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


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


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.

 

Meaning Making Through Constraint: Modernist Poetics and Game Design Analysis


Asad Miriam
2011 DiGRA '11 - Proceedings of the 2011 DiGRA International Conference: Think Design Play

The process of reading a modernist poem is just as much a process of deconstructing it: the language is designed to make meaning through inefficient means. The reader must decode the text. The process of reading is not unlike the process of playing. I compare masocore games with the poetics of William Carlos Williams to discuss how constraints can be meaningful through the affordances of each medium.