Aarseth's Anti-Quest

Aarseth, bringing up an overgeneralization in another recent article, his piece in First Person, goes on to admit that ?most proper narratologists, who actually have to think about and define narratives in a scholarly, responsible, and accurate way, are not guilty of this overgeneralization.? I have to wonder, then: Why is most of Aarseth‘sNarrative across Media article devoted to picking off straw-man pseudo-narratological arguments rather than advancing his potentially interesting quest model or addressing how to improve the valuable scholarship that has been done on the relationship between narrative and games? —Nick Montfort —Aarseth’s Anti-Quest (Grand Text Auto)

Montfort puckishly trolls for responses from the ludologists.

He suggests that Aarseth is “camping” — a strategy employed by online players of massively multiplayer games, wherein the player stays in one well-hidden location, waiting for hapless victims to stroll by or resources to appear.

I don’t generally approve of trolling (and certainly didn’t intend to drive a wedge between narratologists and ludologists when I blogged about the absence of the ludological viewpoint in evidence at the Princeton videogame criticism conference). Montfort had to do some explanation and clarification in his comments, slightly adjusting the trajectory of his salvo after he fired it.

But I always find Montfort’s ideas fascinating, along with his sometimes unorthodox ways of communicating them.