ABSTRACT
Playing a Video Game, or watching a game played, where a character pursues a specific goal with cause-and-effect levels, provides several clues about creating a compelling story. Without a Call to Action, video games have no need to act. Tierno, interpreting Aristotle, addresses the importance of theAction Idea in stories. Video games enacted Aristotle’s observation quickly in its relatively short existence. It is easy to dismiss agency and action ideas as irrelevant in “high drama” where the focus is the exportation of character. For many years, video games truly only displayed a context and a character trait. Considering that filmmaking and video games both tend to start with the external actions to suggest an internal mindset, just as Aristotle suggested millennia ago, perhaps that means that critical script interpretation should identify the action idea and the manner in which the character shows true agency.
