ABSTRACT
As Jesper Juul explains in Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, some scholars of video games have written about the concept of the quest as one attempt to resolve a long and bitter confl ict between “narratologists” and “ludologists.” In game studies, narratologists argue that games can be analyzed as narratives, whereas ludologists (from the Latin ludare: “to play”) insist that games should be studied for the features that are distinctively related to play, such as rules and simulation. While the defi nitions of both narrative and game are highly contested by both camps, these theorists tend to defi ne a narrative as a sequence of causally and dramatically connected events that a reader follows in time. In contrast, a game is a set of rules for interactive play. Juul writes:
Juul concisely defi nes the difference between a quest and a narrative by focusing on the issue of performative activity, which requires the player of a game to cause events to occur through effort rather than passively observing as these events unfold.
