Video Games and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books

by Souvik Mukherjee

Overview

The potential of video games as storytelling media and the deep involvement that players feel when they are part of the story needs to be analysed vis-à-vis other narrative media. This book underscores the importance of video games as narratives and offers a framework for analysing the many-ended stories that often redefine real and virtual lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349580149
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	01/25/2016
Edition description:	1st ed. 2015
Pages:	239
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

'Souvik Mukherjee's Video Games and Storytelling examines the ongoing discussion of video games and narrative, extending it in new directions, with verve and aplomb.' - Mark J. P. Wolf, Concordia University Wisconsin, USA

From the Publisher