narratology

Disclaimer: I apologize if this seems fragmented. I'm writing this on a supply of allergy meds.

So, Markku Eskelinen and the ideas surrounding Ludology seem like a dead horse by now. We've already established that most--if not all--of us either don't like his work or aren't convinced Towards Computer Game Studies is a valuable work of scholarship. While I don't exactly disagree, I'm more interested in trying to understand why his opinions are met with such open hostility, and what (if any) scholarship can be extracted from his essay.

So, if we consider Towards Computer Game Studies something of a flagship for Ludology's self-proclaimed maiden voyage into the glorious uncharted territory of the Computer Game (and while that may seem like an unfair judgement, ludology itself is a very contemporary school of thought created upon the platform of direct resistance to narratology), we run into basic problems with premises. Eskelinen's premises.  read more »

After reading Markku Eskelinen's excerpt about the infiltration of narratology in ludology, I found some of his arguments intriguing, but most of them were sounded like pretentious crap. And this was my reaction before reading his rude response to Richard Schechner.. I think his main point that caused me to feel so indignant was how he differentiates between ludology's user time and event time and narratology's story time and discourse time. He expresses these ideas as being totally separate, black and white arguments when really these concepts are so ambiguous.  read more »