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Rather than write about death and the world unfolding in the throes of the Black Plague, Giovanni Boccaccio instead wrote about the utopian potential of storytelling.

                                      
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Rather than write about death and the world unfolding in the throes of the Black Plague, Giovanni Boccaccio instead wrote about the utopian potential of storytelling.

Molly is a storyteller. Storytellers are artists, fabricators, and cultural arbitrators. They run games.

Conflict is necessary for storytelling, and video games have often used one of the most overt representations of conflict possible to tell their tales, the battlefield.

When done right, a match-three puzzle can be as strategic as any other form of RPG combat, and even a slot machine can tell a story.

Adventurers come and go in some video games, meaning that sometimes the only narrative element that remains consistent in such games is the boss.

You know the story. You’ve lived the story, and you're destined to relive it again and again.

Houston, do we have a problem?

Comics artist Bryan Coyle drafts recollection and current day settings in 'Babble' with the use of powerful aesthetic shifts.

In storytelling, the past dictates the future. Plots are laid out like traps that our heroes inevitably fall into. And we, watching Bruce Willis in Looper, or reading of Dream in The Sandman, are thus fated, as well.

The new film by Todd Solondz finds the notorious director of Happiness and Storytelling being surprisingly compassionate -- gentle, even.

Edward Hollis is a stylistic illusionist, adopting a variety of voices and storytelling modes as he weaves his tales of dreams, ambitions, follies, and ruins.

Not because they don't -- but for another reason entirely.

With a focus on combat and bloodshed, many games find themselves telling stories about human struggle of the most calamitous kind. This week the Moving Pixels podcast discusses war stories told in video games.

Story these days is a battlefield, and Mike Carey and Peter Gross are the new generals.