videogames

Blaseball, a fantasy baseball simulator developed by The Game Band, took 2020 by storm, quickly developing from a niche web game to an legitimate cultural phenomenon, including a whole catalogue of fan-created merchandise, more than a dozen albums of music, including a musical, and a dedicated following of players from around the world. Much of the attraction of the game comes from the passionate involvement of the fans and the openness The Game Band have shown to players making the game their own.In this paper, I demonstrate how The Game Band and players make use of the affordances of web browsers as a platform to create an inclusive space for play where each player can enjoy the game in their own way without precluding or diminishing other ways of playing Blaseball. The specific examples I examine are the use of a minimalist, text-forward approach to the game in a way that gives players licence to imagine a diverse, inclusive league of Blaseball characters; the development of "forbidden knowledge" as a way to include players with an interest in spoilers without alienating those who wish to avoid this information; and the player-led creation of a wiki that supports simultaneous-yet-mutually-exclusive descriptions of characters and events in the game, which allows the community of fans to enjoy a variety of interpretations of the minimalist events of the game without excluding any other faction of the fanbase.In using a minimalist, text-forward approach to game development, The Game Band not only created a low-cost, quick-to-iterate game by excluding the time- and labour intensive components of visual art, video, and audio elements; they also created an opportunity for fans to develop their own visions of the in-game characters and events without being limited by canonical race, gender, or sexual orientation. This seemingly-practical choice for a project from a small team is in fact pivotal to the game’s inclusiveness.Given the easy access to the game's code that web browsers offer, it was inevitable that players would explore and try to divine how the game works. While such behaviour could be seen as cheating, in Blaseball the interaction with the game’s code and data is part of the experience. In response to the grey area such interactions exist in, The Game Band and players developed the idea of "forbidden knowledge"— knowledge players had back-door access to but hadn't been made public by the game itself. I examine the concept of forbidden knowledge within the context of traditional methods of cheating, as studied by Mia Consalvo, and demonstrate how forbidden knowledge, as a social practice, is an inclusive response.Finally, I demonstrate how players make use of the mutability of web content to allow multiple visions of the same game to coexist in the form of the Blaseball wiki. This wiki loads random fan-generated player backstories every time the page refreshes so that no single vision of the game dominates all others.

(Source: Author's own abstract)

It was in Summer 2020 that Seraphine - a ‘virtual influencer’ in the mould of Brüd’s Lil Miquela – began building an audience on Twitter, Instagram and Soundcloud. Each of her posts served to flesh out her persona: that of an anxiety-prone aspiring musician with an ‘adorkably’ girly personal style and a cute pet cat. In September it emerged that Seraphine was a new playable character in e-sports giant Riot’s League of Legends (Riot 2009), a free-to-play ‘multiplayer online battle arena’ funded by the sale of sale of ‘skins’ and cosmetics items that allow players to customise the appearance of their chosen characters. While the character proved highly popular, the launch was not without controversy, with some pundits finding Riot’s bids for ‘relatability’ clumsy and their portrayal of the Seraphine’s mental health issues ‘perverse’ and ‘offensive’ – especially when set against the backdrop of a worsening pandemic (Jackson 2020). The controversy intensified when, in a post published two months later, Medium user Step-nie (2020) recounted her ‘brief relationship with a Riot employee’ and outlined her belief that the company had essentially plagiarised her online persona to create Seraphine, a character who ‘looks like me, and talks like me, and sounds like me, and draws like me’. 

The Seraphine incident highlights how shifts in the development, distribution and monetisation of digital games driven by the rise of ‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek 2017) are fostering new approaches to characterisation and storytelling - approaches informed by (and often modelled on) the ‘self-branding’ strategies (Duffy and Hund 2015) and ‘small storytelling’ practices (Georgakopoulou 2016) of young social media users. For a sense of how these approaches diverge from previous paradigms we might look to The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog 2020). Naughty Dog’s blockbuster sequel confirms that gaming has yet to shake the case of ‘cinema envy’ that Eric Zimmerman diagnosed it with almost two decades ago (2002, 125). If the game’s photorealistic visuals and its use of state-of-the-art performance capture techniques mean it often looks like a film, its approach to plotting and characterisation is similarly steeped in Hollywood conventions, and entails subjecting protagonists Ellie and Abby to a series of life-threatening trials and life-changing tests of character set in motion by a shocking inciting incident. But while the game was one of the highest-grossing releases of last year, as a story-led singleplayer console game it is also a specimen of what many consider a dying breed. Drawing on accounts of fictional characters as ‘quasi-persons’ (Frow 2014), studies of transmedia characterisation (Thon 2019; Steinberg 2012; Azuma 2009) and work on games and social media, this paper asks what Ellie, Abby and Seraphine can tell us about the functions of fictional characters in an entertainment ecosystem being reshaped by platformisation.

This thesis looks at a sample of twelve stories of electronic literature written in Spanish and focuses on the different narrative techniques that these works implement. The techniques range from simple hyperlinks to highly complex functions as in videogames. These works draw from the traditions of print literature as well as from the digital culture that has shaped this era: hypertext, algorithms, text reordering, text fragmentation, multimedia creations, and almost anything else the computer is capable of. As each work discussed here is unique, a different theoretical approach is used for each.

An interview with Stuart Moulthrop, a Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of English, at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (USA) and an early author of works of electronic literature.

“Moveable books” predate the printing press. Such experiments, including popular pop-up books of the nineteenth century, pushed against the boundaries of two-dimensional storytelling by crafting ways paper can mechanically foster motion and depth. iPad artists and game designers experiment with device-specific expressive capacities. I call moveable books designed for iPad “playable books” to invoke their ergodic filiation with videogames. In this presentation, I analyze one playable book, 80 Days (2014) by Inkle Studios, which won Time Magazine’s best game of the year and was named by The Telegraph a best novel of the year. Crossing the “border” between literature and videogames, 80 Days invites us to consider how popular modes of human/computer interaction in games shape new forms of reading in device-specific ways. I discuss how 80 Days’ gameful attributes adapt and contest Jules Verne’s 1873 novella Around the World in Eighty Days. The game gives the reader a physical experience of the original story’s chief mechanic, racing to beat the clock. Interactions with NPCs [non-player characters] in 80 Days unlock information essential to win; respect and cultural sensitivity are procedurally rewarded. This resists the original novella’s racist depiction of nonwhite “others.” My paper suggests how 80 Days‘ emergent game attributes interrupt our readerly drive to “master” a text.

(Source: http://kathiiberens.com/)

The tropes of the detective genre have been challenged, subverted, re-appropriated by authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, or Paul Auster, establishing what could be considered a new strain of postmodern detective fiction. In these stories, solving the case is not central to the story, and what the detective searches transforms or is derailed by becoming a discovery of something completely different. In some cases, the detective, along with the reader, explores an encyclopedic space in such a way that these stories have already been connected to hypertextual literature (Rosello 1994).

This paper will explore how digital games open up new territory in the genre of postmodern of detective stories. Digital games can have the player explore aspects of the narrative that may not be directly relevant to the mystery to be solved, or by creating a mystery that may be unstable and dependent on the choices of the player. In my presentation at ELO 2014, I discussed how video games have gone from trying to implement classical detective story models (Todorov 1977), encouraging the player to interpret the space and events to solve the case, to removing the challenge of all exegetic performance and letting the player carry out more trite, video game-like activities.

In further examination, I realized that the “vanishing exegesis” that I discussed then relates to postmodern literary detective fiction; both games and novels share a strong influence of cinematic noir and mystery films. While games like L.A. Noire (2011) attempt to put the player in the shoes of a traditional sleuth, some games experiment with the gap between the identity of the detective, narrative exploration, and how player’s choices affect the events of the story. The paper will focus on two games, Blade Runner (1995) and Deadly Premonition (2010).

Blade Runner takes place in the same time period as Ridley Scott’s film (1982), and provides the player with tools to perform exegetic work to solve the mystery. On the other hand, discovering who is an android and who is a human, which is part of solving the mystery, is determined randomly at the beginning of each game. Depending on the player’s attitude towards the non-player characters and their interpretation of whether the protagonist is an android or not, the game will have different resolutions.

In contrast, Deadly Premonition is a detective game with supernatural undertones, which also includes traditional detective work to solve a murder case. Heavily influenced by the show Twin Peaks, the game also lets the player digress and abandon detective work to explore the town where the play is set, from hanging out with the inhabitants to going fishing. The player character seems to address the player by the name of “Zack”, establishing the detective as a schizophrenic personality, whose perception of reality is unreliable. In both examples, the mystery, its resolution, and the identity of the detective are questioned and subverted as the player works on unraveling the mystery, bringing a rich interactive parallel with postmodern literary fiction.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

In 1962, MIT scientist Steve Russell presented one of the first videogames in history: Spacewar! in which two starships maneuvered around a star and tried to destroy each other. A year earlier, Raymond Queneau had published Cent mille milliards de poèmes, a potential literature book consisting of ten sonnets printed onto cards, with each line written on a separate strip, offering readers 100 trillions of possible combinations.

At first glance, the connection between these two milestones from worlds as different as literature and computer science would seem to be remote, but they are actually the start of a convergence of experiences and interests that have radically changed the way we read and write stories.

The sixties marked the start of a series of experiments in both literature and computing that mutally influenced each other and challenged the narrative, physical and conceptual boundaries of literature. This text looks at some of these connections.

(Source: Author's Introduction)

The Meaning of Video Games takes a textual studies approach to an increasingly important form of expression in today’s culture. It begins by assuming that video games are meaningful–not just as sociological or economic or cultural evidence, but in their own right, as cultural expressions worthy of scholarly attention. In this way, this book makes a contribution to the study of video games, but it also aims to enrich textual studies. Early video game studies scholars were quick to point out that a game should never be reduced to merely its "story" or narrative content and they rightly insist on the importance of studying games as games. But here Steven E. Jones demonstrates that textual studies–which grows historically out of ancient questions of textual recension, multiple versions, production, reproduction, and reception–can fruitfully be applied to the study of video games. Citing specific examples such as Myst and Lost, Katamari Damacy, Halo, Façade, Nintendo’s Wii, and Will Wright’s Spore, the book explores the ways in which textual studies concepts–authorial intention, textual variability and performance, the paratext, publishing history and the social text–can shed light on video games as more than formal systems. It treats video games as cultural forms of expression that are received as they are played, out in the world, where their meanings get made. (Source: Routledge)