This essay has a lot going for it while Juul notes on both sides of games and narratives. One interesting thing that stood out to me that Juul touches on is the large print of “Everything is narrative”; which at first glance feels like it makes sense then reading more, I realized there was much more to it that I just didn’t think about. When he says that Narrative is a fundamental human capability but something can be presented with a narrative does not mean that it is narrative. Which is interesting, because we might look at it as it is a human tendency to want to tell stories or create a world inside our world -which is why we have the arts.
He then notes on how games can be connected with narrative but it is really just an aspect of a game that tells a player to do in order to get rewards and such though the game. With that I think of how my friends and I binged Skyrim for years (sometimes still today) and how we all talk about how we play it and we end up creating the story to go along with it as we talk to each other about the game so it ties into his idea that games and narratives can have some points of similar traits.
Finally, the big one that hit me was the adaption from movie to game and vise versa. He talks about Star Wars on the Atari and as someone who loves the Star Wars saga this was interesting; because, he notes that the game is so bare bones that if you remove the title it might just be a space fighting game as you have the 3 phases and then it is basically on repeat which is completely unlike the film itself so adapting film to game can be done but in this example, not done very well. Then the adaption of game to film… Just don’t. As we’ve seen with Mortal Kombat they generally end up pretty bad. Though, I will say the new MK games are mostly an animated film with fighting attached to it so where is the line drawn for what is considered a game or animated film?
Game Studies 
Great post. I was perplexed by the same question regarding animated movies adapted from video games..is it a game or animated film? Consider any game with a decent storyline which unfolds as the player progresses to the next goal. Would it essentially just be watching a speed run and experiencing the entire narrative without playing? Perhaps if the writer takes the video game and adds to the narrative or is their own altered rendition of the original. I think it would be difficult to make a Hollywood hit based off of a video game that I would actually watch, then again doesn’t happen very often…so maybe it just hasn’t happened.yet? So I thought about Red Dead Redemption and the story of John Marston. Even if it was a sexy Hollywood actor and shot beautifully I don’t know if the story is engaging enough without play. I will feel really stupid typing this when a freaking awesome box-office film is based on a video game…we will see.
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I really enjoyed this article because I believe there is so much to examine for both sides of the debate we had on Monday. I will say this though: have a little bit more of an open eye to adaptations. If you’re a film major, you know that Hollywood loves control. There are a lot of people who control these movies that have no idea what the audiences want. That’s why so many video game movies are so bad. They don’t understand us, but that doesn’t mean adaptations will always be bad. It’s the high art / low art argument.
Attaching the appropriate people to video game movies is the first step. Hollywood has to take a film adaptation seriously, and then we will get something of subjective value. Also, Juul’s argument on the Star Wars games is a straw mans argument. Juul decided to use the most mundane and out of date Star Wars game for his/her example, while there are dozens of Star Wars games with a narrative that resembles a film (Force Unleashed 1 and 2, Dark Forces, KOTOR 1 and 2, and the upcoming Jedi Fallen Order).
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This article definitely helped put this debate into perspective. The point I related to most was talking about how a game doesn’t have to have a narrative, but we can make a narrative in our retelling of what happened during our gaming session. However, as we said in class, the example Juul brought up of the Star Wars game for the Atari, it was really quite the bad example. There were definitely more recent games that portrayed the story of Star Wars much better than that.
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