![]() ![]() The Boyhood of Raleigh (1870) - John Millais.īefore we can truly talk about games-as-stories, it’s important to pause and consider how we got here in the first place. Storytelling represented in other mediums. ![]() ![]() Drawing on our shared experiences as primarily fiction writers and literary scholars (we each hold a Bachelor’s of English in creative writing), and our varied backgrounds in film and digital media studies, as well as video game theory and design, we strive to provide critical assessments of contemporary video games in order to cultivate a better understanding of successful narrativity. The purpose of this blog is not to push forward a new definition of game studies, or to favor one over another, but to instead to step back and see games for what we enjoy them as: interactive stories. There are scores of conflicting voices weighing in on this topic (see: Sebastian Deterding, Jesper Juul, Ian Bogost, etc.), but many of these voices focus on defining what game scholarship actually is. Scholars, such as Henry Jenkins, have argued that video games are by nature a type of storytelling medium–comparable to books and films–and representing a new type of “transmedia storytelling.” Others, such as Espen Arseth, find that the study of games should focus not on narrative at all but on their structure as rule-based, formal systems. Where video games and their stories are concerned, we realize that we aren’t on the cutting edge of this discussion. The video game–a new platform for narrative expression–allows us to take our stories, both old and new, and re-imagine them as playable experiences. ![]() From simple beginnings, stories have been created throughout time to fulfill particular niche roles: inspiring us to follow moral paths, maintaining our histories and our cultures, entertaining us, and helping each one of us to understand each other and our place in the great narrative of human existence. ![]()
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