Due to the increasing popularity of video games in mass media culture, I will be investigating one particular video game series, Portal: Still Alive and Portal 2, and the manner by which players learn from them. After observing that most instructors use these games in physics and math classes, I want to expand more on the way that video games enact a new story-telling feature through experiential means, which also serves a pedagogical function. I assert that players learn from games through their interactive gameplay, which allows them to engage with the game narrative that contains ideological content embedded through portrayal of characters, plot development, use of imagery and text, and thematic development. Thus, I develop my model of video game literacy through interactivity with a game narrative.

My model, Critical Narrative Gaming Literacy, provides a construction of game narrative comprising of thematic development as the central component encompassing the development of the other narrative elements such as plot, character, use of symbols, setting, and point of view. A new form of Cultural Studies that incorporates the study of video games, Critical Narrative Gaming Literacy is informed by theorizations in Cultural Studies, Critical Pedagogy, and Psychoanalysis as articulated in Literacy Theory. In my analysis of the game series, I investigate the narrative using a means of comparison to Jacques Lacan’s reading of Antigone and examine themes of the sublimated death drive, violence, and sado-masochism, since I experienced those themes manifesting through plot and character development and the use of symbols. Due to the interactive nature of video games and variability in gameplay, I also capture the manner by which undergraduate players experience the narratives differently from each other. Thus, taking a phenomenological approach to data collection through 13 interviews with 13 different participants, I narrow my focus on 5 different participants’ experiences of the game series. These participants express their experiences of the game series as revealing a mother-daughter relationship and a cautionary tale of science and power.