Hi everyone,
Great to see everyone again after the end of the break. I hope everyone enjoyed the first session back. Thanks to everyone who played a bit of something! Next week we will begin running at a regular time for the rest of the semester from 2 til 4pm-ish on a Thursday afternoon.
This week we played two very, very different games – Paratopic (Arbitrary Metric 2018) and Later Alligator (SmallBü, Pillow Fight 2019). Paratopic is a surreal work of existential horror that creates “a mistrust in reality” using a number of hard cuts between scenes and an uncertain, nonlinear storyline. The game grips from the outset but demands a lot from the player in order to figure out what exactly is happening, and who we are playing as. It is a game that links in to what I dubbed the “techno-haunted” in my Honours dissertation.
On the other hand, Later Alligator is a cute, humor-focused game in a New York city inhabited entirely by eccentric alligators. The player is tasked with interviewing thirty different alligators and playing unique minigames to progress the story. The two games are linked perhaps by their frequent use of different styles of gameplay to deliver the narrative. The repetitive structure of video games is a necessity in programming and designing them, meaning a video game’s arguments surface within that same repetition. These points are things that we had a bit of a discussion about regarding the reading.
The introduction to Persuasive Gaming in Context already raised some interesting questions around what it means to be persuaded by a work of fiction in general. Some ideas floated around about games and immersion. Do games allow for a different kind of immersion, or one that is more effective? Perhaps neither is true. There was also some discussion around the idea that narrative is the vehicle for persuasion, and gameplay often conflicts with that traditional vehicle. The classic concept of ludonarrative dissonance informs us that games often fail to persuade when the gameplay and the narrative are at odds with one another, and this happens very frequently.
I have attached the reading for next week, which is Ian Bogost’s reflection on the idea of persuasive games that he helped to coin. How has the field done in the intervening years since his book and game development company were launched? What promises did he make, and how did that unfold? How might we consider persuasive games in the modern context, and how might we use it going forwards?
Hope to see you all next week, have a lovely weekend!