Narrating Futures. Volume 4 Storyplaying: Agency and Narrative in Video Games

Incontestably, Future Narratives are most conspicuous in video games: they combine narrative with the major element of all games: __agency__. The persons who perceive these narratives are not simply readers or spectators but active agents with a range of choices at their disposal that will influence the very narrative they are experiencing: they are players. The narratives thus created are realizations of the multiple possibilities contained in the present of any given gameplay situation. Surveying the latest trends in the field, the volume discusses the complex relationship of narrative and gameplay. 1 Introduction: What is Storyplaying? 1.1 Preliminaries: Medial Forms 1.2 Preliminaries: Exclusions 2 Video Games and Narrative 2.1 Gameplay and Narrative 2.1.1 Gameplay and Game Mechanics: The Rules of the Game 2.1.2 Semanticization and Fictionalization: Towards Gameworlds 2.2 Narrative Forms 2.2.1 Passive Forms 2.2.1.1 Exposition 2.2.1.2 Cut scenes 2.2.1.3 Loading Screen 2.2.2 Actively Nodal Forms 2.2.2.1 Player Actions 2.2.2.2 Quick Time Event 2.2.2.3 Dialogue tree 2.2.2.4 Event trigger 2.2.3 Dynamic Forms 2.2.3.1 Non-player Character 2.2.3.2 Timed Events/Intradiegetic Clock 2.2.4 Digression: Architecture and Protocols 3 Non-Unilinear Gameplay in Video Games 3.1 Levels of Observation 3.2 Non-Unilinear Existents 3.3 Non-Unilinear Objectives 4 Non-Unilinear Narrative in Video Games 4.1 Non-Unilinearity in Quest-Based Narrative 4.2 Non-Unilinear Narrative Outside of Quests 4.2.1 Character 4.2.2 Spatial Narrative 5 Choice and Narrative in Video Games 5.1 The Anatomy of a Player Choice 5.2 Choice and Meaning 5.3 Choice, Information, and Narration in Video Games 5.4 Choice and Consequence in Video Games 6 Narrative’s Contrast Agent: Moral Choices 6.1 Valorisation Rules 6.2 Valorising Morality 6.3 Ethics and Rules 7 The Future of Storyplaying 7.1 Media-Economic Aspects 7.2 Media-Technological Aspects 7.3 Artistic Potential of the Medium Works Cited Index

This series explores a hitherto unidentified type of narrative: Future Narratives. Narratives are traditionally concerned with past events or with events that are happening right now, and narratives process them into a meaningful sequence. In contrast, Future Narratives preserve a characteristic feature of future time, namely that it is yet undecided, open, and multiple, and that it has not yet crystallized into actuality. They do this by operating with ‘nodes’ as their basic unit – situations that allow for more than one continuation. Future Narratives can be found in print, in film, in video games, in scenarios of world climate change, and in other simulations of future trends. Cutting across all media and genre classifications, this burgeoning corpus still lacks a theory and a poetics. This series offers both – as well as detailed case studies. Firmly rooted in narratology, the project has interesting interfaces with philosophy, the theory of history, media studies, game theory, decision theory, and futurology.