Abstract

This critique of the overlooked Lucasfilm adventure game focuses on the techniques, by which the distance between the avatar and the player is bridged, and the way the game deals with its gameness in its fiction.The critique is broken into three sections: the analysis of the fiction, investigation of the interface and, finally, the whole narrative structure.Conclusion is made that the uniqueness and "magic" often mentioned by the game's fans comes about thanks to a series of parallels between the player's and the avatar's situation.

Highlights

  • The past few years in videogame history have been ripe with innovative controllers

  • There is a different, overlooked and scattered, strand of game design, that relies on traditional controllers and finds another way of conjuring an illusion of presence and being in the game world

  • This game was made with the clear intention to produce an independent, intimate, lyrical work of art, a transparent, quiet fable with ether-like gameplay and music as the driving force of the game. [...] Loom is the Buddhist of adventure games: it listens to the silence, it understands the beauty of a moment, and it doesn't need many words to express the very essence of life. [...] Each encounter is memorable, each character is unique, and sometimes you feel the game carries you somewhere through a thin stream of air, up into the sky. [...] To call it wonderful wouldn't be enough to describe its sublime beauty6. (Roschin 2003, italics added)

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Summary

Introduction

The past few years in videogame history have been ripe with innovative controllers. The Guitar Hero series, the Nintendo Wii, and to a certain extent the Nintendo DS, have popularized what we could call mimetic interfaces, that allow for a greater degree of correspondence between the player's real-world actions and the avatar’s in-game response, offering a sense of immediacy. I will show that this immediacy is present on many different levels, from the many parallels between the player and the main character's situation to the character's relationship to his environment and the very metaphysics of the game's fictional world. One of them leaves behind a distaff8, which will become the musical instrument Bobbin will play and which he will use to interact with the world.

Results
Conclusion
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