A story has a beginning, a middle and an end - or does it?

I've commented before on the new literacy tasks our children need to get their heads around when engaging online. Well Saturday I was hit again with how their world is different from ours.
Jon is a very skilled cartoonist and writer and has also been exploring gaming animation. He had made a birthday card for one of his friends on Friday and the elf he had drawn on the front was the kind of good that makes a suspicious mother ask if it was traced. "No Mum - I sketched it!" You can imagine the offended tone!
Saturday morning I walked into his room while he was playing Dark Chronicles (I think) on the PS2. He was in the middle of a storyline and not happy to be interrupted. As I stopped to watch what was on the screen it hit me that the "warrior prince" interacting with his avatar was clearly the model for his birthday card drawing. Somehow that computed with some stories he has been writing recently which are like variations on a first chapter of a book. I thought he'd been just exploring options until it hit me on Saturday that in the quest games he plays there are multiple variations on the entry point and he was in fact creating a story for a gaming world, not a book world.
That is kind of a mind blowing thought really - when we as adults tend to think if stories as linear with a beginning, a middle and an end, what does that mean to how we support children's learning? What could it mean to the future of books and story as we know them. A friend and I were discussing it the next day and both believed that the magic of a good story/book will always be with us - but it made me wonder.