Hi everyone!
I wanted to open this post with a tragic reminder: as the academic year winds to a close, so too will the Literary Games Group. Depending on the work I get for the remainder of the year, next week may be the last session of the LGG for 2025. This week, though, we discussed the idea of genre further. What does it mean for a literary genre to be transposed into game format? And what effects does realism have on the game experience? In the case of something like Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar 2010), does a game’s realistic attempts at simulation allow for the game to hoodwink players into believing things that are outside of a historical context? Does it even allow them to absorb messages about what good values are, as long as the hero gets tired and needs to work to earn money to buy their realistically functioning cowboy horse? Elements of realism (citing Mark Fisher’s idea of capitalist realism and neoliberalist mechanics represented in games) can lower the player’s guard, and create misunderstandings about our own reality, deliberate or not.
This week we played and finished Red Tape, which contains an incredible moment of gameplay whiplash, the likes of which I don’t know I’ve seen before. The previously fetch-quest driven, dialogue game about wandering through Hell becomes a game all about platforming while dodging projectiles. The game’s strange disjunction and odd ending, where the game appeared to run out of budget, was both a shame and terribly entertaining. It worked on some bizarre level, but also felt like the developers just couldn’t quite figure out how to finish their game properly without making it into a jump-em-up. Still, it had fun mythological and historical references, and was at least “literary” in that sense. Also “the economy” was the best demon ever.
For next week, I selected a reading on “Literary Studies and Role-Playing Games”. How have we played with roleplaying games, both on the board and in the digital realm, in a literary sense? In fact, can we even count them as “literary”? This is a question asked by scholars David Jara and Evan Torner in the larger book The Routledge Handbook of Role-Playing Game Studies, published just last year.
Hope everyone has a lovely week ahead!