End of Story? Quest, Narrative and Enactment in Computer Games

Anders Sundnes Løvlie challenges Espen Aarseth's claim that games labeled "narrative games" are better understood as "quest games," a position rooted in the ludology-narratology debate in computer game theory. Using Remedy Entertainment's 2001 third-person shooter Max Payne as a counter-example, the paper argues that its heavily narrated, linear structure cannot be meaningfully separated from its gameplay: the player's actions gain meaning only in relation to the story's resolution, and the quest is comprehensible only when gameplay and narrative are viewed together. The author proposes "enactment" as a more fitting concept than either acting or authorship, describing the player as someone reacting to a script of narrative and rules rather than performing a fixed one or freely authoring an experience.

The analysis focuses on Max Payne's dream sequences, where genre conventions are deliberately broken and the player confronts a labyrinth of confusion that can induce immersion in the protagonist's psychological experience. Drawing on Manovich's database-interface model and Jakobson's account of poetry as the projection of paradigm onto syntagm, the paper contends that the game's forced repetition of an unavoidable event with identical outcomes represents an attempt to express metaphysical themes through new media.

The paper extends this argument to a set of small, politically charged games, including September 12th, Adam Killer, Kabul Kaboom!, and New York Defender, which the author sees as producing "mock agency," a broken promise of player control, and thereby an estrangement effect borrowed from Brecht. The author presents this as a route toward serious artistic expression in games and toward better analytical tools for narrative-driven titles. The paper is a short conference contribution drawing on a limited set of theoretical and game-based examples rather than empirical data.