All click and no play? Game comics, comic games, and user agency

Abstract

ABSTRACT This contribution examines game-like digital comics, departing from Daniel Merlin Goodbrey’s concept of “game comics” that he discusses in his doctoral dissertation and in following articles (2017, 2020). Game comics, as the name suggests, would be interactive, playful comics, closely related to video games. In Goodbrey’s words, they are “a type of hypercomic that presents some of the key features of a game and uses some of the key features of the comic form as the basis for its gameplay” (2020, p. 45, "Game comics: Theory and design"). Firstly, the article defines comics, establishing a new taxonomy of digital comics (distinguishing between “homothetic,” “linked,” and “expanded”) and positioning game comics as belonging to digital ones, yet as much more fluid objects than Goodbrey’s. Secondly, it reframes the concept of interactivity within a novel framework, envisioning four types of user agency (narrative, interpretive, material, and social) that a semiotic text encourages or hinders. Lastly, it discusses a selection of game comics and reconsiders the relation the concept bears to that ofcomic games (Backe, 2020, "Game-comics and comic-games") – video games remediating comics’ affordances, seen as game comics’ hypothetical reverse. In interrogating the specifics of these objects and reflecting on the different types of user agency they prompt, the article concludes that the space between comics and games is fuzzier than taxonomies considering media in isolation would suggest.