Games as nonliterary narratives: A temporal view of Aarseth´s ontic dimensions

Games have redefined the way humans interact with computers and challenged the traditional definitions applied to narratives. Narratologists and ludologists have used a variety of approaches taken from their respective fields to study game narratives. The current study creates a measure of narrativity based on existing literature to plot the game chosen for analysis. Using the ontic dimensions (World, events, objects and agents) formulated by Aarseth, the study applies temporality as a tool, to identify the hierarchy embedded within those dimensions in the game. It is proposed that while such temporal hierarchies differ according to the narrativity measure of each game, the emerging common patterns will create interesting ludo-narrative templates for game design.