The role of narrative in childhood has been the subject of intense academic interest over the last few decades. Most notably, the psychologist Katherine Nelson has argued that children process the world through “scripts”—they order their mess of experience into a series of mini-narratives: First you do this, then this, then that. They lose the details, but they keep the form, and seem to instinctively organize their lives into a sort of Russian doll of stories. (You can see this, through the musings of a single child, in the fascinating Narratives From the Crib.)
(via Eugene Ionesco and other absurdist children’s authors. – Slate Magazine)
It is a happy revelation to me that there is some theory already in place for what I have been calling “micro-narratives” as I have explored ideas about sense-making in the creation of computer games by novices, both young and old. I am aware, of course, of how intensely semiotic this form of cognition theory is. I am open to the idea that cognition can be extra-linguistic. I just don’t have the words to describe that 😉