Narrative and Gaming

I appreciated how thorough Juul is in his argument that video games and narratives are separate entities although games can have narrative components. I found that as I came up with a counter argument, he addresses it without completely dismissing it. I have particularly been of the mindset that narrative is separate from any sort of medium, and that the author can chose to have narrative as its dominant or not and the spectator can also chose to interpret it from a narrative standpoint or not. However, Juul argues that the nature of traditional story telling formats is narrative, and the nature of gaming is interactive and therefore not interpretive dominant. This encouraged me to understand narrative in a new way: as something that is created and fixed. Narratives have specific components and qualities that are observable: existants, locale, agents, diagetic/non-diagetic, resolution, etc. What is usually the interpretive part is theme, moral, message, tone, meaning, etc. In stories and films, the formal elements are fixed although we have all the room in the world to interpret them. In video games, the formal elements are fixed in that the possible options are generated before hand either by design or algorithm, but what is not fixed is the structure, the order, the options the players will choose. By adding that agency, video games open up formal elements in the way that thematic elements are open in traditional narrative in that the player/spectator is necessary in determining them.

With this in mind, here is my example from new media on how this operates: how the user can determine formal elements in such a way that is not possible in traditional narrative mediums.

This is a video game adapted from a book, which is interesting in terms of the narrative argument. You glean pieces of the book as you play the game, but ultimately the experience of living at Walden Pond is in your hands.