...is that I do, actually, plan to talk about Fight Club. A former student of mine inadvertently convinced me to remove the Matrix section from my course description, and replace it with a unit on Fight Club: the way the narrative is driven by underground boxing, and the way the boxing naturally evolves into Project Mayhem, breaks open some issues of play in interesting ways (and lodging the discussion in a book makes me feel more at home).
We consider fighting games (from Mortal Kombat to Bible Fight) to be a major genre in gaming (and the Fight Club console games follow suit) -- the games somehow resist narrative and lead inevitably to them anyway... hm. Thoughts?
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The martial arts film and its master narrative trope "the elimination tournament tree" seems to be the master narrative of frame for the vast majority of fighting games, although the tournament is always then infused with a soap-opera-load of past romances and betrayals, soured family relationships, old rivalries and grudges, etc. etc. Still, these things seem to be ornaments intended to amplify the significance of the matches. Most tournament-tree fighting games don't actually perform plot-branching in an ongoing story as the tournament progresses.
Matt: I think you might need to say a bit about whether you view "play" as distinct from competition.
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