Since its inception, narratology has constructed essentially as an research of literary narrative fiction. Linguists, folklorists, psychologists, and sociologists have increased the inquiry towards oral storytelling, yet narratology continues to be essentially involved in language-supported tales. In Avatars of tale, Marie-Laure Ryan strikes past literary works to envision different media, specifically digital narrative forms.  via grappling with semiotic media except language and expertise except print, she finds how tale, a sort of which means that transcends cultures and media,  achieves  variety by way of proposing itself lower than a number of avatars.

Ryan starts by means of contemplating, between different texts, a 1989 Cubs-Giants baseball broadcast, the truth tv convey Survivor, and the movie The Truman Show. In some of these texts, she sees a story that organizes which means with out good thing about hindsight, expecting the real-time size of machine video games. She then expands her inquiry to new media. In a dialogue protecting text-based interactive fiction resembling Spider and internet and Galatea, hypertexts comparable to Califia and Patchwork Girl, multimedia works similar to Juvenate, Web-based brief narratives, and Façade, a multimedia, AI-supported venture in interactive drama, she specializes in how narrative that means is plagued by the authoring software program, comparable to the Infocom parser, the Storyspace hypertext-producing procedure, and the courses Flash and Director. She additionally examines arguments which have been stated opposed to contemplating desktop video games similar to The Sims and EverQuest as a sort of narrative, and responds by means of outlining an method of machine video games that reconciles their resourceful  and strategic size. In doing so, Ryan distinguishes a large spectrum of narrative modes, resembling utilitarian, illustrative, indeterminate, metaphorical, participatory, emergent, and simulative.

Ultimately, Ryan stresses the trouble of reconciling narrativity with interactivity and anticipates the time whilst media will offer new how one can adventure stories. 

Marie-Laure Ryan is an self sustaining pupil and the writer of, so much lately, Narrative as digital truth: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and digital Media.