Au-delà de « l'envie cinématographique » : le complexe transmédiatique d'Assassin's Creed

Nous proposons d’aborder dans cet article la question des rapports entre le jeu vidéo et le cinéma à travers une étude de cas spécifique : la franchise Assassin’s Creed, qui s’inscrit dans un contexte techno-historico-culturel bien précis : celui des technologies de l’image numérique au Québec. Plus particulièrement, nous nous questionnerons sur le rôle que joue la trilogie de courts métrages Assassin’s Creed: Lineage, réalisés par Yves Simoneau et Hybride Technologies, et diffusés gratuitement sur YouTube dans le but d’attiser l’intérêt des joueurs avant la sortie du jeu Assassin’s Creed II. De toutes les déclinaisons médiatiques de la franchise Assassin’s Creed à ce jour, c’est elle qui incarne le mieux la convergence technologique entre le cinéma et le jeu vidéo, mais aussi notre modèle original de constellation transmédiatique. Loin d’agir comme de simples outils promotionnels, les films capitalisent sur les forces du cinéma et contribuent au déploiement de la franchise, mais non sans heurts. Du général au particulier, nous nous intéresserons d’abord à la relation entre ces deux arts, que l’on peut envisager sous deux paradigmes : celui de la remédiatisation et celui de la transmédialité; puis, nous traiterons du cas Assassin’s Creed comme étant la plus récente incarnation des rapports de croisement et de tension entre le cinéma et le jeu vidéo. Nous montrerons comment le modèle transmédiatique s’inscrit dans le prolongement des questionnements portant sur la remédiatisation, puis comment il éclaire et met à contribution les spécificités qui distinguent le cinéma et le jeu vidéo comme les points communs qui les rassemblent

Video game trailers: how storytelling is used to create identification and appeal with audiences

Video game trailers are an effective promotional form of intermediation that enables audiences to navigate and engage with old and new media. Although video game trailers function as advertisements designed to sell a game, they are also stories that provoke social media commentary and debate. Trailers aim to draw the viewer in, convey sound and imagery, and evoke an involuntary reaction of excitement and awe. In this thesis, I will be using the games Fallout 4, Watch Dogs 2, and Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate. In the case studies, I investigate how viewers make sense of the promotional and storytelling aspects of video game trailers. I examine how video game trailers have the potential to arouse emotions and interest before viewers even play the game. Trailers provide an insight into the basic gameplay, not only into the gameplay but also into the story and the characters (protagonists and antagonists). They show audiences the video game theme genre and provide the viewer with a visual and auditory tool to entice possession. This project explores these themes, showing how video game trailers have an inherited cinematic quality but also how trailers actually spend little time presenting actual gameplay. There is a clear connection with movie trailers, teasing the events that will take place in the game and asking the player what will happen next. In this study, I used the methods of narrative analysis and textual analysis to analyse comments from YouTube, Facebook, and a survey of video gamers. The textual analysis of the trailers raises questions of representation and authenticity. In this research, I identified an incongruity between the representation of the core features of a game and the promotion of those features in the trailer. The narrative analysis of the trailers focused on storytelling and emplotment in the trailers. A key theme that has emerged from the analysis is that superheroes engage in vigilantism, a justifiable form of self-administered violence. Gamers may feel at ease with the violence used to correct perceived injustices. There is potential for gamers to consider the moral grey area of vigilante violence and romanticised vigilantism. With their enhanced ability to simulate complex interactive narratives for actual and simulated authenticity, video games offer a sophisticated engagement with players that contributes significantly to their widespread and universal support. The role of culturally created characters in the experience of playing a video game helps stimulate philosophical research. I explore whether normative audience expectations can speed up the development of cultural expectations about the relationship between the player and the narrative of the game and its audience. In this context, I examine case study video game trailers and ask what it means to revise our understanding of the relationship between power, law, and morality while playing the game. I examine and critique how the narrative, and thus the mechanics of a specific game, shapes our understanding of connection, power, law, or morality; I contend that prestige reflects normative privilege and law

The story of a video game: reading the Assassin\u27s Creed universe

In the digital age, fictional narratives worthy of serious analysis are no longer confined to print. In recent years, video games have come under the eye of scholars from many fields. What can video games offer? How do they change the hature of fictional narrative? And how can we study them with a critical eye? The Assassin’s Creed universe is an ideal case study for analyzing the fictional worlds video games create using narrative. The Assassin\u27s Creed narrative is composed of two parts: a present day narrative and a memory narrative set in a stylized historical past. The present day narrative accesses the memory narrative in a similar way that a player accesses the video game narrative. In addition to mirroring the gaming experience, the Assassin\u27s Creed narrative had become a fictional world that has extended to other media. These are not just recreations of the story presented in the games, but new narratives that live within the same fictional universe

Mapping Methods Visualizing Visual Novelsâ Cultural Production in Japan

This research report presents mapping methods visualizing Visual Novelsâ cultural production in Japan. Three mapping of the East section of Ikebukuro city in Tokyo are presented in order to unravel the urban environment surrounding the production of Visual Novels for â girlsâ (Otome and Boyâ s Love games). The imbrications of a typology of Visual Novel and their paraphernalia, with cartographies of the urban infrastructures and events sustaining Visual Novelâ s paraphernalia circulation therefore invites to question of the definition of a â game environmentâ as the emergence of a urban cultural network emerging from the circulation of game paraphernalia

Game-centric transmedia audience experiences : case of Quantum Break and Defiance

Transmedia research has in the past been mainly interested in defining transmedia and examining transmedia franchises that have their starting point in movies and TV-series. However, there are multiple transmedia constellations that have a game as their starting point, or as a core. In this thesis, I suggest that there is a need for a game-centric transmedia research. The survey data from two examples of game-centric transmedia, Defiance (Trion Worlds, 2013) and Quantum Break (Remedy Entertainment, 2016), were analyzed by using grounded theory-informed approach. This was done in order to find out what motivates an audience to consume or avoid game-centric transmedia and what kind of experiences does the integrated transmedia style of Quantum Break offer compared to the separate transmedia style of Defiance. The results of this study show that if the developers of game-centric transmedia are aiming for an accessible and cinematic experience, integrated transmedia might be the better choice. The motivations to consume game-centric transmedia had a strong focus on narrative aspects and there were several mentions of immersion and identifying with the characters in the data. The results differ from earlier transmedia audience studies and suggest the need for more game-centric transmedia audience studies, where the core text is a game instead of a television show

Videojuegos, una narrativa en evolución : Knight Lore, Half-Life 2 y Heavy Rain como casos de estudio

Los videojuegos han evolucionado desde su nacimiento como entretenimiento puro hasta su papel actual como medio para transmitir historias complejas. Este trabajo pretende resumir el marco teórico de estudio de los videojuegos para mostrar cómo ha evolucionado su narrativa. Para ello revisaremos su crecimiento tecnológico y artístico, tanto en sus rasgos definitorios como en su relación con otras disciplinas artísticas. Además, haremos hincapié en el rol cambiante del jugador, su inmersión en las historias que se le proponen y en la forma en que la narrativa del medio consigue una identificación e implicación cada vez mayor de sus usuarios. Así, mostraremos cómo ha cambiado el papel del jugador, y su libertad, en el desarrollo argumental y en la experiencia de los títulos hasta convertirse en un campo de estudio semiótico de primer orden. Relacionado con todo lo anterior, hablaremos de la simulación como forma última de la evolución narrativa, que puede llevar al jugador a un proceso de confusión entre la realidad física en la que vive y el simulacro que se construye en los videojuegos de última generación. Finalmente propondremos un análisis narrativo de tres títulos de diferentes épocas para mostrar con ejemplos concretos la evolución de la narrativa: Knight Lore (1984), inicio de la edad de oro de los juegos de ZX Spectrum; Half-Life 2 (2004), que marca el punto álgido del género de tirador en primera persona, y Heavy Rain (2010), título que muestra la confluencia entre el mundo de los videojuegos, el cine y la literatura

The Female Video Game Player-character Persona and Emotional Attachment

This research, using online qualitative survey questions, explored how players of the PlayStation 4 console game, Horizon Zero Dawn, formed emotional attachments to characters while playing as, and assuming the persona of the female player-character, Aloy. It was found that the respondents (approximately 71% male) formed emotional attachments to the female player-character (PC) and non-player characters. Players found the characters to be realistic and well developed and they also found engaging with the storyworld via the female PC a profound experience. This research advances knowledge about video games in general and video game character attachment specifically, as well as the emerging but under-researched areas of Persona Studies and Game Studies

Criação e reestruturação de personagens para o universo transmídia The Rotfather

PCC(graduação) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Centro de Comunicação e Expressão. Design.Este Projeto de Conclusão de Curso tem como objetivo criar e reestruturar personagens do universo transmídia The Rotfather, utilizando-se de uma metodologia adaptada de criação de personagens, bem como estudos psicológicos na área da personalidade humana, além de pesquisa da criação de personagens em universos transmídia existentes no mercado.This final graduation project has the purpose of creating and reestructuring characters from the transmedia universe The Rotfather, using an adapted methodology of character creation as well as psychological studies regarding human personality, besides research about character creation in existing transmedia universes in the market