ABSTRACT
The outcome of any given game is inherently uncertain, since it must be possible to win or lose (or, in the case of toy games, to play at will). Yet stories, as normally understood, should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and only one of each. Games that include storiesreferred to in this book as interactive narratives-have thus proved difcult to design. ere has also been considerable debate as to whether it is desirable, or even possible, that games have stories. is question was a frequent subject for dispute between board and counter wargame players and tabletop role playing game enthusiasts in the 1970s, for example, with the former group emphasizing the importance of simulational accuracy over narrative and the latter taking the opposite position. More recently, the growing commercial importance of videogames has led to the appearance of academics dedicated to “game studies,” who have historically divided into “ludological” and “narrativist” camps. Broadly, members of the rst group view games as formal systems of rules and have, on occasion, suggested that videogames should not attempt to tell stories, as in Jesper Juul’s master’s thesis, A Clash between Game and Narrative (2001). Narrativists, on the other hand, typically begin their consideration of games from the viewpoint of narratological theory, a tradition of literary analysis that can be said to begin with the Russian formalists of the 1920s and Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folk Tale [“Morfologija Skaski”] (1928). us, Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (1997) contains something of a manifesto for the future of interactive digital narrative, based on a structural view of the elements of story. Other narrativists have taken the position that all
games are essentially narrative in nature since the act of playing any game creates a story that the player can retell, a point that, while valid, seems of little practical signi cance. More recently, the ludological and narrativist camps appear to be converging on some sort of middle ground. Regardless of the details of the academic debate, however, it seems clear that many modern games contain detailed characters, complex settings intended to express signi cant themes, and predesigned plots that allow explicitly or implicitly for various narrative paths to be taken depending on the actions of the players. Such features are more important in some forms than others; story and characterization seem especially signi cant in gamebooks, tabletop RPGs (role playing games), adventures, and computer role playing games, and can also be important in computer wargames, 4X games, god games, and rst person shooters. us, it seems reasonable to consider the types of interactive narrative present in such works.
