Video Game Narrative.

In this blog post I would just like to briefly discuss narrative and its relation to video games. It is still an ongoing debate between the two schools of thought; ludology and narratology,whether or not video games can be an effective story telling medium. We all know ludology is the argument that game play is central to video games and narratology argues that video games is and can be an effective story telling medium.

It is said that all art forms contain narrative, and games don't have narrative because narrative is different for all individuals and can be altered as the protagonist, therefore games aren't an art form. The argument I would like to make is that theres no doubt that video games have narrative and although the nature of their interactivity raises doubt, It still is an effective story telling medium. For example when reading a book, I am almost certain that different individuals reading the same book will have slightly different imaginations on the narrative within the text. The narrative will be looked at from multiple different perspectives from different readers. The same notion applies for games. In a lot of games there are a set narrative which enables each gamer to interact differently in according to the agency and narrative of the game. Yes its is not going to be the same for everyone but neither is reading a particular book , not everyone is going to be thinking about the narrative in the same way. I believe that video games successfully combine game play and story to become an effective storytelling medium. The debate will never the less go on but one thing is for certain 'Thanks to video games we are no longer passive observers in the stories we encounter.'

Brendon .S