Surely, chess is a game but it is not that is trying to do the same thing that World of Warcraft is trying to do. The latter is trying to create a world in which we care about our actions for more than strategic reasons (ideally). When you have those broader concerns, namely narrative. T

he governing assumption of these fellows perspective, of course, is that life doesn’t have a cohesive, over-arching narrative and, in order to make a game more immersive, it needs to imitate life. There may be problems there, but that is a more philosophical question.

I’m coming at this from the lit. crit. direction and I’m not at all conversant in game theory, so I’m probably missing something, but: it seems to me that with traditional games (say, chess), there’s a clearly-stated object and certain rules (those serve as the parameters, the metaphysical field of play). Within those parameters, there is any number of ways of accomplishing that outcome. There is no one narrative that will result in the achieving of the object. But with narrative, the eventual outcome is always known in advance and the actions taken/not taken by characters sooner or later lead to that outcome . . . but no matter how often we read the narrative, characters always make the same choices. Put another way: Chess is a game; the recounting of Bobby Fischer’s first match with Boris Spassky on July 11, 1972, is a narrative.

I don’t know. I’m just a simple caveman. But it seems to me that “game” and “narrative,” sooner or later, just won’t mesh with each other because they are fundamentally at odds with each other by virtue of their respective natures.