Hi everyone!
Last week we had an earlier games group session at 9am in the morning, where we discussed the importance of literary genre to our perception of a game’s procedural rhetoric. We talked about the idea that a game’s expectations are set up at the very early stage of genre identification. Expectations being set this early can create opportunities to subvert a player’s expectations, while at the same time that can frustrate players who were expecting a more straightforward experience from their genre fiction. The chapter focused specifically on cowboy and noir detective literary genres, saying that literary expectations about these genres has carried over and been perpetuated by video games.
We played Electrobasis, a free first-person adventure game about playing as an angel that inhabits electrical equipment to help solve a bunch of people’s problems, in order to reopen a casino. It was a lovely, positive, relaxing game and it comes highly recommended. Thanks to Liam for recommending it! We also started Redtape, a game about rising through the ranks of management in an office building in Hell, which seems very entertaining. We picked the scariest possible name for a demon, “the economy”, striking fear into the hearts of our fellow employees just by uttering our name.
I’ve attached a reading from the same book for this week. In this chapter, Sara Humphreys discusses how genre is tied to realism, and how realism informs a game’s rhetoric and argument. In some ways, just by presenting a realistic game world, a game can make a player more susceptible to certain arguments, even if just in very subtle or minute ways. We’ll be meeting at the usual time (2pm) this Thursday. Come with some consideration of how your favourite game genre might align with a literary genre, and where the genre’s ideas and codifying moments come from! Not much left of the academic year, so I’ll keep everyone posted about when the group will end for 2025, before I will be running it again next year!
Hope everyone had a nice weekend 🙂