Game Critique: Narrative & Yu-Gi-Oh!

Mirror Force, a highly useful Yu-Gi-Oh! card.

While I'm on the topic of collectible card games, I thought I might as well use one this week to discuss narrative.

When Yu-Gi-Oh! started to take over the young minds of America, I began to get interested. A couple of years ago when I was poking around a game store in San Jose, a woman came in and bought more than $300 worth of cards. I asked her if she played the game and she admitted she didn't understand it but this was the only thing her son wanted for Christmas. Wow, nice mom. I was curious but I didn't want to buy a card game that seemed aimed at 8-year-olds. I took a vacation in Hawaii and while investigating the "skill" games in an arcade (uh oh, I sense a future post topic), I came upon one that had decks of Yu-gi-Oh! cards. I'm pretty good at these games (I'm a former crane game champion), so all it took was about $2 for me to win a starter deck and three booster packs.

Anyway, to shorten this narrative, I learned to play the card game. However, nobody wanted to play it with me, so I ended up polishing my skills on a Game Boy Advance version, called Eternal Duelist Soul. One thing you have to love about Yu-Gi-Oh! is how seriously it takes itself. This becomes clear when watching the original Japanese TV series. I watched about 120 episodes in Japanese (with horrendous English subtitles) and was completely drawn into its ridiculous tale of Japanese teens whose dark sides emerge when they play a card game. In the TV series, the game usually isn't depicted as a friendly schoolyard pastime; it's often a matter of life or death. This mirrors the original manga, in which an affable kid named Yugi turns into a sinister avenging adult who brings bad guys to justice by forcing them to play grotesquely violent games. The card game didn't appear in the earliest installments of the manga but it eventually took over the storyline.

Surprisingly, the card game is fun and does require strategy. If you have a fixed set of cards, however, I believe that the optimal strategy is entirely knowable no matter how your opponent plays. I think this frequently is the problem with CCGs, one that is solved only by adding more cards to complicate the game system. Adding cards means more money, and this leads to the most common complaint about CCGs: those who can afford to buy the most (or best) cards usually will win the game.

Yu-Gi-Oh! The Card Game and Its Narrative

Every episode of the Yu-Gi-Oh! TV series that I have seen has something to do with playing the card game. In fact, it sometimes it takes several episodes to show a complete "duel." This can be mind-numbing for those who don't play the game, but for those who do, it's a valuable strategy lesson and sometimes a preview of cards yet to be released in the real world.

The Backstory

The backstory for Yu-Gi-Oh! is huge and still growing, created by the TV series and the manga. While it's easy to despise the Yu-Gi-Oh! empire because of its ubiquitous marketing, I think there's a lot to admire in how well the card game has been integrated with the other elements of the Yu-Gi-Oh! world. The TV series serves multiple purposes: not only does it teach, it provides visualizations that enhance gameplay. When cards are played in the TV series, monsters spring to life from the cards and literally battle each other on the playing field. This is what happens (or should) in the minds of players in the real world, but by showing this in the series, it reinforces the idea that the cards are more than just numerical values to be compared. Themed decks associated with characters from the TV series and manga also allow players to recreate the conflicts from the story, or at least draw from them to enhance the play experience.

Narrative Typology

Yu-Gi-Oh! The Card Game presents an emergent narrative, that is, one created and influenced by the players. Each duel tells a story in the fashion of the TV series, but without the predictible conclusion. Players can mimic events from episodes, playing a certain combination of cards, but the overall narrative of a duel is formed by player actions and the randomness of the decks.

Players who engage in a duel are assuming roles identical to those of the TV characters, who also duel with cards. Thus, the narrative they create is performed. Players are free to create personas and role play to the degree desired. To some extent, if a player executes a particularly well-thought-out play or has a streak of good luck, stories of play may emerge. Players who compete in tournament become known "duelists" much like their fictional counterparts, and their stories of success parallel those in the TV series and manga.

One of the wonderous qualities of Yu-Gi-Oh! is that each card is a living piece of the overarching Yu-Gi-Oh! narrative. Thus, each is imbued with magical qualities that transcend or deny its own near worthlessness as a laminated piece of paper. There are cards I love and cards I hate, and the only difference is the arrangement of the colored ink on the paper.