 Here we see some of the, you know, unusual interface devices that have been developed over the years. You know, you have Karambas, and you have a pistol, and I don't know what that device with the long antenna is there for. Storytelling also takes place through the setting of the game scene. By this, I mean the places, objects, ambient characters, and atmospheres of the game world to stick with the example of Grand Theft Auto. A large part of the game's narrative is conveyed through the virtual world. The comments of people passing by on the street, the contrasting atmospheres of the different neighborhoods, the billboard advertisements, and especially the virtual media which the player has at her disposal. TV, computer games, radio, and a smartphone, and even the internet. The most important of these virtual media is without a doubt the radio and the radio channels that it transports, which are available in every vehicle that the player can hijack and that not only give the player a customizable soundtrack to her endeavors, but also convey what kind of simulated world the player is immersed in through the satirical advertisements on the one hand and the grotesque chatter of the different radio show hosts on the other. The radio also conveys a meta commentary on the player's actions. Completed missions leading to news flashes, for example, as well as on the state of the game world, for example a bridge being opened which signals expansion of the playable part of the map. Another common use of virtual media is the distribution of recordings within the game world that reveal important information and enrich the narrative setting of the game. For example, in Bioshock, where the player finds recordings made by deceased characters which unveil the history of the fallen utopian city and its philosophy that she is in the process of exploring. But the unique narrative dimension of games, that which differentiates them from all other storytelling media, is to be found in the actions that the player can and must perform in order to make progress in the game and unfold the narrative. Computer games are all about action, as the media theorist Alexander Galway points out. And this gamic action is a narrative dimension in and of itself. Whereas the computer implements the game world, including all objects and characters, the player is the protagonist for whom everything is enacted. Her performance drives the course of events. This performative dimension can be very rudimentary and abstract, as is the case in early computer games such as the aforementioned Pac-Man. But it is a narrative dimension nonetheless. Pac-Man's actions solely encompass moving and eating. Most of the time the player can only eat the dots and try to avoid being eaten by the ghosts. Only when Pac-Man eats a power pill does the course of events flip and he becomes temporarily able to eat the ghosts. Thus, Pac-Man can be seen as an arch-type of story of being hunted and hunter. Okay, this artifact here isn't really representative of storytelling in games, but it is a fascinating piece of game art. It's the pain station made by two artists coming from Cologne. And basically what it is, is you have a modified version of Pong. Pong being this ping-pong game where you're trying to hit the ball back and forth. It's for two players. And the special thing about the pain station is that each player has to put their hand on the pain execution unit over here. And you put your hand on the pain execution unit and you press both buttons down. And you have to have both buttons down to be able to play. If you lift your hand off the button then you automatically lose. You know, a tricky part of this game being that every time the other player scores a point you get penalized and the penalization can be either in the form of an electroshock or it can be in the form of the hot plate getting hot, you know, and steering your hand. Or if you're getting whipped by this little rubber whip here on the side. You can lift your hand up a little bit. This finger hurts a little bit. It hurts a little bit. It hurts a little bit. This long shit! Shit! We don't win so much by, you know, making more points, but by just being able to take the pain. Hence the name pain station. The story of a computer game can be told solely through the actions performed by the player. For example in ICO where a moving narrative about a little boy trying to take care of a little girl is told with no dialogue at all. Or in the follow-up title, The Shadow of the Colossus where the futility and tragedy of the Archtypal hero's quest is conveyed solely through the action of the game where the player is scaling gigantic beasts in an extended dance of death finding their weak spots by meticulously studying their behavior becoming increasingly fascinated by the great beasts and then having to kill them in a last ditch and futile attempt at saving the player characters one true love. The list of computer game actions implemented thus far is long and I won't be able to list all of them here. Time passes crawling, climbing, walking, running, jumping, flying, diving, driving and riding, punching, kicking, hacking, sword-triving, talk of assault, training, planning, building, time-traveling, morphing and mutating, et cetera, et cetera. The list can go on for quite some time and new actions are being discovered or invented, implemented every day. The performative narrative dimension of games can thus be extraordinarily elaborate as contemporary action-adventure games such as the aforementioned Beyond Two Souls continue to prove. In this latest game by David Cage, the player slips into the role of Jody, a girl who has been in contact with an entity from another dimension since childhood and partakes in various episodes of her life moving back and forth in time in a patchwork of different stages of her life. These scenes are told in a seamless mix of scriptive interactive scenes and quick-time events. Each chapter offers its very own interactive possibilities that are all driven by the narrative goals of the sequence. Next to the actions the player has at her disposal and needs to perform in order to move the platform forward, the spaces in which the player must perform these actions contribute to the narrative in their very own way. For example, in the chapter Imaginary Friend that takes place during Jody's childhood. At the beginning of the chapter, the player finds herself in the house of her parents. The scene begins with a view of Jody alone in her room. As the player one feels her fear and loneliness, the feeling carries over into the next day in the kitchen where Jody is confronted with her distant mother. David Cage's games don't use dialogue menus in a classical sense, but rather they offer the player a choice from multiple thought cues, one word choices that float around the game figure's head for a limited time, giving the player a chance to influence the course of an inner monologue or a conversation such as when Jody has the choice of whether to try and seek comfort from her mother that morning in the kitchen. Being initially ignored by her and only gaining comfort if she continues to demand attention. When Jody's mother sends her into the garage to get something she needs for cooking, the sequence gains an uncanny edge. In the half-lick garage, the player is confronted with faces in the shadows and sounds on the threshold of her perception. The feeling of dread, the subliminal spatial presence of a dark entity holds over after the player returns from the garage to the kitchen. Every time you as player pass the closed door to the garage, there is a strong feeling that something is going to jump out at you at any given minute. Thus the game space becomes a place that the player inhabits. The feeling of being physically threatened carries over into the evening when Jody lays in bed unable to sleep and decides to send out her otherworldly friend Aiden who allows the player to leave Jody's body and view the surroundings remotely, being able to pass through walls and objects in its ghostly form and telekinetically interact with the physical virtual world. In the kitchen, the player gets the first glimpse of her father who disowns Jody because he views her as a monster. As the player bears witness to this parental disapproval, a thought forms in her head, questioning whether they are even her real parents. In a later chapter, alone, the player enters a scene of Jody's parents giving her over to a scientific program that is specialized in studying paranormal phenomena. In this short, poignant scene, Jody has the ability to react to her father's abandonment of her. As Aiden, who acts as an agent of Jody's or the player's emotional reaction, the player can choose to choke Jody's father and if so, decide for how long to do so. The only interaction possibility of the scene besides the free movement of one's vantage point. Every time you make a decision in Beyond Two Souls, you ask yourself what the alternative would have been. This is a very important goal for game design. A central aim is to make decisions meaningful. Narrative input can be conveyed through every element of the game. For example, the trophy I get after playing the chapter alone, which finally confirms my suspicion with its name, not my father, that Jody is adopted. This scene also underlines the fact that it is just as essential for storytelling to limit the interactive possibilities of a player as much as it is to expand them. Every time a game tells a story, the unfolding of events have a dramaturgy that necessarily guides the player's actions through a narrative channel of possibilities. This is true for all games. Even the most open of worlds, like Grand Theft Auto, use scripted sequences next to cutscenes to move the plot forward. When the player chooses to explore the open world freely, they are telling stories of their own, within the simulated story space created by the game designers. Such games, open world games with an embedded plot, are storytelling engines and narrative networks in one, offering the player the choice of when to switch between these two interaction paradigms. And as one could say, two storytelling paradigms.