Narrative in Games... it does happen.

Narrative in games seems to be a fairly contestable point of view, there are those that believe games do have some forms of narrative structure and those who believe that they do not when you compare games to traditional media forms such as film, books and theatre. For myself I look at narrative as being story telling, it focuses on the past tense, in other words things that have happened. While traditional forms of media such as film and books have a specific narrative structure, I.e beginning, middle and end, it can be argued that with games while play (control of the characte etc are set in the present, games often have elements of the past as well such as the backstory of the characters, there are often film like introductions that introduce you to characters, take for example Grand theft Auto, when you meet new characters throughout the game, there are often film like sequences that help the player to understand what is going on, what the new characters are about and so on. As Jesper Juul argues you can not have interaction and narration at the same time, this in effect breaks narration, which is a good point. Yet I would argue that because games have the ability to combine both narration and interactivity, they are often done alternatively, in other words while you are observing the film like sequences in games like Grand Theft Auto, you often are unable to have any interactivity, you have to wait for it to be over before you can become the character again. Therefore because games are different to other media forms I do not believe it is useful, or even right to definitively say that games are non narrative, it is more that they use narrative in a different way from traditional forms of media, which in itself is not an excuse to discount them as being inferior and not worthy as being considered a narrative based media form.

Jarrod Te Moananui