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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

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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

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A paper by Roy Shilkrot, Nick Montfort and Pattie Maes on Augmented Reality and Narratology. From the abstract: “This paper presents an examination of augmented reality (AR) as a rising form of interactive narrative that combines computer-generated elements with reality, fictional with non-fictional objects, in the same immersive experience. Based on contemporary theory in narratology, we propose to view this blending of reality worlds as a metalepsis, a transgression of reality and fiction boundaries, and argue that authors could benefit from using existing conventions of narration to emphasize the transgressed boundaries, as is done in other media. Our contribution is three-fold, first we analyze the inherent connection between narrative, immersion, interactivity, fictionality and AR using narrative theory, and second we comparatively survey actual works in AR narratives from the past 15 years based on these elements from the theory”.

Read the full paper at http://fluid.media.mit.edu/sites/default/files/nARratives_ISMAR2014.pdf

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A new issue of the Journal of Games Criticism http://gamescriticism.org/ has been published.

Volume 2, Issue 1 features a series of exciting articles from game developers, game critics, and game studies scholars. Velli-Matti Karhulahti offers hermeneutics as a method for ludocriticism, and Michael Heron and Pauline Belford discuss the history of choose your own adventure and narrative games. Next, Stephanie Jennings tackles the importance of subjectivity for the critic. Victor Navarro-Remesal and Antonio Loriguillo-Lόpez explore the intersection of Manga, Anime, and Gému within Cool Japan. Our invited articles include Robert Rath who develops explanatory game criticism as a solution to barriers for tangential learning and David Parisi who delves deeply into the importance and stability of the video game controller across new generations of platforms.

Read the full issue for free at http://www.gamescriticism.org/issue-2-1