A few salient quotations from the beginning of Iser’s essay, “Interaction between Text and Reader”:

“Central to the reading of every literary work is the interaction between its structure and its recipient.” “We may conclude that the literary work has two poles, which we might call the artistic and the aesthetic: the artistic pole is the author’s text, and the aesthetic is the realization accomplished by the reader. In view of this polarity, it is clear that the work itself cannot be identical with the text or with its actualization but must be situated somewhere between the two.”

Something that strikes me, also, is that the things gamers as a group take away from games that heavily rely on story is how they completed each plot point. That is, we all see the same story, but we usually enjoy that privately. What we talk about together is *how* we did it. I might have used the sniper rifle, while you might have preferred the shotgun — so on. I think if a typical plot-narrative is present, to look at the video game as a whole, we do have to examine both narratives together. Even one of my hobby horses — storytelling in video games — relies on the way in which the game makes the story happen for the individual player. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is usually one of my examples, as it has a great insanity system in a first-person game. I avoid incidental things that add to my sanity, while I have friends who go out of their way to make the character as crazy as possible, to get more and more insanity effects.