A thousand lives: telling stories with computer games

Computer games are becoming the default entertainment medium of the XXI century. Fueled by an expanding market which is close to the gross income of Hollywood blockbusters, and ubiquitous in our technological world, via the mobile phone, the game console, or the PC, computer games are also reshaping the ways we understand the old art of narration. In this paper I will present an approach to possible techniques for telling stories with computer games. While this is a field that has a long and rather controversial story in the field of computer game studies, it is not my intention to write a manifest for the narrativity of games. The goal of this paper is to introduce a number of issues that have to be taken into consideration in the process of developing a a narrative game. This paper will present some of the central discussions on the narrativity of games and how it relates with their ontology, but focused on introducing and suggesting practical approaches for actual game development.