Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual 167

Trigger Happy

action. For instance, the back story of Blade Runner is the invention, programming and rebellion of the replicants; the “present” story is Deckard’s attempts to find and kill them. Some movies in fact are all about attempts by the characters in the present to find out what the back story actually is—for instance, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, or The Usual Suspects (What went on at the wharf? Who is Keyser Soze?).

For the purposes of talking about videogames, the “back story” is the diachronic story, and the story that happens in the fictional present is the synchronic story—an ongoing narrative constituted by the player’s actions and decisions in real time.21

Now synchronic and diachronic modes of story in other media are very often combined in the same narrative. For example, in the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles, the synchronic (present) story is about Oedipus as the King of Thebes trying to find out why his city is cursed. The diachronic (background) story, gradually revealed through Oedipus’s dogged investigations, is that in the past Oedipus himself killed his father and slept with his mother. (This is the

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21 Of course, even what I am calling a “synchronic” story unfolds over time, but since that period is far shorter—usually, in the fictional videogame universe, a few hours or days—I will let the term stand.

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