Playing at Narratology: Digital Media as Narrative Theory by Daniel Punday (review)

Playing at Narratology is an exemplary book in many regards. An important contribution to narrative theory as well as games studies, it also radically reshapes our ways of thinking about the relationship between the two fields. Contrary to what almost everybody interested in narrative and game studies unproblematically argues, Playing at Narratology does not take for granted the radical difference between the two domains (it should be noted, however, that the notion of "games" is explicitly used in this book in the strict sense of story-driven and world-building games). Daniel Punday thus discards the two fundamental positions that are generally taken by scholars in the field: he abandons any attempt to "colonialize" games studies by narrative theory (this is the stance of those who try to supersede the perceived difference between games and nondigital narrative by imposing the instruments of the latter to make sense of the former), just as he does not believe in the usefulness of forging a completely new framework to do justice to the medium-specificity of games and digital narrative (this would be the stance of ludology, which claims the necessity to produce a new conceptual apparatus fitting the exclusive needs of the digital environment).

Punday adopts a different position, more innovative and also more rewarding than the others. Instead of emphasizing differences and incompatibilities of theories and practices, his book highlights the correspondences and similarities between narrative theory and game studies—not in order to propose a new version of narrativized game studies (or whatever one wants to call it), but in order to expose the initial limits of narrative theory and the possibility of fundamentally rethinking them. These limits appear when it comes down to analyzing objects and practices that classic and postclassical narratologists could not even dream of, but also and more crucially in the case of textual analysis itself. As Punday rightfully argues, narrative theory has remained blind to a certain number of aspects and dimensions that the difficulty of applying narratology to games and digital literature forces us to reexamine.

Moreover, these aspects and dimensions do not concern simple "details" of narrative theory (I can reassure the reader: Playing at Narratology does not bother about tinkering one more time with the countless subtleties of the free indirect style in Jane Austen). They all engage the very fundamentals of narrative analysis, such as the host medium (the material ground that channels the words, sounds, and images of the work), the notions of time and space (that most understudied feature of all narrative theories), the idea of movement of characters in the fictional space and the way they are co-built by authors and readers, and finally the more general element of worldmaking in fiction.

Granted, no serious narrative theory leaves these elements undiscussed, and Punday carefully pays homage to the work of his colleagues, but in many cases the existing theoretical discussions go not far enough. The most typical case is of course that of the host medium, for instance the page and the book. The fact that in most narratives the reader is not explicitly challenged to reflect on the importance of what it means to turn the pages of a book does not mean that this type of reading, even if unnoticed by the average reader, does not deserve an in-depth discussion. Neither does it signify that the relevance of these material properties can be restricted to the three ritually mentioned textbook examples of noncanonical reading: Queneau's One Hundred Million Million Poems, Cortazar's Hopscotch, and Pavic's The Khazar Dictionary. In games and digital literature, knowing how to navigate the interface or learning how to do it are key issues, which help Punday make a thought provoking distinction between the work of the narrator and the work of the "intrigant," that is, the agent preparing the way in which the reader has to go through the text, in the material sense of the word. Next to the actual narration...