124,850 research outputs found

    Insolvency Insurance for Private Plans

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    This essay is about the use of narrative in video games, and the discussion surrounding it. For years ludologists (game researchers) and narratologists (narrativity researchers) have been arguing about how to analyze narrativity in games. While ludologists have chosen to see games as a product by itself, and therefore something to be analyzed separately, narratologists instead see games as a narrative medium alongside film, theater and books. This essay starts by taking a look at the arguments from both sides, and then introduces three questions regarding narrative in games, and how this phenomenon has changed over the past 13 years. To answer these questions, five case studies are carried out, analyzing games with the help of a new framework built on narrative theory. The essay’s conclusion then reveals how the development of game narrativity has progressed, and what this could mean for the future of narrative games

    Fun Versus Meaningful Video Game Experiences: A Qualitative Analysis of User Responses

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    Emerging research on video games has suggested that feelings of both enjoyment and meaningfulness can be elicited from gameplay. Studies have shown enjoyment and meaningfulness evaluations to be associated with discrete elements of video games (ratings of gameplay and narrative, respectively), but have relied on closed-end data analysis. The current study analyzed participants’ open-ended reviews of either their “most fun” or “most meaningful” video game experience (N = 575, randomly assigned to either condition). Results demonstrated that “fun” games were explained in terms of gameplay mechanics, and “meaningful” games were explained in terms of connections with players and in-game characters

    Enhancing Narrative Writing Skills through Action-Adventure Video Games

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    Video games have become a big part of a student’s life. With the influence of massively marketed commercial games, teachers can no longer ignore the role it plays in the student’s overall development. This research investigates the link between commercial video games and the teaching and learning of the English language, specifically, narrative writing. This research utilized a pre-experimental research design on 4 respondents using the Sony PlayStation 3 gaming console and Naughty Dog Inc’s “UNCHARTED 2: Among Thieves” video game. The results of the research show that there are several narrative elements in the video game which differs from the standard narrative structure used in an English language classroom and these elements were transferred to the respondents who played the game, as evidenced in their post-experience narrative essay. The three features of the game: Three-Act Narrative Structure, Double-Climax feature and the existence of the Orientation suggest the positive influences of the video game on the respondents’ narrative writing ability. From the results of this research, teachers will be able to tap into the educational potential of commercial video games to further enrich their writing class by integrating commercial video games into their narrative writing class. It challenges ESL teachers to break out of their traditional methodologies and use commercial video games as a tool to enrich the students’ learning experience and retention. Keywords: Narrative writing, video games, three act structure, narrative structure, ES

    New Game Plus: A Study of Video Game Narratives

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    New Game Plus: A Study of Video Game Narratives is a scholarly thesis that examines three dominant narrative forms in video games, namely, linear, branching, and rhizomatic. These narrative forms help contextualize this study’s consideration of the history of video games which reveals the increasing sophistication of the medium as a form of storytelling. This thesis examines two different video games in each of the three categories and traces how more recent video games tend to use player interactivity to explore and reflect players’ morality. Common threads in the examined video games include moral dilemmas, socio-political issues, remediations of earlier narrative forms, game mechanics, and the effects of player agency on video game narratives

    The story of a video game: reading the Assassin\u27s Creed universe

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    In the digital age, fictional narratives worthy of serious analysis are no longer confined to print. In recent years, video games have come under the eye of scholars from many fields. What can video games offer? How do they change the hature of fictional narrative? And how can we study them with a critical eye? The Assassin’s Creed universe is an ideal case study for analyzing the fictional worlds video games create using narrative. The Assassin\u27s Creed narrative is composed of two parts: a present day narrative and a memory narrative set in a stylized historical past. The present day narrative accesses the memory narrative in a similar way that a player accesses the video game narrative. In addition to mirroring the gaming experience, the Assassin\u27s Creed narrative had become a fictional world that has extended to other media. These are not just recreations of the story presented in the games, but new narratives that live within the same fictional universe

    Chronotypology:a comparative method for analyzing game time

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    This article presents a methodology called “chronotypology” which aims to facilitate literary studies approaches to video games by conceptualizing game temporality. The method develops a comparative approach to how video games structure temporal experience, yielding an efficient set of terms—“diachrony,” “synchrony,” and “unstable signifier”—through which to analyze gaming’s “heterochronia” or temporal complexity. This method also yields an approach to the contentious topic of video game narrative which may particularly recommend it to literary scholars with an interest in the form. Along with some examples from conventional games, a close reading of the “reality-inspired” game Bury Me, My Love will serve to demonstrate the use of a chronotypological approach

    About Authoring: Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons as a Semiotic, Narrative, and Rhetorical Text

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    I began my research with personal experience playing video games and a formal education in English studies. My interest and my education intersected to form a simple question: what tools does an education in English studies offer to someone trying to understand video games as texts? To answer that question, I brought scholarship from three English sub-fields—semiotics, narrative theory, and rhetorical study—into discussion with computer gaming scholarship. My research demonstrated three primary findings: 1) video games can considered as texts that communicate via visual, aural, and interactive (often tactile) modes; 2) video games are narrative and offer players varying degrees of authorship over narrative elements; and 3) video games are rhetorically designed, even down to inscribing meaning in the control schemes that players use to engage with the game. I brought those research findings to a thorough analysis of Brothers, a critically acclaimed video game released in 2013. The resulting analysis finds Brothers to be a carefully composed text, one which offers players control over narrative satellites (minor, connective events) but not kernels (essential plot events), and conveys its central theme and narrative (one of growing companionship) through an unconventional control scheme. My research demonstrates the values of applying the theoretical frameworks of English studies to the analysis of video games and bringing the new texts to the broad field of English studies.No embargoAcademic Major: Englis

    Dialectical Polyptych: an interactive movie installation

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    Most of the known video games developed by important software companies usually establish an approach to the cinematic language in an attempt to create a perfect combination of narrative, visual technique and interaction. Unlike most video games, interactive film narratives normally involve an interruption in time whenever the spectator has to make choices. “Dialectical Polyptych” is an interactive movie included in a project called “Characters looking for a spectactor”, which aims to give the spectator on-the-fly control over film editing, thus exploiting the role of the spectator as an active subject in the presented narrative. This paper presents an installation based on a mobile device, which allows seamless real-time interactivity with the movie. Different finger touches in the screen allow the spectator to alternate between two parallel narratives, both producing a complementary narrative, and change the angle or shot within each narrative.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    Interactive narrative in video games

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    A main characteristic of a part of the videogame industry is the search for realism inside the games. Through the years, graphics, animations and scenery have become more and more like the real world. And so has adapted the narrative to it, getting everchanging, adapting to the players interaction with its surroundings. But there is still a long way to go. In this thesis, we have analysed four videogames with a high narrative interactivity variance to see how games in different genres adapt. Then, with its main strong points, developing a way to generalize these methods of adaptation and putting them together to make the feel much more realistic and natural. By using a content analysis methodology, we try to break down those games in pieces so it’s easier to extract the data from them. As a result of the analysis and posterior work with the data, developed one method that joins them in one single interactive narrative methodology to implement in games. This has obviously to be adjusted to the videogame it’s being included in but it’s a good start to determine a direction for a first step towards that realism talked about earlie

    Narratology

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    This essay provides an overview of the different types of study that can be conducted when considering the narrative aspects of video game play. It contextualizes this research among the larger movements of narratology, particularly concerning the structuralist roots of the discipline and the parallels between gameplay and narrative structures. A brief overview of the key points of the ludology/narratology debate is made, followed by an introduction to the three domains of narrative in video game studies: story content, story structures, and narration as the discursive mode that games use to relay the game-state
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