Video Game Narrative and Criticism: Playing the Story

With impunity, millions of players traverse the fictional landscapes of video games every day. Video Game Narrative and Criticism treats gameplay as the player’s own psychological experience where fears, desires, and anxieties are projected onto the game’s fictional world. By exploring the structural peculiarities of storytelling in video games, the book develops a critical paradigm that explains the meaning of gameplay as self-discovery. The player-response criticism considers the nature of game fiction by centralizing the player in the analysis. This interpretative model is not a rigorous analytical toolbox. Rather, it responds flexibly to the essential fluidity, temporality, and openness of a player’s own experience in an intelligent fictional world.