Thoughts on “Genre Trouble”

I was absolutely fascinated by Espen Aarseth’s piece titled “Genre Trouble.” His approach to video games is completely different than most writers’ pieces regarding electronic gaming; he digs down to the root of the game and considers where the plot of the game comes from and how its path is determined.

I have never thought of video games as “narratives” before. In fact, I’ve never really considered where video game creators come up with the idea of game plots, because the game just has the components of a game (rules, a gameworld, and application of the rules to the gameworld, as Aarseth says in his piece), so we regard it as a game. However, the term “interactive narrative” applies perfectly to many games. While Aarseth claims that video games place us in a different frame of mind from stories in the sense that we have no insight into the internal thoughts and feelings of the character, I think video games give us an incredible ability to be the character. On multiple occasions, I’ve watched someone who was playing a video game be “shot” by another character on the game and flinch or start as if they were actually able to feel the character’s pain. Video games are absolutely an “interactive narrative” because although we may not know what the character is thinking, we are able to place ourselves in the shoes of our avatar in the game and truly feel for him or her.

I was even more convinced that video games are narratives after reading the last portion of the piece, which discussed the fact that electronic storytelling is, nonetheless, storytelling, just as a plastic credit card is still paper money, just in a different form. Seeing people reading paper books is becoming rare in our modern-day society, as many people carry Kindles and electronic copies of books on their smartphone or computer. It doesn’t mean that Americans don’t still have a love for reading or will stop reading, we have just modernized the methods by which we read. Just because video games don’t require the player to hold a book or read words doesn’t mean that video game players aren’t as riveted by the events and occurrences in his or her game as a reader is in his or her book.

Overall, Aarseth brings up some very interesting perspectives on video games and narratives in society today. Although he believes that storytelling still holds a stronger position in presenting narratives that video games do, it is possible that with further research, video games will continue to develop as narratives and eventually take the place of stories as the main storytellers in our society.

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One Response to Thoughts on “Genre Trouble”

  1. Rebecca says:

    It’s interesting that you feel like videogames will take over as the main story teller in society. Why do you think that? Are the stories told by videogames only going to have one possible outcome? So that no matter what you do, the same things will happen, which would lessen the appeal of replaying the game. Or would these be more interactive and changeable stories? And would you imagine there to be non-fiction story games (which would only have one outcome if it’s trying to tell the factual story) or just fiction stories? Would you take existant stories and turn them into games, or do you think that the video game media gives a chance for new “authors” to tell their stories?

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