Edward Wolf’s work explores the connections between literary traditions and interactive narrative, with particular interests in heroic epic, fantasy literature, and Western role-playing games.
His research draws on Old Norse and Old English heroic literature, the development of the fantasy novel, and the ways in which older narrative forms continue to shape contemporary storytelling. He is especially interested in the relationship between narrative, time, space, world-building, and the reader or player’s experience of fictional worlds.
A central strand of his work considers how stories move across different media. Literary texts and video games create very different kinds of narrative experience, yet they often share structures, motifs, characters, quests, imagined histories, and ways of constructing coherent fictional worlds. His research examines both these continuities and the important differences between reading a narrative and participating in one.
His current work focuses particularly on the Western role-playing game and its relationship with heroic epic and fantasy literature. It considers questions of immersion, presence, choice, character, landscape, temporality, and the ways in which players encounter and help shape narrative worlds.
Across these areas, his broader interest lies in the enduring human impulse to create, inhabit, and reinterpret stories.
