Similarities Between Games and Stories
Games are seen as interactive narratives, procedural stories or remediated cinema (Markuu). Most games have a story written on the package, in the manual, or in intro sequences, placing the players in the context of a larger story (back-story), and/or creating an ideal story that the player has to realize (Jesper 3).  As Janet Murray suggests in Hamlet on the Holodeck, such similarities would indicate that there is a promising future for digital storytelling and interactive narratives, that games and narratives are not very far apart (15).

Many people will rightly argue that computer games are played for the sake of solving problems and defeating opponents, of refining strategic skills and of participating in on-line communities, and not for the purpose of creating a "trace" that reads as a story. Yet if narratives were totally irrelevant to the enjoyment of games, why would designers put so much effort into the creation of a narrative interface? Why would graphics be so sophisticated ? Why would the task of the player be presented as fighting terrorists or saving the earth from invasion by evil creatures from outer space rather than as "gathering points by hitting moving targets with a cursor controlled by a joystick?” (Eskelin, 8).

Jesper Juul in "Looking at the Table of Narrative & Game Translations" compares narratives and games:

The use of narrative elements in computer games such as characters, themes, and plot gives stories the ability to be retold.  Although the sequence of events and concrete settings may change, the goals and actions are what lures players to keep coming back into the game-world.  As with the oral storyteller who tells great stories, the listener becomes more and more engaged. The irony in narratives is the fact that when stories are transformed from the oral, to the written, to the visual, the story changes according to the storyteller, but remains true to the same three basic elements of character, plot and theme.

The Concept of Re-Tellability
From the perspective of Gaming Theorists Juul, Eskelin and Ryan, games have similar traits based on the classical argument for the existence of narratives, Re-tellability.  Re-tellability is when a story can be translated from one medium to another: Narrative may be a special ability or competence that when mastered, allows us to summarize and retransmit stories in other words and other languages, to transfer them into other media, while remaining recognizably faithful to the original narrative structure and message (Brooks 3-4). 

Games and Narratives can be split into two levels of discourse: the telling of the story and the story told.  The story-told can be further split into two parts: existents (actors and settings) and events (actions and happenings).  A story can be recognized because it has the same existents (with the same names) and the same events; this is what we usually mean by talking of "the same story" (Chatman 19).  If the computer game is a narrative medium, stories from other media must be retellable in video games, and video games must be re-tellable in other media.

Role-Playing Video Games
The difference between the now in narratives and the now in games is that the first now concerns the situation where the reader's effort in interpreting obscures the story -- the text becomes all discourse, and consequently the temporal tensions ease. As we have learned from storytelling, the first story is usually oral, then transformed into writing (textbooks), and then transformed into visuals (pictures). In addition, the increasing versatility of video games due to enhanced story-lines offer the possibility to let players not only retell a predefined story but also modify or even create it as it is being experienced. When such story-telling applications are created, they will increase the level of engagement for people and further blur the line between story-teller and audience.