17: Spy Video Games after 9/11: Narrative and Pleasure
Role-playing games (RPG) is the most important type of video games, for both PC and online games. In the last decade or so, video games with a spy theme were pretty common and have become an important genre in games. This chapter discusses, from the narrative and cultural perspectives, the identity and pleasure of the RPG player, and analyses the text construction in the multinarration of spy games. The discussion is divided into three parts: (1) How does a spy game tell a story? We will do a narrative analyze and find out how the narrative scheme causes pleasure in the player. (2) What stories are told by spy games? Putting these stories among the various post-9/11 texts, we can see what kind of “tacit writing” is provided by the spy games. (3) Starting from these game texts we discuss what special role is played by spy games in the video game industry, in the global political and economic system, and what effects result from it.