Vinrafel Gaming

Sections Narrative Method and Essence Gaming’s Narrative Method: Interactivity The Avatar Vivens - Lived Experience Acting the Part Routine and Habit Inter and Intra-personal Meaning The Two Forms Exemplum Vivens Habitual Vivens No two forms of art are quite the same. Novel, stagecraft, painting and every other art-form are all differentiated not only by their mediums, but also by the stories that they can tell. For instance, a play can express different themes than a novel on account of it’s use of visuals and motion. In the case of gaming, neither the narrative method nor narrative essence of the medium has yet been formally defined and so I will do what I might to illuminate both of these topics. For the medium of gaming, the narrative method of interactivity allows the audience the unique ability to access a work’s themes through a form of lived experience that we shall call vivens . Narrative Method and Essence Before we can delve into gaming we must first...

For most people the standard narrative arc will be quite familiar. In graph form it is akin to a parabolic curve with rising action, some climax moment, and falling action. While there may be differences in form from one story to another, there is one thing that remains constant throughout every novel, movie, play, or schoolyard story: the X-axis. Narrative time remains constant as one events leads to another in a strict, predictable, and sequential order. In the world of gaming, the linear narrative arc is no longer the only means of storytelling. Gaming is capable of expressing story through a cyclical story arc. In this form of story arc a portion of the narrative is allowed to loop, potentially into infinitum, with the events within the loop having narrative significance. In this essay we will examine the aspects, necessities, and significance of a cyclical story arc. Figure 1: Linear story arc with axis. There are three things that any narrative requires in order to prese...

The concept of being immersed in a game is a common idea in gaming culture. People would usually refer to some game with gorgeous graphics and lore the size of a duffel bag. While, without a doubt, immersion is created by great graphics and herculean lore, there is another form that it can take. There is a form of immersion that is created by the presentation of a puzzle. To explore this different type of immersion we will examine the game Sethian, a somewhat obscure indie title that represents this form of immersion superbly. Two Forms of Immersion However, before we start talking about Sethian , we have to understand what the more conventional form of immersion looks like. This is the immersion of beautiful landscapes, empathetic characters, and good lore, or what we will call narrative immersion. Narrative immersion is “the experience of being drawn in - even transported to a fictional world through storytelling” (What is Immersion 0:27). There are two key parts to this definit...