This Essay is posted in Opinion.

Disclaimer! This is completely an Opinion based upon 25 years of playing narrative-driven video games and 10 years of creative writing. Please be respectful in the comments if you disagree. Trolling and viciousness will not be tolerated.

Video Games as Narrative Devices

I don’t post about video games often, and part of the reason is that the narrative structure in video games is very often superfluous to the experience of actually playing the game, and as such it doesn’t fit the nature of this blog 99 out of 100 times. But I have a long and storied history with the video game, as I was born the year before the Nintendo Entertainment System released stateside. I was the perfect age to grow up alongside the burgeoning medium, and I took to it like the aliens from Signs took to water. Wait, I mean the opposite. For as long as I can really remember I have owned a video game console, and one of the types of video games I played throughout my adolescent years was the Role Playing Game, or RPG, which have had a heavy emphasis on story since the early days of the NES. Continue reading →