Textuality and Videogames: Interactivity, Narrative Space and Role Play

Textuality and Videogames is an interdisciplinary academic study that interrogates whether videogames, particularly Role Play Games, can be understood as narrative forms. Drawing on a two-year research project conducted from 2001 to 2003 at the Institute of Education, University of London, the authors combine textual analysis, video recordings of players in domestic settings, and interviews with both players and developers. Their central argument is that while games incorporate narrative elements that players genuinely value, they are not inherently narrative media. Real-time play unfolds as events rather than fixed sequences, and player agency disrupts the linear structures that narratological theorists such as Chatman describe.

The study's empirical findings challenge several assumptions common in earlier games scholarship. Rather than solitary, individualistic activity, play was frequently found to be social and collaborative. Case studies of Abe's Oddysee and Anarchy Online show that console games largely offer reactive interactivity, yet players still exercise personal, proxy, and collective forms of agency. Motivations in massively multiplayer environments were likewise found to be ambiguous and overlapping, combining ludic, representational, and communal impulses rather than falling neatly into distinct categories.

Methodologically, the work draws on multimodal and social semiotic theory to account for how meaning is produced across visual, auditory, spatial, and interactive channels. The authors position computer games studies as a young, interdisciplinary field still developing its theoretical vocabulary and methods, and their analysis is offered as a contribution to that ongoing effort.

The book's scholarly scope is broad, engaging with play theory, cybertext, narrative theory, and semiotics, and it examines a range of titles including Final Fantasy VII, Halo, ICO, Planescape: Torment, SimCity, Baldur's Gate, and Silent Hill. Its reference apparatus situates the study within the wider literature on interactive media, establishing a foundation for further research into how games construct and distribute meaning.