Game Narrative Through the Detective Lens

At this year’s DiGRA conference, I gave an overview of my work of the last few years on detective stories and games.

Here’s the abstract:

The paper examines detective games as a corpus to understand the relationship between gameplay and storytelling in games. Detective fiction is a narrative genre that is already playful by teasing the reader to figure out the solution to the mystery before they get to the end. By exploring the narrative nature of detective games, how detective stories have been turned into games (digital and non-digital), and how genre expectations and conventions shape gameplay, we can gain a better understanding of the integration between gameplay and narrative. Contradictory as it may sound, this paper uses inductive methods to infer general approaches to game narrative by concentrating on a specific corpus of stories and games. It is not within the scope of this paper to cover all aspects of game narrative, nor go into all the implications deriving from the comparison. Rather, this paper will be limited exploring two key aspects to demonstrate the kinds of insight that we can gain through this method.

The slides of the presentation, including references to my sources and my own work, are here: DiGRA 2018 – Game Narrative through the Detective Lens