Unfamiliar Feminine Spaces in Gone Home’s Environmental Storytelling

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Bednorz Magdalena
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

Spatiality of digital environments, including video games, is not only one of the defining aspects of the medium (Murray 2001), but also an aspect through which medium-specific types of narratives can be communicated to the audience. It allows for environmental (or diegetic) storytelling – a narrative method in which the story originates from exploration (Carson 2000; Peirce 2007; Smith and Worch 2010), in which the player traverses the game space and discovers pieces of information in the form of artifacts and elements of the environment. Among the games which broadly employ this type of storytelling is The Fullbright Company’s first-person adventure exploration game Gone Home (2013). In the game, the player assumes the role of Katie, who returns home after a year abroad only to find her family house deserted. By spatial exploration focused mainly on searching the house, the player, through Katie, can solve the mystery and discover the story of coming of age, discovering one’s sexuality, and coping with the aftermath. Doing so requires interacting with objects placed within the house—they seem to work as a conduit of the narrative, not only informing of the recent events by themselves (e.g. notes, pictures), but also occasionally triggering additional audio-narration.

 

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors: Values of Digital Objects in FarmVille2

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Gruning Jane
2014 DiGRA '13 - Proceedings of the 2013 DiGRA International Conference: DeFragging Game Studies

This paper describes the findings of a textual and structural analysis of the free-to-play social networking game FarmVille 2 (FV2) with a focus on the values (social, economic, etc.) available to players for digital objects within the game. FV2 is purportedly a social game, which might suggest that findings regarding the social values of objects from the study of material culture could play out in the game, as they have been shown to do in other games. However, the author’s experience suggested that people who were not playing within an already existing network of friends might not show the kinds of digital virtual consumption patterns that previous research has found in social gaming. Instead, this paper suggests the possibility that a strong community may be necessary for the attribution of symbolic value to virtual goods, and that FV2 as played on alternate Facebook accounts may provide an example of a negative case for this basic tenet of the study of material culture.

 

Of discs, boxes and cartridges: the material life of digital games

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Toivonen Saara Sotamaa Olli
2011 DiGRA '11 - Proceedings of the 2011 DiGRA International Conference: Think Design Play

So far the field of game studies has mostly bypassed the everyday meanings attached to the material manifestations of digital games. Based on qualitative survey data, this article examines what kind of personal and collective values are attached to the physical copies of games, including the storage medium and packaging. The results show how materiality resonates with the reliability and unambiguity of ownership. Furthermore, games as physical objects can have a key role in the project of creating a home, receiving their meaning as part of a wider technological and popular cultural meaning structure. Finally, collecting associates games with more general issues of identity, sociability and history. Through storing and organising games and having them on display, gamers position themselves as part of game culture, gather subcultural capital and ensure the possibility for nostalgia.

 

Domesticating Play, Designing Everyday Life: The Practice and Performance of Family Gender, and Gaming

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Enevold Jessica
2012 DiGRA Nordic '12: Proceedings of 2012 International DiGRA Nordic Conference

Playing digital games is now a common everyday practice in many homes. This paper deals with the constitution of such practices by taking a closer look at the material objects essential to play and their role in the “design of everyday life” (Shove et al 2007). It uses ethnographic method and anthropological practice theory to attend to the domestic spaces of leisure and play, the home environments, in which the large part of today’s practices of playing digital games takes place. It focuses on the stagings of material, not virtual, artifacts of gaming: screens, consoles, hand-held-devices essential to play and their locations and movements around the home. It demonstrates how everyday practices, seemingly mundane scenographies and choreographies, practically, aesthetically and technologically determined, order everyday space-time and artifacts, domesticate play and condition performances of family, gender and gaming. In the process, a history of the domestication of play unfolds.