The Role of Place as Medium in the Transmedial Ecology of Play

The theme park experience: Kingdom Hearts and the franchise

Video Game Détournement: Playing Across Media

Taking as a starting point the French concept of “artistic détournement” and its application in the context of video games, this paper aims to study creative remix practices that use video games as materials or as matrices to produce derivative works. Precisely, the research examines a diversified range of productions whose common feature is to be created from video games (mods, machinimas, let’s play videos…) in order to question the relationships between the notions of détournement and play. Where is the boundary between these two activities? How to define and categorize the various forms of détournements in the specific context of the video game culture? Can these remix practices that go beyond the frame of the game and extend themselves to other media be described as “playful”? By crossing rhetoric and theories of play, this paper will try to answer these questions.

“More Interaction, More Story, More Lore”: Motivations Related to Game-centric Transmedia

Transmedia research has in the past been mainly interested in defining transmedia and examining transmedia franchises that have their starting point in movies and TV-series. However, there are multiple transmedia constellations that have a game as their starting point and this paper concentrates on two of those, Defiance (Trion Worlds, 2013) and Quantum Break (Remedy Entertainment, 2016). The survey data from these two examples was analyzed by using constructivist grounded theory-informed approach in order to find out what motivates audiences to consume or avoid game-centric transmedia. Ten categories related to consuming game-centric transmedia and five categories related to avoiding it emerged from the data. The motivations to consume game-centric transmedia had a strong focus on narrative aspects. The results differ from earlier transmedia audience studies and suggest the need for more game-centric transmedia audience studies, where the core text is a game instead of a television show.

Markers of Subjective Perception in Larp

Based on J.-N. Thon's (2016) framework for analysing representations of character's subjective perception in film, video games and comic books, this paper studies representations of subjectivity in live-action role-playing. This is a direct continuation of two previous papers, one positioning larp as a narrative medium in the context of transmedia narratology, the other researching storyworld representation / interpretation by larp participants. The hereby presented text focuses on markers of subjectivity, their three types (narratorial, content, and representational) defined by Thon and the fourth (metasymbolic) by myself. The discussion is organised in three parts, corresponding with Thon's types of subjectivity: (quasi-)perceptual point of view, (quasi-)perceptual overlay, and internal worlds. The analysis confirms Thon's observations about the transmediality of some of the markers (e.g. the use of narratorial markers in larp is very similar to their use in (audio)visual media), and reveals the larp-specific nature and/or larp-specific usage of other markers.

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

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.

Narrative Friction in Alternate Reality Games: Design Insights from Conspiracy For Good

Alternate Reality Games (ARG) tend to have story-driven game structures. Hence, it is useful to investigate how player activities interact with the often pre-scripted storyline in this genre. In this article, we report on a study of a particular ARG production, Conspiracy For Good (CFG), which was at the same time emphasising the role of strong storytelling, and active on-site participation by players. We uncover multiple levels of friction between the story content and the mode of play of live participants, but also between live and online participation. Based on the observations from the production, we present design recommendations for future productions with similar goals.

Waiting for Something to Happen: Narratives, Interactivity and Agency and the Video Game Cut-scene

Since the appearance in 1978 of Adventure on the Atari 2600, the cut-scene (alternatively cutscene or cut scene) has been a key component to many video games. Often, the cut-scene gives narrative shape to the game experience, moving the player along through a series of events culminating in the story's end. Cybertheorists such as Hayles, Murray and Frasca have explored the ways in which digital interactive media and the video game introduce new paradigms of narrative and storytelling, as well new conceptions of interactivity and agency. However, in many ways the inclusion of cut-scenes raises many of the problems concerning the theoretical structures with which to investigate video games. Since cut-scenes often follow cinematic codes of representation, current theory often renders the cut-scene as passive and non-interactive, as opposed to the interactive nature of gameplay. Yet as film theory has shown, especially in the effects of suturing and such, cinema offers a kind of psychic interactivity that blurs the hard boundary often drawn between cinema and gameplay. The cut-scene then becomes the locus of the tension in video games between cinematic representation and gameplay, and subsequently, an investigation of the cut-scene and its role in the video game can offer substantial insight into the nature of agency and interactivity within the video game. Using the release of Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 and Ubisoft's Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie, both of which challenge the traditional definitions and uses of the cutscene, this paper will study the different ways in which the cut-scene operates within the video game. It will not only discuss current conceptions of agency and interactivity within the video game, but also offer an transmedia framework, after the work of Marsha Kinder, with which to explore the relationship between narrative and gameplay, cinema and simulation in the video game.