Video Game Narrative Research Articles

Transculturation in Latin American Video Game Production: Between Regionalism and Cosmopolitanism

This research explores the manifestation of transculturation, a literary paradigm designed to situate Latin American production in the context of globalization, in video game production, evaluating its applicability to the study of cultural representation. Embracing a documentary research and content analysis methodology, the study analyzes 29 video games from nine Latin American countries, classifying them as “regionalist” or “cosmopolitan” based on settings, themes, audiovisual elements, and intertextual references. The regionalist category exhibits a preference for realism, natural settings, representation of myths, and an emphasis on cultural preservation. Conversely, the cosmopolitan category favors the fantastic, urban settings, reinterpretation of myths, and an emphasis on cultural exchange. By scrutinizing video games through the lens of transculturation, the study revalidates this theory as a relevant paradigm for understanding cultural representation in the digital age, offering new insights into the interplay between local and global influences in Latin American video game narratives.

The Ascendancy of Video Games: Can They Eclipse Literary Works?

This article investigates the factors contributing to the rise of video games and their potential to surpass literature in narrative expression. By examining extensive research on the intersection of video games and literature, the study dissects their complex interrelationships, mutual impacts, and shared evolution. Video game narratives, often inspired by literary predecessors, have become increasingly complex and engaging, drawing on literary techniques and non-linear storytelling methods from postmodernism and metafiction. These narratives challenge players to actively construct meaning, enhancing emotional resonance through character development, evocative prose, and carefully crafted dialogue. Technological advancements have played a crucial role in the evolution and rising popularity of video games, offering immersive, interactive experiences that empower players to shape the narrative and storyline, contrasting with literature, which relies on the reader's imagination and interpretation. The future of storytelling is likely to be shaped by the ongoing interplay between video games and literature. The integration of literary techniques and interactive elements across these mediums will continue to evolve, resulting in innovative hybrid entertainment forms that leverage the strengths of both literature and video games. This dynamic interaction ensures a diverse and vibrant future for storytelling, reflecting the multidimensionality of human creativity and imagination. As video games continue to incorporate more sophisticated literary techniques and storytelling methods, they become more capable of delivering rich, nuanced narratives that rival those found in traditional literature. This evolution opens up new possibilities for hybrid forms of storytelling that combine the best elements of both video games and literature. By embracing these hybrid forms, creators can push the boundaries of narrative expression and create new, immersive experiences that engage audiences in ways previously unimaginable. The article concludes that the future of storytelling lies in the continued convergence of video games and literature, promising a diverse and dynamic landscape that celebrates human creativity and imagination in all its forms.

Formalism and Power of Language: Unravelling the Narratology of Final Fantasy XVI

Using the framework of formalist analysis, this study examines how language serves as a source of power in shaping the narrative depth, character development, and thematic exploration of Final Fantasy XVI. This research involves analyzing various types of language, from dialogue and narration to symbolism, metaphor, and simile. The research methodology employed is qualitative analysis, allowing for an in-depth examination of the linguistic complexities present in the game through textual analysis and content analysis. By thematically dissecting language and applying techniques from formalist linguistics, such as Deixis Analysis, the study aims to determine how game creators purposefully use linguistic techniques to construct emotional connotations and expressive effects. Additionally, it explores how witty dialogues between characters contribute to the development of story-related themes. This study reveals how the linguistic fabric of Final Fantasy XVI functions as an effective tool in crafting an engaging and powerful story. It draws players deeper into the game's world and evokes their sympathies for the various forces at play. Furthermore, the research highlights the intentional use of linguistic devices to enhance narrative immersion and emotional impact, showcasing the intricate interplay between language and storytelling in video games. Through this analysis, the study underscores the significance of linguistic elements in video game narratives, providing insights into how language can be manipulated to create compelling and immersive experiences for players.

The Replacement of the Mentor/Educator Archetype With the Pseudo-Father Figure and in the Video Game Narrative

The Replacement of the Mentor/Educator Archetype With the Pseudo-Father Figure and in the Video Game Narrative

Ramifications of Digital Technology - A Critical Study of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch

Mankind is the only species to be gifted with the power of reasoning. Our quest to comprehend life has always been on the move. There was a time when we were completely governed by the laws of nature. However, through breakthroughs in science and technology, man has been able to evolve and exercise control. We now live in an era where our lives are governed by digital technology. Literature, cinema, and other art forms are the bases on which this is built. As movie lovers there have been times where we wished the movies had alternate endings. This stems from our own thoughts of living vicariously through the main characters. This is being facilitated by Interactive Digital Narrative in video games and movies. To understand and analyse this, the present paper takes Black Mirror: Bandersnatch to study the same. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is an interactive movie that gives us several choices as we become the protagonist and attempt to change the fate of the protagonist in the story. Does digital technology help or harm our core values? Can art forms withstand the test of time, even in this digital era? This paper comprehends to find answers to the above questions.

Migration and interactive narrative in video games: scale, ethics, and experience

ABSTRACT A number of contemporary video games (and particularly independently developed or ‘indie’ games) explore migration in ways that are designed to elicit productive discomfort in Western audiences. In this article, I build on a combination of games research, narrative theory, and migration studies to examine how these games enrich and complicate the cultural representation of migration. My focus is on how different scales of migration converge in game experiences (and in the narratives bound up with those experiences), immersing the player in moral dilemmas that have no clear solution or ideal outcome. I study four indie games that deploy this conceptual and emotional dynamic within different genres: Papers, Please (2013), Bury Me, My Love (2017), Frostpunk (2018), and Where the Water Tastes Like Wine (2018). By putting the player in touch with a variety of fictional migrants, these games walk a fine line between empathy for individual migrants and understanding of the large-scale factors that shape the lived experience of migration and the discourse surrounding it. Games thus mirror the real-world complexity of migration but also afford opportunities for more critical, or distanced, reflection than is possible in engaging with, for example, factual representation in the media.

Трансформация феномена видеоигр: от гедонистического к актуальному социокультурному нарративу

The work is focused on the transformation of video games in the socio-cultural space of modernity. It is shown that over the more than 60-year history of the existence of video games, in their socio-cultural purpose, they have gone from being a means of exclusively entertaining functionality to reflecting significant narratives of modern culture. The authors offer and substantiate an original periodization of this transformation process. A conventional boundary in the evolution of video games is shown by the set of factors/events of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when, according to the authors, video games, preserving their hedonistic orientation, began to overcome exclusively entertainment purpose, as from this moment actual socio-cultural narratives begin to be actively included in the video-game narrative. The entire set of identified factors/events contributing to this transformation is divided into two groups - technological (internal) and sociocultural (external). The second part of the paper analyzes specific examples of socio-cultural practices of modernity, confirming that video-game reality has already gone beyond the scope of entertainment functionality and, by broadcasting an actual socio-cultural narrative, contributes to the transformation of the modernity discourse in the perception of the average person.

Eksplikaciya koncepta «holodnaya vojna» v videoigrovyh kibertekstah: osobennosti mediagrammatiki i ideologizaciya istorii

The article analyses historical video games whose narratives are confined to the “Cold War” thematic frame. Video games are treated as original cyber texts of modern screen culture which shape the current discourse of popular history. Emphasis is laid on both the ideological content of video game narratives and features of the media language in which they are publicly explicated.

Sensitive Memories of War and the Perception of History in Video Game Narratives

RESUMO O presente artigo analisa a apropriação de fatos históricos do game The Valiant Hearts, sobre a Primeira Guerra Mundial (1914-1918). Esse game rompe com o padrão mainstream e aborda o tema da guerra pelo viés monumental e laudatório, e conta com narrativas da sobrevivência de civis em tempo de guerra. A valorização de narrativas críticas às guerras e foco na vivência civil compõem a tônica em projetos de pesquisa na área das humanidades digitais, como base conceitual em projetos no campo do patrimônio e museus.

GENDER DISCRIMINATION IN DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS GAME NARRATIVE

This article explores the narrative in Dragon Age: Origins, a video game released in 2009 that was developed by BioWare and published by Electronic Arts. This research aims to show how this game’s narrative can be experienced both by passively watching and actively involving the player’s input through the video game narrative forms, according to Sebastian Domsch, while showing gender issues through them. This research uses qualitative analysis to explain the video game narrative. The result is that Dragon Age: Origins shows that this game can be experienced both passively and actively through the video game narrative forms, which are passive and active nodal forms. It also shows discrimination towards women in its narrative with the women treated mainly as a victim and the sexual violence against them being used as a way to bring drama to the game’s narrative.

Dramatic agency und moralische Dilemmata

It is a relatively new idea to include video game narratives in German lessons. The following article argues that this genuin digital media offers a specific potential for learning with literature. Because of dramatic agency the players can influence the story and experience kaleidoscopic storytelling. It is to be assumed that especially immersion, involvement and engagement are intensified. The focus is on finding identity and moral development and the example Detroit: Become Human (2018/19). The genre of the video game narrative is science fiction with the city Detroit in 2038 as the setting. Androids and AI are part of every day life and raise the question what it really means to be human.

Video Games, Art-Making, and Digital Commemorative Narratives

Digital sites have become increasingly popular places where bereaved individuals choose to enact grief and memorialise the deceased. Various online sites, including social media and video gaming sites, are frequently revisited by bereaved individuals, not only as an act of remembrance but also as a way of storytelling, given that certain representations of the deceased continue to live on in these digital/virtual realms. Considering this active turning and returning to virtual environments to enact mourning and to digitally perform multilayered narratives of loss—specifically in video games—I ask what the implications are for art- and image-making. Pilgrimage is an important and popularly used metaphor or trope in video game narratives, especially in role-playing games. In this article I surmise that the experience of immersion into video game narratives as a ritual of mourning allows individuals to experience greater agency by undergoing a video game pilgrimage. Moreover, I argue that related engagements and interactions with works of art informed by such imaginary worlds may shed more light on the “art” of mourning in general.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Video Game Narratives: Pandemic Themes in Covid Times

This article explores the relationship between Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and its influence on video game narratives. Video game sales have increased significantly since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. The influence of Stoker’s Dracula and the narratives of vampire and pandemic video games is important, since some popular games are explicitly centred around pandemics and vampires, and are being played during the Covid-19 pandemic. The article explores the historical connection between epidemics and the vampire myth, and how that influenced the narrative of Dracula, especially the connection between the influence of cholera and his upbringing in Ireland. It then examines how the narrative has been influential in video game narratives. Finally, the article touches on how video games with pandemic themes may be used by a player to find a sense of control, explore difficult narratives in a structured environment, and explore various points of view and catharsis.

Of Castration Anxiety and Hypersexualized Female Bodies: A Critical Assessment of the Objectifying Gaze in Batman: Arkham Video Game Series

This article builds upon Laura Mulvey’s idea of the Male Gaze to conduct a feminist reading of the video game series Batman: Arkham (2009-2015). It does so by using Bechdel Test to analyze the depiction of the major female characters appearing in the series. The article investigates why portrayal of the women characters in video games is always problematic and how Batman: Arkham franchise becomes yet another transmedia text that fails in showing its female characters accurately. The textual analysis of the games confirms that the video game industry protects and perpetuates male privilege through the hypersexualization and objectification of female characters. As a result, the study further identifies a noticeable lack of compelling female characters in the video game series. Thus, the investigation calls for the necessity of a neutral and unbiased counter gaze for the legitimate portrayal of the women characters in the video game narratives as well as proper gender representation in the fast-growing game industry.

Digging the Digital: Beat Modalities and the Representation of the Beats in Video Games

Ever since setting their foot on the social and cultural landscapes of the post-World War II realities, the Beats have been both the subject of and subject to pop-cultural representations and appropriations. While figurations of Beat sensibility in film, television, press and popular music have been well recognized and analyzed, an area which remains uninvestigated for Beat influences, perhaps due to its relatively short pop-cultural presence, is the one of video games. Recent years, which have marked the release of titles such as Fallout 4 (Bethesda Game Studios, 2015) and Life Is Strange (Square Enix, 2015), attest to a certain amount of interest invested in Beat mythos by both indie game developers and the biggest game studios in the world, thereby opening a new chapter in representing the Beats in visual media. By, on the one hand, mapping out the categories of Beat references in video game narratives and, on the other, setting them against the backdrop of existing models of (mis)appropriating the Beats in visual culture, I will seek to explore the ways in which video game designers venture into the Beat ethos and I wish to address the implications this bears for the lineage of Beat pop-cultural presence. The final part of the essay takes a closer look at Fallout 4, making references to such theoretical concepts as Derridean hauntology, Zygmunt Bauman’s retrotopia and Simon Reynolds’ retromania, to further demonstrate how complex and ambiguous Beat video-game figurations can be.

Enactive Experience for Streaming Media Services

Since the beginning of humankind, storytelling enabled people to understand and shape their impressions of reality. Depicted by Walter R. Fisher, the narrative paradigm encounters the ubiquitous computing dimension, as proposed by Mark Weiser (Fisher 1984, Weiser 1991), that results in the interdisciplinary field of Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN). Departing from the first text-based experimentation in the late 1970s, IDN can be considered a vibrant field wherein different forms of interactive artifacts derived such as Hypertext Fiction, Interactive Installations, Video Game Narrative (Koenitz et al. 2015), and Enactive Cinema (Tikka 2006, 2008). IDN presents a field of inquiry prevailing for over three decades, but the question remains: is it supposed to be strictly entertainment or something else? In response, this paper explores the possibility of implementing an enactive paradigm to design a tailored experience for streaming media services, thus proposing a conceptual, methodological framework for designing a system to be prototyped and tested in accompanying research.

Historical Video Games in the Context of Public History: Strategies for Reconstruction, Deconstruction and Politization of History

Today, historical video games going beyond the boundaries of the purely entertainment framework of screen media are increasingly influencing the formation of the public history infosphere. The aim of the study is a comprehensive analysis of historical video games as a tool for constructing mass historical consciousness and the implementation of ideologized strategies for the politics of memory. Methodologically, the work is based on the concepts of “public history infosphere” and “politics of memory”, as well as the historical method and classification approach. In addition, elements of comparative analysis, the method of narrative research of cultural artifacts and the optics of I. Bogost’s procedural rhetoric are used.
 The study determines the specificity and nature of broadcasting historical plots in the context of procedural actualization of video game narratives. Starting from the interactive-procedural nature of video games, the original possibilities and objective constraints in the reproduction of “stories about the past” are revealed. It is demonstrated that the programmatic and subjective-user modalities of a video game existence endow it with rhizome and nomadic characteristics. Video game architectonics has an intention to deconstruct the “metaphysics of presence” and the main repressive instances characteristic of traditional historical narrative. At the same time, based on the concept of simulations by G. Frasca, three main formats of historical video game reconstructions are revealed: factual (plot and setting), logical-dynamic and hybrid. The article identifies the most common ways of distorting, mythologizing and politicizing history in video games. Special attention is paid to the explication of the ideologized concept of “anti-Sovietism” in video game plots, as a form of quasi-historical criticism of the Soviet regime and the continuation of the rhetoric of the “Cold War”.
 The results of the study can be used in the expert assessment of the space of public history, in the identification of relevant media tools and meaningful concepts that form its semantic framework. In addition, certain conclusions are essential for the effective correction of memory policy strategies implemented in screen digital media.

Formal Organization and Complex Responses to Video Games Narratives

The application of complex systems theories to the study of narratives proved able to offer a high heuristic value for the analysis of movies [24,26], TV series [35,36], music [45] and different other media with narrative capacity [cf. 20]. However, they were not yet thoroughly employed for the study of video game narratives. To address the relation between formal complexity and the complexity of response in video games, this paper conducts a contrastive analysis of two games of the Halo series, namely Halo 3 [6] and Halo 3 ODST [7]. Formal complexity is analyzed by applying Cutting's [13] approach for counting (narratorial) complexity. The evaluation of the responses to the narratives of these games is based on crowdsourced data, through Hven's [24] and Kiss and Willemsen's [26] understanding of audience response. The findings reveal that a complex response is at least partly predictable through an analysis of the formal quantitative and qualitative/organizational aspects of narratives, and, ultimately, that narrative complexity is a factor in the appreciation of games by the audience. The paper also poses the basis for the identification of a "Goldilocks level of complexity', which can maximize the appreciation of video games stories.

State-of-the-Art in Automated Story Generation Systems Research

ABSTRACT This paper presents a review of research works from the last several years in automated story generation systems. These systems are categorised into interactive story generation systems and non-Interactive story generation systems. Interactive systems are those that collaborate with a user/author during the process of creating and/or executing the story. The extent of user interaction varies across systems but remains an integral part of the creation and/or the unfolding of the story. Non-Interactive systems concentrate on complete automation of the creative process involved in narrative generation to create diverse and interesting stories. Interactive story generators specifically designed for video game narratives are reviewed as a separate sub-class of interactive story generation systems. Also reviewed are the methods used for evaluation of story generation systems as a way to explore the possibility of having standard methods of evaluation within the research community. The paper includes a discussion of trends and directions of the research discipline.

Percepción de 'gamers' universitarios de la UPC sobre el 'in-game advertising' de Adidas en el videojuego 'FIFA20'

El in-game advertising o IGA es un tipo de product placement dentro de un videojuego de manera textual, auditiva, visual e interactiva, empleado desde hace décadas y que, con la transformación digital y los cambios en el consumo, ha cobrado mucho protagonismo. Su uso está permitiendo que las plataformas mediáticas lúdicas, que antes no tenían un lugar en la convergencia de los medios, ahora sean empleados con fines publicitarios. Está fórmula está permitiendo que las marcas impacten infinidad de veces en un nutrido conjunto de jugadores a través de los diferentes servicios de streaming. Este alto alcance es complementado con una consistente construcción de valores, experiencias, estilos de vida e identidades a través de la interacción con el producto a través de la narrativa del videojuego. La creciente participación e-sports en las universidades peruanas, a través de torneos de FIFA20 ha permitido lograr un alto nivel de alcance y notoriedad de las marcas presentes en el videojuego en los jóvenes universitarios. La presente investigación ha buscado descubrir cómo el in-game advertising de la marca Adidas en FIFA20 – uno de los juegos más populares en Perú según la última investigación de GFK – es percibido por los gamers universitarios.