As I mentioned in class I strongly believe that narrative is the catalyst of video games and leaves the largest impression on users. There’s been constant debate regarding narrative being a beneficial necessity for games or it being detrimental. Based on my own personal experience as a gamer I’ve always looked forward to the unique storylines games possessed. Throughout my gaming experience with, Call of Duty Modern Warfare, I was able witness a campaign that revolved around emotional war scenarios with the beloved Captain Price. Captain John Price is known as a protagonist who is the main character in all of the Call of Duty games since the release of Call of Duty 4 in 2007. At the time of his initial debut I was only ten years old, so I truly felt as if I grew up with Captain Price in my life up until I graduated from high school. I outgrew Call of Duty by the time I was in 11th grade, because of my increased interest in playing more basketball. Throughout many of the campaigns I’ve played I experienced various emotional moments where I had to save Captain Price’s life or him having to save mine under the mist of war. Every single year during the fall I would constantly anticipate the releases of trailers and YouTube gameplay, because I truly couldn’t get enough of the narrative. These detailed war story lines created so many memories for me as a gamer due to the adrenaline and excitement the missions were garnering for me. Pursing checkpoint after checkpoint was always risky with opposing armies that were meant to stop us from our war goal which was winning. Constant trial and error as a war soldier built a passion for being good at Call of Duty. With that being said, without this narrative it would be extremely difficult for me to feel nostalgia from the game and I wouldn’t have had the same emotional experience otherwise. According to Mejeur’s article, Too Narrative Too Queer, “If we’re going to attempt to excise stories from games, we might as well stop making games. Waypoint’s Patrick Klepek started down this road, saying, “The problem is that it doesn’t matter: games have no choice but to tell stories,” but abruptly veered away from the most obvious follow-up to that statement: games have no choice but to tell stories because they are made by humans, and humans think in stories. Precisely how that happens is debatable, and has been debated around theories like the narrative paradigm, but we order things and seek structure. We played Pong, assuming a wider world of players on a court or at a table, rather than just playing Move Ball With Physics (and even that can be argued as a narrative structure, i.e. the ball begins here and then goes there. Also, it was never literally a ball at all; that is its own story).” Overall, Klepek’s articles conveys how essential it is for video games to possess narratives, because as humans we can’t help it, but to enjoy storytelling. Alike films and books, video games should be allowed to generate good narratives with ease as long the storytelling intensions are good.
Work Cited
Batti , B., & Karabinus, A. (2017). A Dream of Embodied Experience: On Ian Bogost, Epistemological Gatekeeping, and the Holodeck.
DMS 448 Spring 2020 
I completely agree with you about how games that provide players with a narrative leave the largest impressions. Games with no narrative like Tetris don’t draw players in emotionally like other games do. I recently started playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons on my Switch. The fact that Animal Crossing is real time makes players feel as if they were the one that is on that deserted Island. From the moment I started playing the game, I immediately feel a sense of responsibility to keep my Island in tip-top shape. Having control over the narrative and what happens in the game keeps me interested and keeps me coming back to the game. Without a narrative it would be extremely hard for me to find interest in a game. With non-narrative games how do you pick which to play? When choosing a game to play i usually look into the story that it provides. Whichever game has a more interesting story is usually the game I will stick with for the near future. So when a game has no narrative, it would be really difficult for me to pick a game to play and then stick with it for a while. The narrative and story is what keeps me intrigued and pushes me to continue playing a game. Narrative gives players a sense of “What is next.”
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