REBORN: engaging players with reminiscing and nostalgia via interactive text-based barratives

Abstract

Video games are designed to engage gamers with multiple experiences, including competitiveness, social interactions, and exploration. While engaged in gaming, users (a.k.a. players) can also engage in a plethora of varied and different emotional experiences. The level of emotional engagement and the kind of emotion evoked during gameplay is often (but not exclusively) contingent on the game genre, how challenging the game is for players, and the game narrative/storyline. This thesis is concerned with the latter. In narrative-based games, players' emotions are often engaged through cutscenes, dialogue with non-playable characters (NPCs), and decision-making tasks that can "shake" players and even make them reconsider their own moral stand. This thesis focuses on the feeling of nostalgia and how this particular feeling can be enhanced by engaging with narrative-based games. Particularly, I engage players with a text-based narrative game called REBORN, which is stripped down of all visual and audio elements; these types of games are often referred to as interactive text narrative games. This thesis also supports further understanding of nostalgia effects through emotional responses and player experience. --Author's abstract