Deconstructing game stories with propp's morphology story patterns in role playing games and cultural differences

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the following: (1) the applicability of Propp's morphology to game stories, (2) the identification of the required changes in the original framework to analyze game stories on an act/mission level, (3) the discovery of the logical sequence of story functions that form story patterns, (4) and the identification of commonly repeated story patterns as well as the cultural differences between American and Japanese game stories. The scope of this study is limited to Role-Playing Games (RPG), believing that the narrative value of RPGs coupled with the freedom of choice they offer, make this genre more suitable for a structural study of game narrative. To focus on the cultural differences and to identify repeating story patterns, three RPGs from the east and three RPGs from the west are selected. Each game's overall story is broken down into acts and then each act is mapped to Proppian functions. © 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.