Storytelling, Interdisciplinarity, and Cross-sectoral Collaboration
Games engage players through a variety of modalities, such as audio, visual, and haptic cues. The combination of modalities are filtered through the player’s cognitive perception as a holistic experience, often, reinforced by narratives. Sometimes the narrative element has been implicit, other times open, but games have exploited narrative techniques, employed narrative suspense, and relied on narrative characters with ever greater sophistication. Narratives, as understood through the video game medium, have now extended broadly toward interactive and immersive media—continuing to push the bounds of how we understand the power of storytelling both within game worlds, and the culture surrounding them to engage researchers from various disciplines to explore questions such as:
- Is gameplay fundamentally distinct from narrative?
- How can game mechanics enhance or engage with narratives?
- Do we always subtlety try to narrativize our game experience?
- How do interactive media narratives reflect and shape our sense of gender, race, sexuality, nationalities, and cultural identities?
- How do players interact with multimodal narrative and game elements?
- How do narratives affect other dimensions of society and culture?
The 2025 International Conference on Games and Narrative (ICGaN’25) provides an interdisciplinary venue for researchers from a variety of disciplines (humanities, social sciences, human-computer interaction, computer science, engineering, etc.) to discuss and consider the plethora of factors which impact video games and interactive storytelling.
2025 CfP AND CONFERENCE DATES: COMING SOON!
Curating a Community for Novices and Experts
The International Conference on Games and Narrative (ICGaN) began within a small reading group led by Drs. Ken Hirschkop and GI Executive Director, Neil Randall (both faculty from English Language and Literature) called the “Games and Narrative Reading Group” (GNRG). The GNRG started in early 2020 as a way for humanities graduate students specializing in games studies to discuss narrative theories, emerging literature on multimedia, and apply them to the medium of games. Dr. Hirschkop, an expert on film and literary narrative theories but new to the world of games, encouraged the group to consider how game mechanics interact and impact linear storytelling motifs, and the different ways in which stories can be built in non-linear fashions for open-world games. Dr. Randall, as a games and narrative scholar specializing in historical simulations and adaptations, added a counterpoint to Dr. Hirschkop’s more traditional perspective. These discussions created the basis for ICGaN. The vision for the conference was to engage all narrative scholars—including those in other disciplines such as social sciences, engineering, and design.
Read more about the 2021 inaugural virtual conference in this news spotlight!
You can read more graduate student involvement, the challenges of hybridity, and working towards greater interdisciplinary engagement during ICGaN’23 in the this news spotlight.