Evan Pavell is a senior English major completing a research thesis for the English Departmental Honors Program. His lifelong passion for playing and immersing himself in video game stories, and his development as an author of fiction, have motivated him to focus and direct his studies to the nature and structure of storytelling in literary, cultural, and popular texts. His honors thesis project combines these two interests, applying structural narrative theory to the video game form. Using Spec Ops: The Line, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind as cases, he explores a new way of understanding the role that the video game player occupies in telling these stories; different from a novel’s reader or a film’s viewer, the video game’s player has an active, creative responsibility for the story’s progress and development – but to what extent, and how do we describe this in a narrative structure? He hopes this project will contribute to the rapidly growing field of video games studies and, years down the line, he hopes to pursue an MFA in creative writing – because his studies of storytelling stem from the desire to tell stories of his own.