Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds

Any popular cultural object or pastime can be popular for several different reasons at the same time.

It means that one enters a complex world of symbolic interactions where attacking someone in a game can be an invitation to friendship, and helping someone in the same game can be a condescending rejection.

The answer to this is basically that games provide context for actions: moving an avatar is much more meaningful in a game environment than in an empty space;

One issue is to what extent game research should deal with game design.

Realistically, video games are to some degree part of a general storytelling ecology, incorporating at least some elements of popular stories.

In this broad sense of storytelling, video games are part of a general ecology of transmedia storytelling, but on a level that is often closer to the level of toys and merchandising than to the level of movies or novels.

As an attempt at bridge-building between the open structure of games and the closed structure of stories, the concept of quests has been proposed by Ragnhild Tronstad (2001), Espen Aarseth (2004b), and Susana Tosca (2003). Quests in games can actually provide an interesting type of bridge between game rules and game fiction in that the game can contain a predefined sequence of events that the player then has to actualize or enact.

Wibroe, Nygaard, and Andersen's article "Games and Stories" (2001)

Rune Klevjer's paper "In Defense of Cutscenes" (2002)

There was a notion buried in my original idea, the idea of a fundamental separation between a game's structure and whatever subject matter or activity or setting the game represents.