Visual narratives in videogames. How videogames tell stories through graphical elements.

Videogame is a unique and, at the same time, widely diversified medium. In videogames, the typical elements of oral, written, musical, visual - but also interactive, spatial, environmental - narration are found, in different ways depending on the different products, merged together creating "elsewheres" capable of telling stories and generating experiences in ways that other media are hardly able to replicate. This mainly because their inherent way to involve the players actively but also via their visuals compartment. Visual and graphical elements can provide great narrative potential in videogames as they take part in the wider process of meaning and narrative conveyment, both shaping countless possible scenarios and helping players to make sense of them. This contribution addresses the narrative potential of visual elements in videogames by merging the scholarly perspectives of game studies and semiotics. The first part will be devoted to the framing of videogames’ expressive power within the field of game studies and will deal with specific field-related concepts such as procedural rhetoric and evocative narrative elements. The second will delve deep into the understanding of videogames as texts, following the work of Agata Meneghelli and Espen J. Aarseth on the matter. The latter part of the paper will deal with how videogames can use their visual elements for narrative purposes, providing a framework of five different visual narratives based upon Henry Jenkins’ videogame narrative theory.