Narrative, Genre and Ideology in Video Games

📖 The Scoop

This book sheds light on gender politics and structures of power that can be found in new media, as a single structure that can be found in any game. This book brings to the public an academic dissertation, that was written to grant a Master's Degree to its author. It aims to produce knowledge regarding the modern video game medium by analyzing the narrative pertaining to one such game. To be written, a game was played and replayed to its whole extension, and analyzed throughout. The game is used as a contemporary example of the cultural form. The dissertation focuses on the narrative structure of the text using the theoretical work of Vladimir Propp and the ideas he develops in Morphology of Folktale (1968). This book argues that the morphology identified by Propp as being present in traditional folk narratives can also be found in a contemporary electronic cultural text. It also identifies and discusses issues regarding character development, the relationships between archetypes and categories, the allocation of tasks to the players within the story-as-game, the characteristics of the temporal development of the narrative, the significance and roles of the main characters, and the extent to which gender politics informs the narrative of this contemporary video game. "The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it. ― Roseanne Barr

Genre: Literary Criticism / American / General (fancy, right?)