Video Games and Storytelling

Souvik Mukherjee is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Presidency University, Calcutta, India. Souvik has been researching video games as an emerging storytelling medium since 2002 and has completed his PhD on the subject from Nottingham Trent University in 2009. He did his postdoctoral research in the humanities faculty of De Montfort University, UK and at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, India where he worked on digital media and narrative analysis. Souvik's research examines their relationship to canonical ideas of narrative and also how video games inform and challenge current conceptions of technicity, identity and culture, in general. His current interests involve the analysis of paratexts of video games, the concept of time in video games and the treatment of diversity and the margins in video games. Besides game studies, his other interests are (the) digital humanities and early modern literature.

• 1. Introduction: Videogames and Storytelling PART I: 2. Machinic Stories: The Literature Machine, Technicity and the Computer Game 3. (W)Reading the Machinic Game-Narrative PART II: 4. Reading Games and Playing Books: Game, Play and Storytelling 5. Shapeshifting Stories : Reading Videogame Stories through Paratexts PART III: STORY 6. Ab(Sense) of an Ending: Telos and Time in Videogame Narratives 7. Playing in the Zone of Becoming I: Agency and Becoming in Videogames 8. Playing in the Zone of Becoming II: 'Becoming' as Identity-formation in Videogames 9. Concluding Remarks: Videogames Versus Books, and Other Egg-endian (Non)Debates

'Souvik Mukherjee's Video Games and Storytelling examines the ongoing discussion of video games and narrative, extending it in new directions, with verve and aplomb.' - Mark J. P. Wolf, Concordia University Wisconsin, USA