Narrative and games

From the beginning people constantly told stories to one another, using narrative to communicate to each other. This is why a majority of games are narrative driven which then gets the player immersed within the game itself. 


Story: 

• All the elements which end up being depicted
• This is not all the events that happen,  much in a story might be implied ad never explicitly stated.

Plot: 

• The chain of causation - which dictates that these events are somehow linked and are therefore to be depicted in relation to each other.
• This is often linear causation but it does not have to be.

Narrative: 

• The order in which events are revealed. This is certainly not the same as the order in which any real world events may take place.

Cobley argues that:

“Catching a bus, going out with friends, performing mundane tasks at work….none of these come to fruition as stories unless we choose to impose some kind of narrative form on them”  (2002:8)

Where as:

Jenkins argues that this means that aspects of narratives tend to be isolated from the computer gameness of games.  They may be delivered in the form of cut scenes.

This has led to a divergence within the gaming community.

Newman states that the split is between

Ludologists:

Who focus on the narrative elements of introductions and cut-scenes and the relationship these have to the gaming elements of the programmes.  Which may, primarily, be non-narrative.

Naratologists:

Who seek to reduce all elements of the gaming experience to narrative components.  The gaming components as `acting out` aspects of narrative. (2004:91)

Façade is an example of narrative in games. A player controls a character who is then put into a situation and whatever happens is now down to the player themselves, meaning that the outcome of the game is completely different for each player.