Media & Story Types
Start here · Reading 3
A plot changes when it is spoken, performed, filmed or played. The medium helps determine what an audience can know and do.
A story meets a form
A myth, fairy tale, fable, novel or saga is not the same kind of category as film, theatre or a video game. The first group describes traditions or kinds of narrative; the second concerns forms and media through which a work is experienced. A fairy tale can be told aloud, printed, staged, filmed or adapted into a game.
Adaptation therefore changes more than the surface. A narrator can explain a thought that a film must communicate through performance, framing or sound. A stage production shares physical time with an audience. A game can make progress depend on actions the player has not yet learned to perform. Structure operates through those conditions.
What each medium makes available
How a story becomes an experience
- Oral story
- Performance and occasion
- Literature
- Narration
- Theatre
- Shared, embodied time
- Film
- Framing and editing
- Music
- Emotion through sound
- Games
- Player action
Oral storytelling can respond to listeners through pacing, repetition and variation. The occasion and relationship between teller and audience are part of its meaning. A printed transcript preserves words while losing aspects of the performance.
Literature can organize access to thought through a narrator, shift tense or viewpoint, and allow readers to control their pace. The order of narration can differ sharply from the chronology of events. The Odyssey, for example, does not simply begin with Odysseus leaving for Troy and proceed forward without interruption.
Theatre places bodies, speech and shared space before an audience. An entrance, a pause or an object visible to spectators but not a character can organize suspense. Film adds editing, framing and recorded sound, making it possible to move between simultaneous actions or control a revelation through a cut.
Music changes the experience of time
Opera, operetta and musical theatre can pause practical action while extending an emotion or presenting several perspectives together. A song may state a desire, complicate it, recall an earlier promise or transform a familiar phrase. Calling it a delay in the plot can miss its structural work.
The 1939 Wizard of Oz is a musical film, not simply Baum’s novel with moving pictures. Its songs, performances and visual contrast shape Dorothy’s experience. An analysis should identify the version and ask how its medium contributes to the meaning of a moment.
Games add an acting audience
In a game, authored events and player activity interact. Ocarina of Time gives Link named quests and a represented journey, while the player learns controls, explores and decides when to proceed. Breath of the Wild offers a much less fixed order of discovery. Neither should be reduced to a single line of cutscenes.
A failed jump may be a player’s temporary setback rather than a represented moral ordeal for the character. Optional exploration is not automatically a refusal of the call. The term ludonarrative concerns the relation between play and narrative; ludonarrative dissonance names a conflict between what the story suggests and what play encourages or requires.
Choose the right evidence
Before mapping a work, write down its version and the experience you are analyzing. For a game, identify whether a claim concerns authored scenes, mechanics or one possible playthrough. For an oral tale, attend to the recorded teller and occasion where available. For a film adaptation, do not import a scene from the novel without saying so.
The same model can help across media, but its application needs to remain sensitive to those differences. A character’s journey and an audience’s experience of discovering it are connected; they are not identical.
Sources & further reading
Source notes identify the model or work discussed. Story mappings and diagnostic questions are this site’s interpretations.
- Homer — The Odyssey. Samuel Butler prose translation, 1900. Book numbers identify the scenes discussed; interpretations do not claim this modern translation is culturally neutral.
- L. Frank Baum — The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. 1900. The novel is distinct from the 1939 MGM musical.
- Clint Hocking — Ludonarrative Dissonance in BioShock. Click Nothing, 7 October 2007. A designer’s analysis of the conflict between a game’s narrative and incentives.
- Christopher Vogler — The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. 25th Anniversary Edition, Michael Wiese Productions, 2020. Author’s account of the memo, book and flexible use of the model; stage and archetype discussions refer to the book.