digital games

Even before worldwide quarantines added impetus, material gaming had already become increasingly enacted in virtual spaces. Rather than virtual play replacing the material, as some speculated in the early days of videogames, material play has become increasingly entangled with virtuality. These increasingly complementary modes of play offer a rich space for exploring the multifaceted embodied and conceptual activity of play, the blending of material and virtual that in many ways defines games.The three panelists encompass a wide range of perspectives, including the perspective of a game maker translating material play into the digital realm, that of a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) scholar who researched how players interact differently with the Catan boardgame and its digital implementations, and that of a theorist reflecting on how virtual spaces remediate material affects. Together, these diverse perspectives aim to explore the paradoxical yet generative spaces where materiality and virtuality intersect in gaming.The theoretical approach looks at analog games as capable of producing the specific circumstances that foreground the affective relationships between the players and the other pieces of the assemblage. Because of the procedural nature that necessitates specific types of interactions between parts of the play assemblage, analog games amplify the social interactions between players and differently produce affective orientations as a consequence of their systems. Then examines the ways that these games are remediated and adapted to digital platforms highlighting the things that are lost or changed in the move to digital, uncovering the types of experiences that are important for each type of adaptation.

The HCI approach presents Association Mapping (AM) in HCI; called so because the formation of a network is due to objects making associations in context. By recording the associations that form a network, it is possible to understand what objects are most central within that network. . This research contributes to the next paradigm of HCI by providing a new tool to understand use that is fragmented, distributed, and invisible. AM incorporates association as its measurement. This results in passive measures of attention, hybridity, and influence in network formation of any kind. It does this by making the systemic nature of use visible and capable of evaluation at any level.And finally the design approach applies design strategies for incorporating three main types of play: Screenplay, Gameplay, and Roleplay, seeking to answer questions about how to bridge the narrative and performance aspects of digital and analog play. This is particularly applicable to classic games that are associated with transmedia narratives and characters, such as the Clue board game, where there are established cinematic traditions and character roles.During the COVID-19 pandemic, board games have become a useful medium for examining our changing relationship with physical and digital interaction. In addition to presenting our own findings, this panel also offers several methodologies for furthering research into the intersections of the analog, digital, physical, and virtual.

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)