Video Games and Storytelling

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vii

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2. Introduction: Video Games and Storytelling

   1. Introduction: Video Games and Storytelling

      • Souvik Mukherjee

      Pages 1-21

3. Machine

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 23-23

      PDF

   2. Machinic Stories: The Literature Machine, Technicity and the Computer Game

      • Souvik Mukherjee

      Pages 25-47

   3. (W)Reading the Machinic Game-Narrative

      • Souvik Mukherjee

      Pages 48-72

4. Game

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 73-73

      PDF

   2. Reading Games and Playing Books: Game, Play and Storytelling

      • Souvik Mukherjee

      Pages 75-102

   3. Shapeshifting Stories: Reading Video Game Stories through Paratexts

      • Souvik Mukherjee

      Pages 103-120

5. Story

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 121-121

      PDF

   2. Ab(Sense) of an Ending: Telos and Time in Video Game Narratives

      • Souvik Mukherjee

      Pages 123-145

   3. Playing in the Zone of Becoming I: Agency and Becoming in Video Games

      • Souvik Mukherjee

      Pages 146-173

   4. Playing in the Zone of Becoming II: ‘Becoming’ as Identity-Formation in Video Games

      • Souvik Mukherjee

      Pages 174-208

   5. Concluding Remarks: Video Games versus Books, and Other Egg-Endian (Non)Debates

      • Souvik Mukherjee

      Pages 209-218

6. Back Matter

   Pages 219-239

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The potential of video games as storytelling media and the deep involvement that players feel when they are part of the story needs to be analysed vis-à-vis other narrative media. This book underscores the importance of video games as narratives and offers a framework for analysing the many-ended stories that often redefine real and virtual lives.

• Videogame
• Storytelling
• Digital Narrative
• Ludology
• Game Studies
• Deleuze
• Affect
• Derrida
• Supplementarity
• Time
• computer
• media
• time
• video

'Souvik Mukherjee's Video Games and Storytelling examines the ongoing discussion of video games and narrative, extending it in new directions, with verve and aplomb.' - Mark J. P. Wolf, Concordia University Wisconsin, USA

• Presidency University, Kolkata, India

  Souvik Mukherjee

Souvik Mukherjee is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Presidency University, Calcutta, India. Souvik has been researching video games as an emerging storytelling medium since 2002 and has completed his PhD on the subject from Nottingham Trent University in 2009. He did his postdoctoral research in the humanities faculty of De Montfort University, UK and at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, India where he worked on digital media and narrative analysis. Souvik's research examines their relationship to canonical ideas of narrative and also how video games inform and challenge current conceptions of technicity, identity and culture, in general. His current interests involve the analysis of paratexts of video games, the concept of time in video games and the treatment of diversity and the margins in video games. Besides game studies, his other interests are (the) digital humanities and early modern literature.

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