Video Games as Narratives

I think we all can agree that video games are a form of narratives in one way or another. Still, there are clear distinctions between how a book or a movie is narrated in comparison to a video game. Every kind of game (we don’t even have to restrict this to video games only) is telling a story – a story every player has to identify and understand for himself, because he is part of the process of creating this story and thus bring life to the underlying text. The amount of clear narration varies greatly in the field of (video) games: while some, such as Alan Wake or some of the Prince of Persia series, even offer a real narration by characters within the game in addition to the player’s own experiences, other games, like Minecraft or Tetris, hardly show any kind of story in the first place which makes the player the only – yet also necessary – narrator.