Column: Are video games the new novel?

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Talking Writing is an online magazine for professional writers. John Michael Bell writes there: “A decade ago, film critic Roger Ebert famously said this interactive aspect of games prevented them from being art. […] In 2014, the best narrative games challenge Ebert’s claim that “serious film and literature” demand “authorial control.” Narrative video games run the gamut from first-person shooters to role-playing games that involve more than blasting another alien to very un-video-game-like stories such as Gone Home. Just as novels were once a new a form of storytelling that included a character’s inner life, narrative games have transformed author-controlled plots with player interaction.”

Read the full article at http://talkingwriting.com/are-video-games-new-novel

Book: “Storyworlds across Media. Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology” (M.-L. Ryan, J. Thon)

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“Storyworlds across Media. Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology”, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon.

The proliferation of media and their ever-increasing role in our daily life has produced a strong sense that understanding media—everything from oral storytelling, literary narrative, newspapers, and comics to radio, film, TV, and video games—is key to understanding the dynamics of culture and society. Storyworlds across Media explores how media, old and new, give birth to various types of storyworlds and provide different ways of experiencing them, inviting readers to join an ongoing theoretical conversation focused on the question: how can narratology achieve media-consciousness?

Go to the publisher’s website: http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Storyworlds-across-Media,675892.aspx

Games: Necklace of Skulls and The Sinister Fairground (Cubus Games)

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Emily Short, author and researcher of Interactive Narratives, has published a review of “Necklace of Skulls” and “The Sinister Fairground”, both by Cubus Games. She writes: “Necklace of Skulls is a fairly substantial piece. I played five or six times and never actually won, though I think I got close, and in each case there was pretty significant variation in my experience of the midgame. It’s possible to take several different routes on your journey to look for your brother (picking up, of course, a wide range of codewords and inventory items along the way). In the late game, this can yield satisfyingly fairy-tale payoffs in which creatures you earlier helped came to your rescue, or mysterious gifts from elderly peasants turn out to be the basis of an ingenious bit of self-rescue”.

Read the full review at https://emshort.wordpress.com/2014/12/17/necklace-of-skulls-the-sinister-fairground-cubus-games/