Critical Analysis
Grennan, S. and Hague, I. (2018) ‘Medium, knowledge, structure: capacities for choice and the contradiction of medium-specificity in games and comics’, Image & Narrative, 19(1), pp. 76–77. (https://www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/1765)
Introduction For this critical analysis, I’m focusing on a passage from Simon Grennan and Ian Hague’s article Medium, knowledge, structure. The piece sits in that long-running debate about “medium specificity” the idea that games do something fundamentally different from other narrative forms (like novels or comics), mainly because games include interactivity and choice.
The section I’m working with discusses open-world role-playing games especially The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011) and Fallout: New Vegas (2010) as examples where plot, time, and choice don’t behave like they do in conventional narratives. What I found useful here is that Grennan and Hague don’t just say “games are interactive”; they get more precise about where the difference sits: how player-time, story-time, and the “telling” of events tangle together during play.
What the authors are trying to argue The extract builds its point carefully. It starts from something very straightforward: these games don’t force you to follow a single “core quest” in a fixed order. You can ignore the main storyline for hours, bounce between side quests, wander, loot, talk to NPCs, or just explore.
From there, Grennan and Hague make their bigger move: they bring in Seymour Chatman’s distinction between story-time (the time of events in the story world) and discourse-time (the time of the narration/presentation). Instead of throwing narratology out, they adapt it to argue that, in open-world play, story-time and discourse-time collapse into the same present moment because the “story” is not fully there in advance as a completed sequence. It becomes real only as the player triggers events and links them through action.
That claim is one of the strongest parts of the passage. It reframes “choice” as a structural feature rather than a lack of narrative. In other words: the plot isn’t missing; it’s assembled through play.
Where the passage is strong One reason this section works is that the argument doesn’t float in abstraction. It stays anchored in how these games actually feel: you are always operating in “now-time,” making decisions, and producing a particular order of events. It’s also strong that the authors anticipate a common objection: “But stories have fixed, teleological plots , games don’t.” Rather than dismissing that, they respond by saying that stories and games are both unrealised until someone experiences them. You don’t get the novel’s story without reading; you don’t get the game’s story without playing.
I also like the way they handle the idea of “freedom.” They acknowledge that open-world games allow lots of permutations, but they don’t romanticise that as infinite agency. The player’s choices are always bounded by what the code, systems, and world rules allow. When they connect constraints to something like verisimilitude (the sense of “this is believable within this world”), it becomes a more grounded argument: the player is free inside a designed structure, not outside it.
The section becomes most persuasive when it shifts toward narration. Their idea of a “game utterance” that narration in games includes visuals, sound, movement, interface, system feedback, and interaction is a useful expansion beyond purely language-based storytelling. It also links back to their earlier point: the “utterance” is never fully delivered upfront; it’s revealed in pieces, depending on what the player does.
Where I’m not fully convinced (and why) Even though the argument is convincing overall, I think the wording can sometimes make the difference between stories and games feel sharper than it actually is.
For example, the claim that there is “no pre-existing plot” in these games risks being overstated. There is authored narrative content: quest chains, scripted scenes, gated progression, and pre-written outcomes. What’s different is not that plot doesn’t exist, but that plot order and emphasis are partially reorganised by the player. So I’d phrase the point more as: the authored plot exists as possibility-space, and the player’s route through it is what becomes “the plot” in experience.
Related to that: the passage leans heavily on open-world RPGs as the core example. That’s fine for Skyrim/New Vegas, but it raises the question of how well the model travels to games with tighter sequences (linear action games, puzzle games, walking sims, or heavily scripted story games). If the article is arguing against rigid medium-specificity, it’s slightly ironic that it depends on a very specific game structure to make the case. The core point still holds, but the scope feels narrower than the theoretical conclusion sometimes suggests.
Finally, the comparison to non-game texts like Saporta and Chris Ware is smart, because it prevents the argument from becoming “games are unique, end of story.” But it also opens a tension: if certain comics and novels already produce “ludic” or choice-like structures, then maybe the difference isn’t “game vs comic” so much as how a text controls event-order vs presentation-order. The article is already heading there I just wanted it to say that part more bluntly.
Conclusion Overall, I think this extract is strong because it gives a precise vocabulary for something players already recognise: in open-world RPGs, time, plot, and choice are experienced as an ongoing present, not as a completed storyline you’re simply being told. Grennan and Hague make a convincing case that the key issue isn’t whether games “have narratives,” but how narrative structure is produced through action inside designed constraints.
What I take from it (especially as someone interested in making game worlds) is that “story” can be treated less like a fixed arc and more like a designed field of possible events where meaning comes from the route a player assembles, not just from the content itself.
