Narratology vs. Ludology Debate
One of the big issues in video game studies of this decade has been the so-called Narratology vs. Ludology Debate sometimes referred to as the N&L Debate. The main problem used to be that video games were analysed as narratives only, which wasn’t fair to the game part of the video game. Games like Tetris and Pong didn’t make much sense from a pure Narratologist perspective. The problem with the N&L Debate was that Ludology was seen as an opposing dichotomy to Narratology, which actually did not make any sense at all. One part of the problem is actually a genre problem. Narratologists tend to focus on roleplaying and adventure games, while Ludologist put more attention to strategy, action, and arcade-like games. In this sense they are actually not discussing the same issue.