I've been thinking about the idea of a contract between reader/player and text/story/game, which several people have made brief reference to in class and on the blog. It's a pretty generally accepted notion that readers enter into contracts with books, and it seems equally plausible that a player enters into a contract with the game she chooses to play. I'm wondering if the contract that a reader makes with a text is substantially different from the contract a player makes with a game.

A reader expects that a story will make some sort of coherent sense (unless we're talking about highly experimental stuff)-- that she'll be able to follow along to a certain extent, that even if she doesn't understand every single paragraph, she'll be able to draw some meaning out of the whole.

Something has been bothering me a while, and I have finally figured out what it is. It might make me sound whiny, but I am okay with that possibility.

Basically, it's this: Why do we care what (if any) "difference" there is between narrative and games?

I don't know. Maybe I'm being narrow-minded (or an English major), here, but it seems really obvious to me that there is a narrative element to video games--duh, of course there is. That's what happens when people do things in fictional universes: in some form or another, stories develop--whether they're plot-based, character-based, or world-based, there is some kind of narrative. Even in that James Bond game. Even in snowboarding games. It may not be a traditional narrative, but to try to divorce games from narrative seems pointless.

I just downloaded and played Facade and I must say it's every bit as creepy as I imagined a game about trying to keep a couple together/break them apart would be. Their facial expressions, the way they tend to interpret innocuous comments made by my character (Ray) as weirdly innapropriate advances, or at least divisive in nature, and how they get mad at not only each other, but also me with no warning. For example, during an awkward silence I made the mistake of mentioning the view, which caused Grace to flip out about how people are always talking about the view.

The relative nature of Facade struck me as very un-game like.