why video games are an affective story telling device

Plenty of video games involve stories, enough that attempting to think about what games do or are, culturally speaking, without any sense of how storytelling works would be a pretty odd thing to do. Understanding games while relying solely on existing theories of the novel would be to make a significant category mistake.Īnd yet. Video games are not like novels and films, partly because they do not simply represent their story-worlds, but rather invite their users to shape them in action.

And indeed if one considers games like Super Mario, which draw so clearly from a longer tradition of kinesthetic and antagonistic play (what one sees in a game of jacks or pin the tail on the donkey), then the game enthusiasts had point. or Tetris, which highlighted precisely the kinesthetic and interactive structures that early game scholars identified as the crucial distinguishing elements of the genre, and deemphasized the kinds of games, also quite popular, that involved adventure or story. The argument for the uniqueness of video games worked best if one emphasized certain types of games, games like Super Mario Bros. In fact, games were so different from novels, films, or drama that anyone seeking to simply slot them into that longer aesthetic history would be effectively attempting to “colonize” a new medium, to strip an exciting and unique cultural form of all of its novelty and interest. Games were about simulating activities, not just imitating them. Unlike novels, films, or television, games, we were told, were interactive, not passive and linear they were oriented toward kinesthetic pleasures (jumping, running, flashing lights), not intellectual or emotional ones. Perhaps typical for any new academic endeavor, the field justified itself partly via claims of video games’ radical difference from other forms of culture. The scholarly study of video games dates back to the late 1990s, when the field’s first major journal, Game Studies, was founded, and the first major work was published in the field.

Why video games are an affective story telling device