‘Taking Gameplay Seriously’

The Tuesday Lunch Series welcomes Sky LaRell Anderson, visiting assistant professor in communication, presenting “Taking Gameplay Seriously: How Interactivity, Narrative, and Player Communities Come Together.”

How do you tell a story when those listening ultimately determine the outcome? How can narrative and interactivity co-exist? In this presentation, Anderson attempts to answer these questions. Among game studies scholars, questions regarding the roles and definitions of interactivity and narrative are hotly debated, but Anderson performed a study in which he examined how players tell their own experiences playing games. Ultimately, he discovered a novel form of gameplay narrative, what he calls extraludic narrative, which describes the stories players tell about their gameplay experiences. This concept brings together theories of online community, narrative, and interactivity in order to take gameplay, and the stories we tell about it, seriously.