’S HERTOGENBOSCH, the Netherlands — High on the cathedral in this trim Dutch town, amid a phalanx of stone statues of local noblemen, crusaders, saints and angels, one figure stands out. Smiling faintly, with lowered eyelids, one of the angels wears jeans, has a laptop bag slung over one shoulder and is chatting on a cellphone. The angel gets about 30 calls a day on the phone.

Even though narratology was conceived as a transmedial endeavour from its very beginnings in Russian formalism and French structuralism, most of its more influential models have been – and continue to be – developed in the context of literary criticism and film studies. In contemporary media culture, however, the creation of storyworlds is not limited to literature and traditional feature films. Rather, emerging forms of multimodal and interactive narration, experiments with the distinction between fictional and nonfictional narrative, various forms of intermedial adaptation, and attempts at ‘transmedia storytelling’ create new ways of presenting narrative content, thereby calling attention to the affordances and limitations of different narrative media as well as to their potential for cooperation. The increased interest in the relation between media and narrative sparked by the development of digital technology and the recent proliferation of delivery techniques in the context of media convergence has reinforced the need for an interdisciplinary and transmedial narratology that studies storyworlds across media.

I love stories. My chief hobby is reading. I was formally trained as a writer, not as a game designer (there wasn’t really any formal training for game design I got started, but that’s another story). I think most game stories are not very good. And I quite enjoy games with narrative threads pulling me through them. When I find a game with a good story, I frequently prefer to the story to the actual game! So please keep that in mind as you read: I love story.
Narrative in a game is not a mechanic. It’s a form of a feedback.

The history of Flash-game website Armor Games, which both hosts and develops some of the biggest browser-based titles around. Browser games, sometimes referred to as 'Flash games,' are easy to access. There's no install required. They're widely available, with hundreds of websites stabling thousands of games. The price for accessing most of these titles? A highly attractive zero dollars." Our lives changed when the mainstream latched onto the Internet, and it changed again when broadband access replaced dial-up in the workplace. Suddenly, text and images loaded in a blink. Improved streaming technology even let us tinker with games in between waiting for the paperwork or phone call that would fire up their corner of the corporate machine once again.