Abstract
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Introduction The digital medium has an
increasing significance in the cultural panorama of the end
of a millennium whose advances have been measured in terms
of first written and then print documents. Computer games
are a lively corner of the electronic arena, and both their
economical success and the widening of their audience
suggest that their influence will go beyond the mere
entertainment role where some literati seem glad to cast
them. Adventure games form a genre
of their own, and are direct descendants of the first
text-based adventures that can be said to have inaugurated
digital narrative. The puzzle solving and plot development
were afterwards combined with the powerful visual element
evolved from action games and others, first incorporating
moving images and then videos and 3D landscapes to the
story-driven games. These games present a new challenge to
literary studies, as their acknowledged aim is to let the
user "live" a story. She solves enigmas, participates in
dialogues and makes the argument advance, so that the result
is very similar to a traditional genre fiction (mystery,
sci-fi or fantasy) story, where the user has played the main
character. (Game developer Jane Jensen makes this explicit
by writing books that follow her adventure games in the
Gabriel Knight series word by word). But adventure
games are not only narratives at the end, because the player
is aware of the storytelling process unfolding before her
all along. What kind of stories are these? What are their
conventions? Are they really interactive? This article takes one of
such games, Blade Runner, to explore the relationship
between adventure games and narrative, and to see how the
genre could evolve towards a more participatory exchange
between the reader and the text. Blade Runner is at
the same time a paradigm and a contradiction, as it draws on
some of the more explicitly marked genre conventions and at
the same time wants to go a "step beyond" towards narrative
interactivity providing a "constantly changing plot" (from
the game´s package). How does it try to achieve this?
Does it succeed? Is this a revolution in
storytelling?
Playing
for the Plot
Blade Runner as Paradigm of the Graphic Adventure
Game