Video Games and Storytelling Reading Games and Playing Books

Grand Theft Auto IV saw more copies being sold than the latest superhero blockbusters or the last Harry Potter novel. Most of its players and critics commend its storytelling experience; however, when it comes to academic analysis, mainstream humanities research seems confused about what to do with such a phenomena. The problem is one of classification, in the first instance: 'is it a story, is it a game, or is it a machine?' Consequently, it also becomes a problem of methodology – which traditional discipline, if any, should lay claim to video game studies becoming the moot question. After weathering many controversies with regards to their cultural status, video games are now widely accepted as a new textual form that requires its own media-specific analysis. Despite the rapid rise in research and academic recognition, video game studies has seldom attempted to connect with older media and to locate itself within broader substantive discourses of the earlier and more established disciplines, especially those in the humanities. Video Games and Storytelling aims to readdress this gap and to bring video games to mainstream humanities research and teaching. In the process, it is also a rethinking story versus game debate as well as other key issues in game studies such as time, agency, involvement and textuality in video game-narratives.

Souvik Mukherjee is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Presidency University, Calcutta, India. Souvik has been researching video games as an emerging storytelling medium since 2002 and has completed his PhD on the subject from Nottingham Trent University in 2009. He did his postdoctoral research in the humanities faculty of De Montfort University, UK and at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, India where he worked on digital media and narrative analysis. Souvik's research examines their relationship to canonical ideas of narrative and also how video games inform and challenge current conceptions of technicity, identity and culture, in general. His current interests involve the analysis of paratexts of video games, the concept of time in video games and the treatment of diversity and the margins in video games. Besides game studies, his other interests are (the) digital humanities and early modern literature.

1. Introduction: Videogames and Storytelling
PART I:
2. Machinic Stories: The Literature Machine, Technicity and the Computer Game
3. (W)Reading the Machinic Game-Narrative
PART II:
4. Reading Games and Playing Books: Game, Play and Storytelling
5. Shapeshifting Stories : Reading Videogame Stories through Paratexts
PART III: STORY
6. Ab(Sense) of an Ending: Telos and Time in Videogame Narratives
7. Playing in the Zone of Becoming I: Agency and Becoming in Videogames
8. Playing in the Zone of Becoming II: 'Becoming' as Identity-formation in Videogames
9. Concluding Remarks: Videogames Versus Books, and Other Egg-endian (Non)Debates