Glitch Horror: BEN Drowned and the Fallibility of Technology in Game Fan Fiction

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2017 DiGRA '17 - Proceedings of the 2017 DiGRA International Conference

This paper seeks to define a burgeoning genre of transmedia narratives — “glitch horror” — using a popular “creepypasta” (a work of online horror fiction) entitled BEN Drowned as a primary source. The horror of BEN Drowned is rooted in the rhetoric of glitches, those infuriating moments when the failures of technology interrupt gameplay and otherwise distort the world of a game. The emergence of the glitch horror genre and the popularity of narratives like BEN Drowned are manifestations of collective anxieties surrounding the fallibility and restrictions of digital technology; it is fiction about the fear of glitchy games, corrupted files, and bad coding. The paper explores glitch horror through the lenses of fan fiction and participatory culture, metafiction, the Freudian uncanny, the fallibility of technology, and fundamental rules of gaming and play.

 

Transforming Game Narrative through Social Media: Studying the Mass Effect Universe of Twitter

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Ryan William Gilson Zach
2014 DiGRA '13 - Proceedings of the 2013 DiGRA International Conference: DeFragging Game Studies

This paper explores the world of social media as a tool for interactive narrative in video games. From the perspective of fan fiction, this paper looks at ways games can be transformed through Twitter as a narrative tool. We perform a textual analysis on selected characters’ Twitter accounts drawn from the Mass Effect series. We show a number of findings having to do with how authors balance their character’s identities, Twitter as a narrative tool despite its unique constraints, the mutability of narrative time in this medium, and the ways authors create and navigate impossible situations created because of the conflict between their authorial intent and what occurs in the games. We argue this participatory and interactive form of narrative is a factor game designers must acknowledge and understand as social media continues to evolve and the boundary between consumer and producer deteriorates.

 

A Literary Excursion Into the Hidden (Fan) Fictional Worlds of Tetris, Starcraft, and Dreamfall

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Rambusch Jana Susi Tarja Ekman Stefan Wilhelmsson Ulf
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

In this paper, we discuss a part of participatory culture that so far has not received much attention in the academic world; it is the writing and reading of game fan fiction. The focus in this paper is on fan fiction, based on three different games that represent three different game genres: Tetris, StarCraft and Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. The aim is to advance our understanding of how players experience and understand the game environment, and promote further research interest in fan fiction based on computer games. We do this by discussing narrative elements in the above mentioned computer games, and the fan fiction that is based on them.