Playing the hero: How games take the concept of storytelling from representation to presentation

ABSTRACT

This article explores an alternative understanding of storytelling, which has risen with the emergence of new forms of narrative media, particularly with the medium of computer games. I explicate the distinctive logic behind this novel understanding and investigate how this logic differs from prior conceptualizations of narrative. In the past decades, marginal formats such as the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book and experimental practices like Experience Theatre already tested the concept of narrative as developed once in structuralist narratology. Narrative experiments like these have now become mainstream, story-driven computer games being one of the prime examples. Drawing on recent theories on the distinction between representation and presentation from the fields of media studies and the arts, this article explains the limits of a structuralist approach, and, in the process, develops an additional concept of narrative, more suited for studying the popular story-driven games of today.

KEYWORDS:

• Narratology
• narrative across media
• game studies
• player experience
• computer games
• theatre
• cinema
• immersion