Abstract About the author Introduction From a literary perspective, the popularity of the computer game appears unmotivated.
Computer games seem meaningless but are nevertheless played over and over.
In opposition to the 'meaningless game' the idea of making games that tell a good story has been expressed in a variety of ways and places, from the ads for computer games to the works of Brenda Laurel and Janet Murray. This idea has often been described with the term interactive fiction which has been traced historically and subsequently rejected by Espen Aarseth in his book Cybertext . The main argument of this paper is that there are no good stories in computer games because the computer game does not tell stories - it is not a narrative medium. My method is that of using traditional narrative theory to examine various computer games, to see how the gameplay interacts with any narrative elements or stories connected to them. In this way I try to identify if and how games relate to stories, and I attempt to pin out the problems of combining them.