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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 Still, it had fun mythological and historical references, and was at least “literary” in that sense.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!

Hi everyone,

This week we had a look at the reading about parasocial relationships with game characters by Joleen Blom. What does it mean to form a connection with a video game character? Advertisers and companies can leverage the narrative connection we feel with a character, selling us merchandise or further stories predicated on our love for the character. The way that connections are formed mechanically within a game as well can be fairly easily codified by meters, gifts, or just saying the thing that the character wants to hear, even if it’s not what we actually believe. Games reward us for making relationships mechanical transactions, thus exposing the nature of the Non-Player Character as a quasi-person. And because of that, a player’s opinion of “a quasi-person may decrease since the character no longer upholds the illusion of being a person-like entity with their own will”. As was also observed during the discussion, game relationships also do not require much maintenance. Once someone is your best friend or your love interest, you can just coast on that relationship being rock solid for the rest of the game, meaning you just move on to socializing with your next best friend – not exactly how relationships in the actual world work!

This week, with our focus on character relationships, I put forward Franz, a mobile horror game based around a manipulative relationship with a small nymph-like creature living in your phone or tablet. At first, it seems you have the control over Franz – but eventually she begins to flip the relationship around, using you just as much as you might use her to pass time. I found that Franz is a legitimately harrowing art-game experience that calls into question these parasocial relationships. However, it also has a deliberately designed destabilizing effect on the player’s mood, and I would even go so far as to call it invasive thanks to the use of notifications to pressure you into spending time with the game. Hence, we ended up returning to the much lighter Expelled! (thanks again to Atom for providing it to the group to play) and we were treated to an audio drama rendition of it by Maddie and El as our main actors – thanks to you both for your involvement playing the game! I think we each found a character to connect to, and even without our group’s collaborative voice acting, it is easy to hear the character’s voices based on how they are written.

This week, I have attached a reading from Sara Humphreys, who interrogates game genre in her book “Manifest Destiny 2.0: Genre Trouble in Game Worlds”. How do literary genres manifest in video games? What is problematic (or successful) in regard to genre? Come next time with some thoughts about genre in video games, and how your favourite games connect to literary genres (and how they might differ). 

See you all next week!

Hi everyone,

This week we had a discussion about simulations and strategy games. What does it mean to avoid simulating critique of empire and imperial systems of oppression in strategy games, as Mukherjee argued that Age of Empires did? How do certain games attempt to model the decay of empire? In Rome: Total War, overpopulation and overextension cause empire-wide riots, and your economy can suddenly collapse due to mismanagement and an overreliance on your imperial war machine as you clash against rival empires.And are there any games that do legitimately attempt to resist the common language of strategy games: expansion and dominance? Even games that allow you to play as the colonized in history ask that you perform those imperialistic tasks, but in reverse, against the actual-world oppressor. It is an interesting thought exercise to consider civilization-building as no longer reliant on dominance and destruction; how do we simulate new ways of thinking?

This week, thanks to Maddie, we played through Kitty Horrorshow’s Anatomy, a haunted suburban house that analyzes the importance of the house, and the inherent monstrosity present within spaces. It was great to play through for me, as it fed into ideas of ruin and discomfort being generated by decay. We also played through Barbotine, which attempts a similar thing, but relates it more to anxiety and a lack of confidence in one’s own body image. Even if it isn’t as effective as Anatomy, it is a fun companion piece. 

Next week, I’ve selected a reading from Joleen Blom’s book Video Game Characters and Transmedia Storytelling: The Dynamic Game Character about the potential to form parasocial relationships that exists between video game players and video game characters. Can we feel anything for these characters? Do relationships extend beyond actually playing the game?

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!

Did you know that dtour – Dunedin’s own literary tourism app – now has a range of entries you can read and listen to in te reo Māori?

Check out this sample of Tip Winiata reading Sue Wootton’s iconic poem “Dune din” (2017):

April Salchert suggested this great series on “Reading the Game” in NPR with the Literary Games group in mind (thanks April):

https://www.npr.org/series/510664099/reading-the-game

Today we read the next chapter of the book Literary Gaming – “Playing With Rather Than By Rules” in which we examined games as not just entertainment, but as political tools and weapons for activism and hacktivism, which is how such a popular medium will likely be used more and more as we begin to enter a more mature age of video game storytelling.

There are also several different ludology theories we learned about, my favourite concept being that of Johan Huizinga’s “magic circle” – the space and state that we enter when we play a game, where we buy into the fantasy or essentially “sign a contract” with the game allowing you to be immersed and follow rules that are different from the regular world, whether they be scientific or ethical rules.
Over the next week, we’ll be looking at the next chapter, which you can read here if you are interested.

Later in the session we booted up the short 2018 game, Paratopic, which I have played before but was keen to introduce the other members of the group to. The developers (Arbitrary Metric) themselves describe it best, saying that “Paratopic [is] an atmospheric retro-3D horror adventure through a cursed fever dream.” It subverts how we regularly experience video game stories and challenges our interpretation of events by making things deliberately unclear. It is an excellent, very unique, game that I have been a fan of since I played it last year, which I can highly recommend to anyone who is interested in non-linear narrative and experimental video games.

Interestingly, when asked to describe how the game made them feel, the player and viewers who hadn’t played the game could only say – “I don’t know”, and  “disgusted” which I believe means that the game is doing its job very well, utilizing its game design and story together to create a potent experience, like a forbidden game you stumbled across in an archive somewhere.

Hope to see you around, looking forward to seeing what kinds of literary games other people have played and recommend!

Today we discussed the kinds of games that might appeal to us as a  running project or thing to analyze in the weeks to come. There are plenty of worthy candidates, but we want to find something that’s not overly long while still being deep enough to really sink our teeth into.
And also something that is entertaining for others to ask questions of while we’re watching the person playing on the projector!

One of the more recent games that comes to my mind is Hideo Kojima’s latest release, Death Stranding, which is essentially a game as a societal statement. Walking simulators are an oft-derided genre for their simplicity, but they have the capacity to tell interesting stories, even if the gameplay can be considered undercooked. Kojima took it upon himself to make a walking simulator about the feeling of isolation and reuniting a divided country. It’s a great game, and one to keep on the radar as we continue.

We also explored a superb Twine experiment that you can access for free here, which is an immensely challenging game, but not in the traditional, gameplay sense. Won’t spoil anything about it just yet, in hope you’ll experience it for yourself blind!
It makes for a great taster for the sort of games we’re looking at and the kind of projects we’d love to find out more about.

Finally, we began reading the book Literary Gaming by Astrid Ensslin, and figured out how to define literary games going ahead with the group. In it, she describes how literary games can grow to encompass fields previously unthought of, and how the melding of video games and traditionally literary media can advance storytelling and video games at once in leaps and bounds. On to chapter two!

Hope to see you round!

After our first meeting, we’ve come away with a good understanding of the kinds of places we want to go, the experiences we want to share, and the aspects of games that we want to explore.

Games are a young  medium, and a medium catering to a very broad audience, that unfortunately doesn’t always appreciate the kinds of very intelligent and subversive game design that new developers, especially indie developers, are coming up with – games that challenge you not just as a player, but as a person. I think there is a lot of fun to be had from exploring games and their ultimate potential, exploring choice, consequence and how games allow us to inhabit roles in fantastic worlds we wouldn’t otherwise be able to be a part of. We can assert our will and our choices on a game, and I think that’s a really interesting thing to be able to explore. Watching others play games and see the choices they make compared to you is a great way to gain a deeper appreciation for a game, and it’s one of the ways we’ll be proceeding from here.

To start the group we’ll also be looking at a book available here, reading the introduction for this week as we figure out how we approach games as things to be analyzed and enjoyed as works of art in their own right.

Hope to see you around!