These are exerts from the full article found
here.
"Games do not necessarily need text, cut scenes, music, sound, or visuals at all to tell stories. They simply need a player's input and some unspecified means to show reaction to player input to articulate the game space and scenario. The process video games employ to tell stories, or describe what happens, is fundamentally in their mechanics. "
"In the very act of playing we automatically assign narrative to actions. In board or card games traditionally not associated with story, the very rules are in fact bits of narrative that help players understand the theming, the pieces we assign narrative by naming them, and which functions as the story to their specific characteristics in play. Think of the game of chess in which the objective of the game is to capture as many of your opponent’s pieces and put them in a position to force surrender. A war game, a military theme, we've given meaning to moving small carved bits of wood around on a board by assigning a narrative. The rules dictate the manners in which the players can move their pieces. This piece is a Bishop and so it can move in this certain fashion. The narrative of the Bishop is in its name and its place on the board, these are used to explain its actions on the board.
In video games, this is even simpler. There's a shape on the screen, and to explain its inter-activeness within its virtual space we assign it a name. The name explains to the viewer why it acts within the space as it does. This is a car, a soldier, a robot, a blob, a gun, a superhuman. Games help the player by contextualizing this narrative by other communicative forms of exposition through interaction; voices, pictures, text. It's important to note these are means of the process but are not the process itself. Similar to how literature uses letters, words, punctuation, thematic devices, and yet narrative cannot be found explicitly within any of those things. Narrative lacks an empirical component."
" It is through the action of the player through the avatar upon the world that allows the player to continue projecting a narrative upon the virtual space and the objects and characters within. "
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