Games and narrative: The ludologist's lament

Some of you may have read Ted Castranova's post a few months ago over on Terra Nova titled Movies Stink. As I tried to convey in my comment there, I'm sympathetic to Ted's plight. Having novel and film shaped artifacts foisted upon you at the expense of game shaped ones really sounds like it sucks. Of course, I'm also more or less unable to have much empathy with him in this matter.

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Video games are not a monolithic medium

Video games are not a monolithic medium. I've said this before and I'll probably have to keep on saying it for at least a few years. In the meantime I've been wanting to get a blog post up to point people to when any of the myriad issues that come back to this simple fact pop up. This is that post.

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Games and narrative: Conflicting definitions

I've tried to keep this installment on games and narrative shorter than the previous one, but I'm afraid I haven't been entirly successful. After all, this post dips into some pretty deep theoretical territory and you know how that goes. At any rate, this post starts with a conversation that happened on Google+ in a thread John Woodring started about gamification in education . At some point in the thread, Roger Travis and I drifted into a fairly theoretical conversation about games and narrative.

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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.

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On Alan Wake - the bulleted version

I finished Alan Wake the same day I finished Portal 2. That was unfortunate for Alan Wake, but extremely good for helping me think through the construction of narrative in linear games. Spoiler averse post continued after the jump . . .

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