Stuart Halls Theory

Stuart Hall was one of the first academics to consider how audiences respond to media texts. He deeloped a theory that the meaning of a media text is negotiated between producer and consumer. He argued that there were three ways in which an audience can respond to a text:

Preferred reading is when the audiences respond to the product the way media producers want/expect them to.
When the meaning is negotiated the audience will partly agree with part of the product e.g film documentary, tv programme.
Sometimes an audience will not accept the producers representation, hall described this as oppositional reading.
The producers of early computer games were only able to produce simple graphics, so the visual representation wasn't very accurate. For example

This is the game pong it is supposed to be a representation of table tennis.
It may not look nothing like it but back then it was good.

Even so, these games makers wanted to include some sort of narrative with their games because people wanted something more advanced and started getting bored of playing the same things over and over.

They used titles and box art to suggest narrative themes and settings. 

This is the game ET that came from the movie itself.

This is the game heroes of neverwinter which has more of a narrative today and better graphics .

this approach to gameplay is a very good example of how producers and consumers negotiate their reading of narrative in media texts.