Video Game Storytelling Is a World-Colliding Reinvention

It is possible that I will be the only person to pick up Colin Harvey’s book When Worlds Collide: How Video Games Reinvent Storytelling and Why It Matters because of the word “storytelling” and not the phrase “video games”. My gameplay experience mostly leaves off with a certain side-scrolling plumber leaping over turtles, not counting my current foray into the phone puzzle “Best Fiends” (level 8740!).

Harvey, a veteran video-game designer and writer (who is also published in PopMatters), however, opens with the assertion that today’s games are closer to the narratively intricate worlds I associate more with the Great American Novel than with Grand Theft Auto. Aside from non-narrative games like Tetris, Harvey writes,