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.

 

“Is This Really Happening?”: Game Mechanics as Unreliable Narrator

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Roe Curie Mitchell Alex
2019 DiGRA '19 - Proceedings of the 2019 DiGRA International Conference: Game, Play and the Emerging Ludo-Mix

The unreliable narrator is a popular narrative technique employed by game designers, as seen in games such as Dear Esther and The Stanley Parable. However, much of the academic discussion of unreliable narration in video games has focused on games with an omniscient, personified narrator. Through close readings of Tales from the Borderlands Episode 1 and Doki Doki Literature Club, we examine how video games without an omniscient, personified narrator create unreliable narration. Our findings suggest that in these games the auditory, visual and interactive (gameplay) narrative modes work together to create unreliability by setting up players to doubt the meaning of their in-game actions. This draws attention to the presence of an implied player to whom the unreliable narration is directed, and heightens awareness of the “Game Narrator” through metalepsis. We propose this Game Narrator as the set of rules that govern how the three narrative modes (auditory, visual and interactive) are dependent on each other, and how they support meaning-making and the formation of the cognitive construct of the storyworld in the player’s mind.

 

Antimimetic Rereading and Defamiliarization in Save the Date

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Mitchell Alex
2018 DiGRA '18 - Proceedings of the 2018 DiGRA International Conference: The Game is the Message

In repeat experiences of story-focused games or interactive stories, players tend to expect to experience something different in each play session. At the same time, they usually expect that each play session will be self-contained, in the sense that there are no explicit, diegetic references to earlier play sessions. Through a close reading of the visual novel Save the Date, I argue that breaking this expectation of self-contained play sessions creates a sense of defamiliarization, disrupting the mimetic nature of the work at the level of the individual play session and foregrounding the process of rereading, resulting in poetic gameplay. I suggest that such antimimetic interactive stories or story-focused games render the acts of reading and rereading unfamiliar, drawing attention to the act of rereading and encouraging players to think about the process of rereading in new ways.

 

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.

 

Making the Familiar Unfamiliar: Techniques for Creating Poetic Gameplay

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Mitchell Alex
2016 DiGRA/FDG '16 - Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG

Just as writers use specific literary devices to deliberately draw attention to a poem's form, in this paper I propose that game designers can make use of the structure of gameplay to draw attention to a game's formal qualities for "poetic" effect. Starting from Shklovsky's notion of defamiliarization and Utterback's concept of the poetic interface, I draw parallels between poetic language and the techniques used in games to create what I refer to as poetic gameplay. Through a close reading of Thirty Flights of Loving, I identify three possible techniques for creating poetic gameplay: undermining the player's expectations for control, disrupting the chronological flow of time, and blurring the boundaries of the form. To demonstrate the potential use of these techniques for analysis, I discuss how these techniques appear in a range of games, suggesting that these techniques can serve as the basis for a more general set of techniques for creating poetic gameplay.