Digital Games: Literacy in Action by Catherine Beavis, Joanne O'Mara, Lisa McNeice

HERE

“Narrative is central to the lives of humans, who make sense of the experience through the stories they tell.”

“the stories woven into game design are informed by ideologies and vale systems.”

“Narratives are generally produced retrospectively – that is, they begin with an end point, and show what led to this point and how.”

“Different game genres incorporate particular arrangements and combinations of features, elements and events.”

“Players who access a role-playing game such as World of Warcraft (WoW) are immediately situated in what Alexander Galoway describes as  ‘the game’s total world of narrative action’.”

“advanced players can develop modifications (mods) such as weapons, story lines, music and characters as well as resources including maps and calculation software. This capacity for players to introduce new elements into existing games pinpoints the most crucial difference between literary and games narratives.”

“videogames are not just images or stories or play or games but actions”

“The unfolding narratives of the gameplay thus shift between the remote and the immediate past, and the present of the player’s current game. They also shift between narrative point of view: at times players view their avatars as figures in landscapes and thus through a third-person perspective; at others they inhabit the figures of their avatars, seeing events and space through their eyes in what approximates first-person narration.”

“..these advanced players tend to value the narrative elements of the game very highly: ‘they … are dedicated to the back-story and narrative structure of the world. They game through developing characters, alliances, and plots.”

“it seems, then, that advanced players view narrative as a crucial aspect of the pleasures offered by gaming, and enhance their enjoyment by creating ever more complex and nuanced narratives.”

“Just as the ideological content of novels and films reside in the ‘how’ of narrative rather than the ‘what’ of storylines, so the ideological and world views of games are manifested through the ‘how’ of representation and game narratives."