Arachne v. Minerva: The Spinning out of long narrative in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and World of Warcraft

Krzywinska, Tanya ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0744-4144 (2008) Arachne v. Minerva: The Spinning out of long narrative in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and World of Warcraft. In: Third Person: authoring and exploring vast narratives. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. ISBN 9780262232630

Abstract / Summary

Comparative analyses of narrative have rarely focused on popular forms such as videogames and television, and still less so than on the relatively new genre of the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing game. This book chapter seeks to redress this omission by appraising and evaluating the different devices used in the construction and sustainment of long narrative in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft. There has been no other work in the area of comparing MMORPG narrative formation with other media . The chapter stages its comparative analysis through the lens of a Classical reference: the competition to make the best narrative tapestry between mortal woman Arachne and the goddess Minerva. This lens connects these screen-based texts to earlier modes of constructing long narrative, yet it also provides a means of investigating the way that the characteristics of a particular medium provide different creative possibilities and affordances for story-telling (in this case persistent real-time world and seriality). This chapter was commissioned by the collection’s editors on the basis of their reading of the author’s work on the use of mythology as a long form mode of narrative in the MMoRPG World of Warcraft and on an essay published in 2002 on the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Writing this chapter acted as a stepping stone on route to the more intensive work on a single MMoRPG, The Lord of the Rings Online, for Manchester University Press, which was co-edited by the author and published in date (2011). The chapter was part of a larger, overarching project to investigate the ‘gamification’ of existing media franchises, transmediality and the development of a comparative media methodology (as is evident by the author’s other papers chosen for REF submission).

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