http://gamestudies.org/1102/articles/deen ---> Interactivity, Inhabitation and                                                               Pragmatist Aesthetics

  - by Phillip D. Deen 

" Players are encouraged to create their own challenges or game-worlds and share them online for others to play within them. "

This quote refers to games renowned as 'sandbox' games or 'open world games' these games tend to have more of a dynamic narrative rather then a linear; you can add your personal touches to your character and shape how the story is constructed. This forces the user or 'player' to make their own choices and decisions rather then following a traditional linear narrative; an example of this would be the game 'minecraft' a game where you are given a open world and you can personally choose what to do with it; build or explore and shape the world how you personally feel like it should be designed. 

Open world games tend to be full of 'side-missions' the player is allowed to move freely through the game and complete these in any order they feel necessary. 'sandbox' games tend to have a snowball effect; your previous actions will affect what happens later in the game/and or give you and your character new options each time you play depending on the actions you choose in certain places.  
' The issue is then not whether the medium is interactive, but whether a particular interaction constitutes ‘an’ experience. '









http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/EJ/1026-jul2013/EJ1026Exploring.pdf

Exploring the 

Boundaries of Narrative: 

Video Games in the 

English Classroom

even the simplest of video games ie, angry birds and Candy Crush can be argued to have a narrative, in this case the narrative could be you launch a bird into a poorly built structure in an attempt to knock it down and destroy/kill its inhabitants; giving suggestions that the two have fallen out of camera that we haven't seen giving this simple game  a narrative. "In other types of video games, the narrative arc plays much more integral role, as the genre of role playing games" these types of games tend to have more focus on the story and alot more dialogue and cutscenes then other games; for example angry birds, it is typical for games like this to undertake the approach of more time spent reading dialogue or watching cutscenes then you do performing the action part of the game 



theres a conflict between interactivity and story telling: most people imagine theres a spectrum between conventional written stories on one side and total interactivity on the other but i believe that what you really have are two self havens separated by a pit of hell that can absorb endless amounts of time, skill and resources  - Walter Freitag Game Designer (Platt 1995).