Narrative Videogames: The Literary Genre of the Digital Age

Abstract

This dissertation deals with the stigma-ridden medium that is the videogame and how it relates to the highly-regarded art of literature. While there is a growing body of literature that recognizes the importance of videogames as major cultural artefacts of our time, they continue to be studied essentially for their behavioral effects or in terms of their ludic aspects and little else. Recently, there has been renewed interest in videogames in the academia prompted by the rapid evolution of the medium especially in its story telling function, increasingly at the core of its design purposes. However, proper examination of its narrative and literary aspects is still lacking relevant substance. Thus, this interdisciplinary research compares the narrative elements of videogames to those of another established art, literature, with the narrative fiction prototype, the novel genre in particular. The central thesis being that the story-driven or narrative videogame can be considered as part of literature for its potential as an interactive, audiovisual as well as literary storytelling medium that effectively tells book-worthy stories. The work is divided into two chapters, the first covers the major theoretical dimensions necessary for the analysis that will be carried on in the second chapter which is as a practical application of literary and narrative theory on videogame narratives, precisely that of the arguably postmodern story of Dear Esther to reach the conclusion that videogames and literature, though seemingly unrelated, are closely linked in both narrative and literariness.