Myst

Game Spaces Speak Volumes: Indexical Storytelling

Clara Fernández-Vara's DiGRA 2011 paper proposes "indexical storytelling" as a refinement of environmental storytelling, drawing on Peirce's semiotics to argue that game spaces can convey narrative through physical traces that players must interpret in order to progress.

Evaluating Interactive Entertainment Using Breakdown: Understanding Embodied Learning in Video Games

This study examines how players learn video games through embodied interaction, using the concept of "breakdown" as its central lens.

Theory Wars: An Argument Against Arguments in the So-Called Ludology/Narratology Debate

Celia Pearce's paper "Theory Wars" responds to Gonzalo Frasca's 2003 essay "Ludologists Love Stories Too," which argued that the ludology/narratology debate was largely a misunderstanding.

• Celia Pearce's "Theory Wars" responds to Gonzalo Frasca's 2003 essay "Ludologists Love Stories Too," arguing that Frasca's essay deepens the ludology/narratology divide by polarizing scholars into opposing camps and mislabeling their positions.
• Pearce contends that attaching the "-ist" suffix to researchers creates a false binary, and that many scholars would prefer to move freely between play-centered and narrative-centered perspectives.
• Her central proposal is to reframe "narrative" as an adjective rather than a noun, shifting the question from whether games are narratives to in what ways they are narrative.