Emergent Virtual Storytelling: Exploring the Dynamics of Meaning-Making in Video Game Narrative

Abstract

The purpose of this depth psychological study is to explore storytelling processes, focusing on the video game narrative format, assessing implications for how meaning is being shaped in this contemporary medium. Narrative emerges from and bridges the conscious and unconscious, inner and outer, virtual and real, and individual and collective. Narrative generates meaning, which draws together reflection, self-awareness, and greater understanding. Meaning is related to processes that arrange and order perceptions and integrate information to internal schemas, particularly archetypal forms. Tapping these psychological dynamics, through increased interactivity, video games enlist the playing audience to be instrumental in the emergent co-creation of story. Through an examination of relevant literature and a hermeneutic phenomenological investigation involving interviews with nine video game narrative designers, this dissertation provides insight into how this virtual, interactive medium engages the storytelling impulse and reveals implications for meaning-making on personal and collective levels. In identifying the deeper themes that reside within the designers’ own lives, the interviews uncover the prominent archetypal images/motifs that propel video game narrative content, and the deeper narrative patterns that arise in their stories.