by Eurídice Cabañes

This collection of games shows examples of the use of narrative in video games, highlighting the variety of possible stories, genres and formats that can be offered to the public. Unlike the traditional narrative where the receiver is limited to observing already established content, in the videoludic narrative the players live the story in the first person and are able to interact with it. This is due to the non-linear structure of the story, which in the video game is always branched, metamorphic and centered on the decisions of the person playing the game. Despite this difference in structure, video games often draw on narrative strategies popular in the tradition of the cultural industry: The transposition of literary, comic, and audiovisual products as a way of updating content for a new audience; the revival of utopia and dystopia as a narrative space to tell stories of the present; the appropriation of traditional narrative genres for the creation of modern myths. They show the potential of videogames to reinvent narrative, allowing us to explore and imagine possible worlds.