The debate between narrativists and ludologists has long enlivened discussions among game theoris... more The debate between narrativists and ludologists has long enlivened discussions among game theorists. Should video games be seen as an offshoot of (film) stories, and thus be studied primarily from the perspective of narratology? Or do they represent a truly different phenomenon, and thus require an analytic approach that has nothing to gain from story-telling theory? In this paper we intend not so much to solve this conundrum as suggest how it has arisen in the first place by showing what journey stories and adventure video games that involve the movement of the player’s avatar, have in common. Our central claim is that both journey stories and suchmany video games involve physical movement and quests, and moreover are based on some sort of “story,” but that only the stories allow for rich mappings of the conceptual metaphor PURPOSIVE ACTIVITY IS MOVEMENT TOWARD A DESTINATION. If our explanations make sense, they can contribute both to the classification and theorization of video games and to the expansion of conceptual metaphor theory into the realm of videogames.
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Papers by roelf kromhout