How, Not if... drama, video games and TV

Among my favorite regular website reads is The Story Department. Started as the blog Australian script editor Karel Segers, TSD has evolved into a rich repository of essays, articles, reviews and discussions about story, cinema and screenwriting with contributors and readers from all over the world. This month I have the honour of having a small article fetaured on TSD entitled How, Not If: drama, video games and TV that sprang from a lengthy binge of near round-the-clock, weeks-long, game playing and TV drama series watching….

The intro is below and the link will take you straight to The Story Department to read the whole thing.

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I play games like I once used to read novels. There exists a pile and as I finish each game (taking a number of weeks and occasionally months each) I move immediately onto the next, working my way through the continually replenishing stack.

It seems significant that I would use the word Finish in regard to games. As it’s the self-same word I would use for a book, it implies certain things. Chief among these implications are notions of linear Progression, Finality and Inevitability. For many game theorists these three concept terms are somewhat of an anathema.

Games are supposed to be non-linear, open-systems rather than closed ones, they are player-controlled and thus are distinct and apart from cinema and literature. Similarly, by nature of being player-controlled they are, in theory, without inevitability.

click here to visit TSD and read the rest of this article and many others dealing with narrative drama and screenwriting.