crime

It is well known that any formulaic genre has a predictable story and a conventional meaning, nevertheless what makes each story unique is the ethos, that is to say the relationship between characters and environment. When the environment is digital, new media renegotiate traditional formulaic features, as is the case with detective stories and crime fiction in e-literature. The paper illustrates how digital ontology shapes the relationship between the ethos and the law. Indeed digital technology determines not only the criminal deed and the method of investigation, but it also highlights how the perception of the crime and the resultant moral or legal responsibility are more and more undetermined in social interaction. For Christie’s inter-war fiction or in American hard-boiled literature, the issue of social order was crucial, but contemporary aporia calls into question the happy ending of the investigation. We can anticipate that in electronic crime fiction the final social order and the need for penalty measures are not part of the storytelling. A brief overview of electronic detective stories will be given, even if particular attention will be paid on Elliot Holt's #TwitterFiction Story Was it a suicide? A homicide? Or an accident? Read and decide...1. In the latter, Miranda, the victim, is the product of digital media communication, and as any other digital object she is ontologically abstract. She simply exists in the relationship between digital subjectivity (communicated via social media by the other characters of the story) and a hyper-real objectivity made of binary code. Technically speaking she is a sequence of 0 and 1 or, as John Searle would say, she is syntax. Holt creates a character who is exiled from the objectivist system, although she exists in a social network for the followers and the readers. Somehow she is locked into some tweets, but beyond the real world. How can a police investigation cope with this? Now social media communication seems to undermine or dispossess reality of the concepts of “reference” and “referent”. The risk to overlap what is inside or outside the digital world, is truly existing, as the murder committed in Cleveland in 2017 to be posted on Facebook suggests. If in the past, a writer gave the reader a criminal case to solve within the rules of law, nowadays a digital writer gives his readers an experience. Actually, readers are no longer asked to share the detective's acumen and insight, but to participate to the criminal case. Today the anticanonical digital detective fiction does not merely tell stories of crimes and justice, but they put on stage how the Law does no longer play its role in society. Nowadays law tries to codify online and offline behaviours, rights and duties, but the more the relationship between these two realities are undefined the harder it is for the law to be effective and incisive in its goal. A more general difference between good and evil seems to be enough for the public of eliterature. Considerations about the Ethics Guidelines For Trustworthy AI, released by the the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group On Artificial Intelligence, will be taken into consideration.

Literary detective stories have some game-like elements, as they pose an implicit challenge for the reader to solve the crime before they read the solution (Suits, 1985). This paper will examine early detective games to argue that interactive detective investigations are essentially linked to textual exploration and exegesis; as text becomes de-emphasized, the detective work also takes a secondary role.

According to Todorov’s typology of detective fiction (Todorov, 2000), detective games present two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation. The first type of detective fiction, the whodunit, emphasizes the story of the crime, which the detective reconstructs, on the other hand, the thriller emphasizes the story of the investigation, by which the detective gets embroiled into the crime that he is solving.

Detective stories found their digital counterparts early in the 1980s, in the form of early adventure games, which will be the focus of this paper. Early detective games are a pure whodunit, where reconstructing the story of the crime becomes is the challenge, while the story of the investigation is the player trying to figure out the case. These early games provide the player with a variety of actions and information sources the player can obtain information from. In contrast, later games after 1990 to the present are closer to a thriller, where crime is an excuse for the player to get involved into a series of adventures and challenges, rather than investigate.

This contrast also reveals that early detective games focused on investigative work more than later digital game thrillers, which emphasize action and adventure. Early digital whodunits present an unusual variety of actions to obtain information, all in textual form: descriptions of objects, dialogue with witnesses, documental evidence. The platforms that these early games were developed for did not allow for sophisticated graphics, so the key information was written, and the game play consists of exploring, unveiling, and interpreting texts. The paper will examine these resources, and how they encourage exegetic work. With the advent of better graphics in later computer platforms, detective games seem to have steadily simplified the mechanics to perform the work of a detective, mostly substituting exegesis as gameplay with environmental puzzles or skill-based challenges, thus sidelining the textual aspects of detective stories.

The discussion will focus on a set of 1980s digital games selected from different countries (US, Japan, Australia and UK), which were originally developed for different platforms (Apple ][, NES, Spectrum, Commodore 64). The games selected are Deadline (Infocom, 1982), Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken (ポートピア連続殺人事件, The Portopia Serial Murder Case) (Enix, 1983), Sherlock (Melbourne House, 1984), and The Detective (Argus Press Software, 1986). For contrast, these will be examined alongside later detective games for later technologies, such as the Gabriel Knight series (Sierra On-Line, 1993-1999), Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream, 2010), and L.A. Noire (Team Bondi, 2011).

(Source: Author's Description)