The textuality of learning contexts

A significant aspect of learning contexts is the way in which semiotic artefacts mediate learning within them. The Literacies for Learning in Further Education (LfLFE) project is researching the role of texts and associated communicative practices in constructing and mediating teaching and learning, in shaping communities, in constructing and sustaining relationships, and in helping students to achieve their goals. A particular aim of the project is to identify ways in which people can bring literacy practices from one context into another to act as resources for learning in the new context. In this paper we explain what we mean by ‘literacy practices’, demonstrate the textuality of learning contexts through examples from contrasting curriculum areas, and show how learning can be enhanced by mobilising literacy practices from one context to another

Death in digital games : a thanatological approach

Analysing our time is an important part of our understanding and modi operandi. At the same time, of equal importance is the analysis of the end of time, that is, the time of death. The analysis of death contains a paradox, since there is no way of knowing death before death, and writing about death after the grave contradicts death itself. Nevertheless, death is a diachronic consistency which defines our presence, existence and, of course, every era, both culturally and temporarily. It reigns over our consciousness and its manifestations: language, philosophy, religion, literature and the arts. Nowadays, we live in the era of digital revolution and are re-familiarising ourselves with many established perceptions of the world we live in and the manner we experience and communicate within it. Death, together with our acknowledgement of it, is no different. Much can be said about how death is perceived through social media and digital applications, but my core focus will be death in digital games. Digital games, as a relatively new medium, and an ergodic one at that, have many interesting aspects that remain unexplored and are worth looking closer into as they provide an exciting field of study. Being one of—if not the most popular leisure activity of our age—one cannot be more in our time than when engaging with digital games. They pose a different approach to interactivity, and for that reason function in a novel manner and are accompanied by new challenges and a need for methodological tools. In this case however, digital games themselves will provide the tool for analysing such a timeless and simultaneously time-perceived idea as death itself. A great example of how the contemporary can not only facilitate the intertemporal, but also re-introduce it in innovative ways.peer-reviewe

Narratology

This essay provides an overview of the different types of study that can be conducted when considering the narrative aspects of video game play. It contextualizes this research among the larger movements of narratology, particularly concerning the structuralist roots of the discipline and the parallels between gameplay and narrative structures. A brief overview of the key points of the ludology/narratology debate is made, followed by an introduction to the three domains of narrative in video game studies: story content, story structures, and narration as the discursive mode that games use to relay the game-state

Introduction: Popularizing Instability (Chapter 1), Introducing Narrative Instability (Chapter 2)

The following text is an excerpt from the book Narrative Instability: Destabilizing Identities, Realities, and Textualities in Contemporary American Popular Culture, which was originally published in 2019 with Universitätsverlag Winter as part of the series American Studies – A Monograph Series. The book introduces the concept of ‘narrative instability’ in order to make visible a new trend in contemporary US popular culture, to analyze this trend’s poetics, and to scrutinize its textual politics. It identifies those texts as narratively unstable that consciously frustrate and obfuscate the process of narrative understanding and comprehension, challenging their audiences to reconstruct what happened in a text’s plot, who its characters are, which of its diegetic worlds are real, or how narrative information is communicated in the first place. Despite—or rather, exactly because of—their confusing and destabilizing tendencies, such texts have attained mainstream commercial popularity in recent years across a variety of media, most prominently in films, video games, and television series. Focusing on three clusters of instability that form around identities, realities, and textualities, the book argues that narratively unstable texts encourage their audiences to engage with the narrative constructedness of their universes, that narrative instability embodies a new facet of popular culture, that it takes place and can only be understood transmedially, and that its textual politics particularly speak to white male middle-class Americans

Objectivism, narrative agency, and the politics of choice in the video game BioShock

In this article, I investigate the video game BioShock for its political and cultural work and argue that it offers a popular platform to discuss the politically charged question of choice, both inside and outside the realm of video games. In a first section, I introduce the game’s basic plot and setting, propose a way to study how video games operate narratively, and briefly discuss the ‘political’ dimension of games in general. Afterwards, I look at how BioShock is influenced by Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism, a philosophy that emphasizes the importance of individual choice and self-interest, and I trace this influence specifically in the game’s main antagonist, Andrew Ryan, and its setting, the underwater city of Rapture. With these elements as a basis, I analyze how BioShock engages with the politics of choice, focusing on a major twist scene in the game to demonstrate how BioShock deals with the question of choice on a metatextual level. Reading this scene in the context of the game’s overall narrative, specifically of moral choices in the game that lead to different endings, I argue that the game metatextually connects the political question of choice inherent in objectivism to the narrative and the playing of the game, pointing to the ambivalences inherent in questions of choice, agency, and free will

Videogames as “Minor Literature”: Reading Videogame Stories through Paratexts

Videogames have, since the beginning of game studies as a discipline, been placed at a problematic cusp between games and narratives. Stories are important in videogames, especially in those such as Grand Theft Auto IV (2008), Fallout 3 (2008), and other games with a pronounced narrative intention. However, the element of play and multiplicity of the narrative makes it difficult to analyze them with traditional critical tools: it is easy, therefore, to dismiss them from the narrative canon. Another problem that videogame research faces is that game-narratives are ephemeral and the textual artefact of the game is substantially contained in the player’s experience. However, an entire range of paratexts, such as walkthroughs and after-action reports, where players construct narratives while recording their in-game experiences, are available for analysis. This paper points towards the urgency of beginning to study ludic paratexts like walkthroughs and after-action reports to understand better the narrative process in videogames. In doing so, it will explore how a player has rewritten the history of Rome through Rome: Total War (2004) and how to do science fiction differently in Fallout 3. Simultaneously, it will identify similar characteristics in examples from established literary media, such as Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch (1987) and Italo Calvino’s A Castle of Crossed Destinies (1977), to name only a couple

Research methodologies in creative practice: literacy in the digital age of the twenty first century - learning from computer games

Literacy remains one of the central goals of schooling, but the ways in which it is understood are changing. The growth of the networked society, and the spread of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), has brought about significant changes to traditional forms of literacy. Older, print based forms now take their place alongside a mix of newer multi-modal forms, where a wide range of elements such as image, sound, movement, light, colour and interactivity often supplant the printed word and contribute to the ways in which meaning is made. For young people to be fully literate in the twenty-first century, they need to have clear understandings about the ways in which these forms of literacy combine to persuade, present a point of view, argue a case or win the viewers’ sympathies. They need to know how to use them themselves, and to be aware of the ways in which others use them. They need to understand how digital texts organise and prioritise knowledge and information, and to recognise and be critically informed about the global context in which this occurs. That is, to be effective members of society, students need to become critical and capable users of both print and multimodal literacy, and be able to bring informed and analytic perspectives to bear on all texts, both print and digital, that they encounter in everyday life. This is part of schools’ larger challenge to build robust connections between school and the world beyond, to meet the needs of all students, and to counter problems of alienation and marginalisation, particularly amongst students in the middle years. This means finding ways to be relevant and useful for all students, and to provide them with the skills and knowledge they will need in the ICT-based world of the Twentyfirst century. With respect to literacy education, engagement and technology, we urgently need more information as to how this might be best achieved

“This Whole World Is a Story”: Popularizing Narrative Instability in Contemporary Film and Television

In this article, I examine the intersection of two trends in contemporary US popular culture: a tendency of recent films to obfuscate the process of narrative understanding (called narrative instability) and a move towards combining elements of narrative with those of play (ludic textuality). I introduce both trends in more general terms and then look at the film Inception and the TV series Westworld to exemplify these trends’ narrative dynamics. This allows me to argue that narrative instability characterizes contemporary popular culture by an embrace of incoherence and by pleasures that build on an audience willing to actively engage with the text and its narration. While this has originally been a predominant trend in films, more recently, fusions of narrative and play have allowed television’s seriality to adopt instability as well, a convergence that I investigate by looking at the synergies between Inception and Westworld