The Game Narrative Reader, Zeroth Edition

Summary: I've collected a curated, thematic link page of important essays and articles about video game narrative. It lives at gamenarrativereader.org. Read on for whys and hows. Right now, the games industry is undergoing catastrophic contraction; others have written extensively about what's going on, in more detail, elsewhere. I do believe that, eventually, it will start to grow again. When that happens, new people are going to come into the field and they're going to be dealing with a discontinuity in practice and in knowledge created by the presently-burning wildfire of layoffs and studio closures. But even in good times, video games have a really limited institutional memory. Big studios churn themselves over time, and the knowledge they accumulate internally tends to only make it out in trickles—through the initiative of individual practitioners who spend their own time and money going to and giving talks at events like GDC. Indie teams often don't survive their first game. This…