Video Games and Narrative

 

There are two essential questions which are very hard to answer talking about video games and narrative. Talking about movies and books narrative is definitely text because the content is written down and (in the case of a movie) visualized. In a video game the player gets the possibility to “write” his/her own story. Of course, the possibilities a gamer can chose are created by those who created the game, but it is not a traditional narrative. Maybe, one could think the other way around: if a gamer writes down the story of his character and his adventures experienced in a game, than one gets a written story which is text (I hope this makes sense because I do not know how to describe my thought in a better way).

The question of the narrator does also seem to be quite difficult unlike books. The protagonist of a video game does not necessarily tell the story but “writes” the story by making decisions and actions. If he stops acting the story will not be continued and the game stops. With his decisions the protagonist influences the story as well as its ending. Nonetheless, sometimes there is an omnipresent narrator giving additional information in short cuts for instance. So, do video games possibly have more than one narrator? And are video games even texts? These two questions will hopefully be answered in the next session because today we could not find an answer.