Studying Videogames: Nonlinear? No worries! (Part 1)

The term ‘videogame’ encompasses a vast range of highly varied products in regards to genre, production value, platform or decade they were produced. As put by Jonas Linderoth (2015), there is “no set of defining traits” (p.293) for all games. As such, it would be foolish to analyse all videogames in the same way. Traditional textual lenses through which one might analyse the narrative of a film or novel are alone insufficient to study games, but that is not to say they cannot be useful. Linderoth writes that in the past, the telling of stories in games was seen to be “in conflict with game play” (p.279). He argues that it is more productive to study games as a “composite form” (p.294), where storytelling is but one of the layers that are significant to a game. To explore this idea, this piece will undertake a close analysis of the 2014 RPG videogame Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. The game will be analysed not simply as a narrative text, but also in terms of how the game’s system and its specific design aspects contribute to a non-linear narrative.

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, developed by Monolith Games and published by Warner Bros Entertainment, is an open world action Role Playing Game (RPG). Set in the pre-existing universe of Middle-earth created within the literature of J. R. R. Tolkien, the narrative of the game takes place between the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.