Storygameness: Understanding Repeat Experience and the Desire for Closure in Storygames

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Mitchell Alex Kway Liting Lee Brandon Junhui
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

Repeat play is often seen as key to the experience of interactive stories such as storygames. This is arguably quite different from repeat experience of non-interactive stories. While work has been done to investigate motivations for repeat experiences of storygames, the impact of the relationship between the narrative and the playable system on repeat experience is underexplored. In this paper we examine this question through close readings of two storygames that encourage repeat play: Bandersnatch and Cultist Simulator. Observations suggest that as players experience a storygame, they shift focus between the narrative and the playable system. This shift impacts both the type of closure experienced and the desire to replay, and suggests the degree to which the player treats a work as a storygame, or its storygameness, is not an inherent property of the work, but instead is an experiential property that can change over the course of a traversal.

 

Making it Unfamiliar in the “Right” Way: An Empirical Study of Poetic Gameplay

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Mitchell Alex Sim Yuin Theng Kway Liting
2017 DiGRA '17 - Proceedings of the 2017 DiGRA International Conference

There has been much discussion of whether games can be considered art. Regardless of the outcome of these discussions, some games stand out as clearly different in a way that can be considered “poetic”. Much work has been done to discuss how these games achieve their effects, and how they differ from mainstream games. There have not, however, been any empirical studies of how players respond to the techniques used in these games, and whether these techniques result in poetic gameplay. This paper describes an empirical study of poetic gameplay in three games: The Graveyard, Thirty Flights of Loving, and The Stanley Parable. Using retrospective protocol analysis and semi-structured interviews with 21 participants, we observed that although these games did encourage participants to reflect upon issues beyond the immediate game experience, this tended to happen when the gameplay was made unfamiliar in ways that directly supported the emerging meaning of the game.