VIDEO GAMES AS INTERACTIVE NOVELS: A DIGITIZED ART AND MULTIFORM INFORMATIONAL TOOL BASED IN NARRATIVE THEORY
Open Access
Author:
Antkiewicz, Nicole M
Area of Honors:
English
Degree:
Bachelor of Arts
Document Type:
Thesis
Thesis Supervisors:
Dr. Scott Thompson Smith, Thesis Supervisor Dr. Marcy Lynne North, Thesis Honors Advisor
Keywords:
Video Games Mediatic Effects Narratology Ludology To The Moon Life is Strange The Last Of Us
Abstract:
Since the 1970's, video game production has globally changed the way the most impressionable consumers of media think, speak, live, and write. This project will closely analyze how narrative is utilized in video games as a creative medium, and what differentiates said medium's narrative components from the traditional novel or film genre. Basic narrative theory and selected games will be used as case studies to explain the uniqueness of the video game genre in comparison to other media, and what the particular form of interactive storytelling and digitization provides to the world through one pedagogical lens of literacy and rhetoric. This project will illustrate the very real potentiality of games in their many forms considered artifacts representative of our culture, in making transcendental impressions through the ability of computer systems to generate appropriate plot coherence and character development. On the eve of virtual reality and augmented reality technology's arrival, blurring the line between fiction and reality, this new coming will again transform the way the world sees, reads, and interprets narrative for centuries to come.
