Narrative vs story

I've been reading up on the concept of stories in games because I think they're incompatible and many seem to agree. Narrative, however is something different: if a story is a sequence of events, then a narrative is a concept. So for example, the story of Star Wars revolves around the rebel alliance battling Darth Vader and trying to destroy the Death Star, but the narrative is basically David and Goliath (which translates well to a video game but the story itself doesn't because it's linear, hence no player agency).

This seems important to me because you can go with an expected narrative or against it. For instance, when Disney makes a movie or game about pirates, they expect the viewer or the gamer to already understand the pirate narrative. In English classes (all language classes) the narrative is usally about living using the language, like going to the bank or reading a newspaper, except that few of my students will ever really need to live in English except online. That's why many of them dislike English and think it a waste of time.

In my lessons, the affective impact is created by going against the expected narrative (I hope!). So for example, last term we talked about McDonalds and the narrative they sell is "happy time for kids". The narrative we looked at had to do with obesity, environmental destruction and cruelty to animals. This term we're looking at invasion of privacy by the media which is the opposite of the expected narrative of the news telling you what you need to know. So we watched a Seinfeld episode where a journalist "outed" him, and we're playing a series of games I've designed involving trying to find out information about each other while trying to withhold information about oneself.

My argument is that it's this tension between what the students thought they knew with what they're finding out that makes for affective impact, and thus a more intrinsically motivating course. This ties in nicely with my "Globosapiens" motif.

The authors I'm citing are Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, Henry Jenkins, and Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (The Game Design reader: a Rules of Play Anthology, 2005) as well as Jesper Juul and a few others. They don't write as teachers, only as game designers, but I still think these ideas are valid since I'm claiming to create a "game-like" learning environment.