The Ugly Duckling: How Diegetic Games Resemble but Transcend Storytelling

The talk will address and attempt to explain how diegetic games, seemingly a low-artistic-/high-production- value kind of storytelling, instead is a different kind of beast. Games are not stories, but computer games are not altogether games, either. I will present several alternative notions of how to make sense of this complex and ill-understood relation, using classic narrative theory assisted by Einstein's (and not Bakhtin's) notion of the Chronotope. Intermediary factors such as experience and memory must be taken into account when accounting for how diegetic games resemble, but, both physically and existentially, diverge from (multi)narrative. And then there is the question of fiction. Are diegetic games a new type, or simply unfictional?