New Game Plus: A Study of Video Game Narratives

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