The Dual Nature of Detective Stories: Playful Plots in Games.
The nature of narrative in games remains elusive, often because we search to define its narrative based on traditional storytelling and narratology. My proposal is to look at a specific type of story, which are detective stories, as a genre that is inherently playful, and apply its structures and techniques in order to understand better how games construct stories. Following Todorov’s differentiation between the whodunit, where the story focuses on reconstructing the events of a crime, and the thriller, which follows the story of the detective as they are solving the crime, we can find how games use similar structures to construct their narratives. The equivalent of the whodunit can be found in games that use the environment and documents for the player to reconstruct the events that have happened in the world before the game started, as would be the case of walking simulators, whereas thriller-like games orchestrate the story of the player and its events, as would be the case of action-adventure games. These two basic models imply different uses of narrative design, as well as different models of gameplay.
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