Andrei Nae. Lecturer, University of Bucharest

In the last two decades, narratology as a field has undergone significant methodological changes in order to include into its ambit narrative practices which had previously been deemed incompatible with narratology’s assumptions, methods, and goals. One branch which has proved itself to be remarkably adept at enlarging the scope of narratology is cognitive narrative theory. This course is to a large extent based on David Herman’s theory of narrativity which will be used in combination with recent theories on multimodal communication coming from game studies. By means of this methodology, students who take this course will acquire the main critical tools necessary for understanding narrative communication in video games with a keen awareness of the diegetic dimension of rules, mechanics, and gameplay in general.

More specifically, this course tackles the following topics and questions:

• Video games and narrativity: To what extent can video games be considered narratives? What is it about video games that allows a narratological analysis?
• Multimodal narrative communication: What are the specific means whereby video games communicate narrative meaning? How are they different from other narrative media?
• The diegetic dimension of gameplay: Does gameplay contribute to the game’s narrative?
• The narrator in video games: Is there such thing as a narrator in video games? If the answer is yes, then how does the act of narration unfold?
• The cultural dimension of games: Given Americentrism of the AAA gaming industry, how do American history and American notions of self and other structure the narratives of games?

The topics above will be discussed in relation to some of following video games: Red Dead Redemption, Red Dead Redemption II, Resident Evil Remake, Alien: Isolation, God of War (2018), The Last of Us, Bioshock Infinite, and others.

Bibliography

Hawreliak, Jason. Multimodal Semiotics and Rhetoric in Videogames. New York and London: Rouledge, 2018.

Herman, David. Basic Elements of Narrative. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2009.

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Jenkins, Henry “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and Pat Harrigan, 118-130. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

Juul, Jesper. “Games Telling Stories?” Game Studies 1, no. 1 (2001), http://gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts/.

Kirkpatrick, Graeme. “Contoller, Hand, Screen: Aesthetic Form in the Computer Game.” Games and Culture 4, no. 2 (2009): 127-143, https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412008325484.

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Nae, Andrei. Immersion, Narrative, and Gender Crisis in Video Games: London: Routledge, 2022.

Nae, Andrei. Horror Video Games as Procedural Narratives: Extreme Colonial Encounters in the Digital Heart of Darkness. Bucharest: Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti, 2019.

Ryan, Marie-Laure & Jan-Noël Thon. “Introduction.” In Storyworlds across Media, edited by Marie Laure Ryan and Jan-Noel Thon, 1-24. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Transmedial Storytelling and Transficitonality.” Poetics Today 34, no. 3 (2013): 361-388.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality 2. Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.

Solarski, Chris. Interactive Stories and Video Game Art: A Storytelling Framework for Game Design. Boca Raton, Florina: CRC Press, 2017.

Thon, Jan-Noel. Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2016.

Toh, Weimin. A Multimodal Approach to Video Games and the Player Experience. New York and London: Routledge, 2019.

Wolf, Mark J. P. “Abstraction on the Video Game.” In The Video Game Theory Reader, edited Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, 47-66. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.