David Brooks recently asked in his NYT column whether we should think of our lives not as stories but as games (or, more precisely, as series of games). As “a liberal arts type” , writes Brooks, he favors the first option. Brooks is right that taking our lives to be stories is prevalent among people of a humanistic bent. One reason may be that such a theory helps us explain the importance of literature and other forms of narrative to our lives. If our lives are stories, then getting better at understanding narrative might help us understand ourselves. And it is part of humanistic inquiry - a central part - to understand narratives.