Games and narrative: Narrative vs. story

The perennial "narrative in games" conversation has been in pretty high gear on the internets of late. I'm less interested in why the topic is popping up again with such regularity, and more concerned with trying to find some clarity on the topic so that we can move past rehashing ye olde ludology vs. narratology debate when we talk about what games are. I intend to resurrect some of the threads of that conversation in order to reconcile them with my own stance on games and narrative, but before I do that there's a little backfilling to do. For that reason, I'm going to proceed through a number of smaller posts on this topic (starting with this one) rather than dumping all of my thoughts on narrative and games in one massive wall of text.

Click to read more ...