I've never actually played this game, so some of what I tell you in this blog may be slightly incorrect, but part of me is simply wondering if anyone has played this. In my Race Theory in the Media course, we have to do a final paper and present what we are discussing to the class. A fellow student in my course recently presented about an interactive video game called Indigo Prophecy (XBox). It is also known as Fahrenheit. My classmate described it as a combination of narrative film and video game.

Basically, the player is the main character (Lucas) and makes decisions for the character which change the outcome of the narrative. The game starts with Lucas waking up from a trance after just killing someone. He has to figure out why he killed them before he is arrested. So the opening scene has the player (as Lucas) cleaning up the crime scene. However, the amount of clean-up the player does effects the outcome of the story after that. The person playing the game has several different choices about what to do in each scenario and each choice effects the outcome of the game. Like I said, I've never played, but it sounded pretty interesting. And pretty relevant to our discussions about narrative and video games. According to my peer it received a lot of praise for attempting to reinvent this genre of video games and it is pretty interesting. Just wondering if anyone has ever played before or knows anything about it...

In Chapter 2 of Hamlet on the Holodeck, Murray discusses how new narrative formats are being developed along with new electronic technology. Beginning on page 51, she explores the narrative potential of video games. Although games have “more detailed visual environments and faster response time… the narrative content of these games is thin, and is often imported from other media or supplied by sketchy and stereotypical characters” (Murray 51). While it’s clear that we still have our share of games with thin narratives, or narratives based on stereotypical characters (“Grand Theft Auto San Andreas” comes to mind), I think that narratives in games have changed a lot since Murray wrote this in 1997.

Okay, so I'm still thinking about narration, and now I have some more questions/thoughts about non-narrative forms. I was in Las Vegas this weekend and my friends and I went to see Le Reve (the dream), an acrobatic, Cirque du Soleil type show. The show didn't make any linear, narrative-type sense as I suppose the audience had been warned about in the title... But I wonder, what effect does providing that kind of a background as a prelude offer to a production? Or a better question I guess, what kind of license does an author get when advising that a creation is dream-based (or simply non-narrative based)? Would most audiences be less willing to drop their attachment to narrative theatre or spectacula without prior explicit warning of the possiblity? It's kind of interesting that we bring out previous conceptions of where we expect narrative to appear and where we don't to the table when consuming media...