I have yet to really figure out if or how Torben Grodal’s Embodied Visions (2009) might prove useful from an applications standpoint. But, from a rhetorical one, the book continues to exquisitely express my thoughts on games far better than I have ever been able to. Chapter 7 releases narrativity from the structural confines in which narrative theory tends to situate it and instead articulates it as a functional process inherent to human experiences via neurological mechanisms.

The basic story experience consists of a continuous interaction between perceptions (I see a monster approaching), emotions (I feel fear, because I know or sense that monsters are dangerous), cognitions (I think that I’d better shoot the monster), and action (the actual motor act of shooting that changes the motivational emotion — fear — into relaxation). …

[T]he ability to hold the story (including possible future elements of that story) in our consciousness — an ability that is important for prolonged action patterns — is independent of language: we can perform this holding operation at the nonverbal level of perception-emotion-action. (pp. 161-63)

PECMA frames narrativity as a neurological process provoked out of biological necessity. It then gives way to mediated representations in order to communicate individual experiences to others. In Grodal’s account, narrative is not just a social construction whose particulars are contingent upon historical context. Narrative “is not some arbitrary or ideological invention” (p. 161). Instead, stories become complex, interwoven fabrics of neurological adaptations (“a reflection of the brain’s innate architecture”), stitched together with cultural and social practices as they arise from human experiences.

Still further, narrative perspective can then be understood in emotional terms because third-person perspective is an “extrapolation” from the first-person: “We infer how other people experience things by extrapolating from our own experiences” (p. 165). In as much as we sympathize with the experiences of others, we do so best when we can draw from something we deem to be similar in our own experiences. Consider as example the oft-used argument that one cannot understand unless that person has been there. Mediated stories essentially try to place into third-person perspective our first-person experiences, sometimes to communicate them to others and sometimes to better understand them ourselves. What Grodal calls “first-person emotions” are reflexive, oft-uncontrolled emotional reactions to stimuli. “Third-person emotions” are those that allow us to feel connected to others.

The most fundamental emotions — love, hate, jealousy, curiosity, sorrow, and fear — can only be fully experienced in the first person. But the assumption of a third-person perspective enables us to simulate these emotions and modulate them through sympathy, as, for example, when we pity the tragic hero or admire the superhuman. First-person emotions are dynamic in the sense that they stimulate us to action, whereas third-person emotions such as pity or admiration, though they too may motivate action, tend to be more static dispositions. (p. 167)

What stimulates first-person emotions can be socially constructed, but the emotional response itself is not. If I am afraid of something, my body will respond somehow and move me to some kind of action — sometimes without my awareness of the action. Yet, what I am afraid of could be something that in no way whatsoever bothers my wife. As an example, she is not fazed at all by removing her contact lenses. Watching her do so makes my skin crawl! When we swam with sharks on our honeymoon, I was in total heaven. After we got on the boat, she semi-threatened to divorce me!

Furthermore, consider the description I just gave. In order to modulate my first-person emotions into a third-person perspective, I had to narrate them in a way to make them “concrete” for the audience. Narration will always do this, but with the aim of making these emotions “present,” to borrow a phenomenological term. Grodal uses “present tense.” Even though narrative often assumes a past-tense, it hopes engender in the audience a sense that things are happening”now.” According to Grodal, film achieves this better than written narrative. He adds that games possibly outstrip all other narrative experiences because their interactions operate from a first-person emotional base and allow for the motor action to manifest in a much more embodied way.

A lot of recent scholarship in games research has turned its attention away from the narrativity debate that characterized such research in the late 90s and early 2000s. Instead of focusing on the game-artifact as a structurally defined phenomenon, the play experience is emerging in scholarship as a phenomenological and embodied phenomenon. Studying the players is becoming just as important as studying the game’s structure — or its rules and fiction. Synthesizing both approaches together can open up games scholarship to a whole new vista both in terms of rhetorical or ludological study, as well as practical applications for designing and building sleeker, more efficient, or more expressive systems.