{"id":1787,"date":"2009-11-07T22:26:12","date_gmt":"2009-11-07T22:26:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/?p=1787"},"modified":"2009-11-08T06:24:51","modified_gmt":"2009-11-08T06:24:51","slug":"against-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/?p=1787","title":{"rendered":"Against Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have often thought that there is an overlooked dimension to the discussions about games and narrative. Many games encourage a particular style of thinking &#8211; a way of looking at situations as possibility spaces and applying systemic, algorithmic, and probabalistic cognitive techniques. And in some ways this type of <em>gamer intelligence<\/em> can be seen in opposition to storytelling as a way of understanding the world. <\/p>\n<p>I usually keep this idea of games <em>against<\/em> stories to myself, because it seems unnecessarily confrontational. But in <a href=\"http:\/\/tedxmidatlantic.com\/live\/#TylerCowen\">this TED talk<\/a>, economist Tyler Cowen gives a wonderful critique of story thinking. As an added bonus, his advice to embrace the mess of our lives and the world reminded me of Ian Bogost&#8217;s recent <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bogost.com\/writing\/videogames_are_a_mess.shtml\">Digra keynote<\/a>. Maybe Tyler is a skeptical realist?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have often thought that there is an overlooked dimension to the discussions about games and narrative. Many games encourage a particular style of thinking<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1787"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1787"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1789,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1787\/revisions\/1789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}