• Dr. Sandeep Soni

  Author

• Dr. Rajvir Saini

  Author

This paper analyses player agency and narrative branching in the context of open-world video game scripts. With each passing year, video games morph to offer increasingly intricate scripts packed with choices that affect the storyline. Traditional linear stories are not a part of open-world games. Rather, games grow and expand in narrative structure. Players affect story scripts, dialogues, and the emotions that the writers sought to express. This paper articulates the variations and descriptions of narrative structure in the use of player agency in open-world games. Discourse and stylistic analysis provide clarity in the use of language, tone, emotional fluxes made by players, and sentence length and structure throughout the game. Furthermore, the research states that player agency in creating a story and making the players the nucleus of the story in the narrative structure is the primary driver of a game. Stylistic variation of that dialogue is the principal characteristic. Different people react to different emotional responses. The paper also explains that in the context of player agency, a lot of narrative threads that branch diverging coexist with narratively world states that are closing. Overall, the research found that 65% of dialogue variation is made by players and that 60% of player agency is the same. The research is formulated to state that open-world games contain the functionality of a highly modernized, complex digital text. The positive offer of this research is to the extent of cross-genre games studies and the interpenetrating multiple dimensions.

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