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.

 

Antimimetic Rereading and Defamiliarization in Save the Date


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.