The Gamification of Gothic Coordinates

Videogames may rely on the highly logical nature of computing technology, but that does not mean they are immune to the dark touch of Gothic; far from it. Gothic themes, characters, stories, and environments can be found across a wide range of videogames, from puzzle games to multiplayer online games and from shoot ‘em ups to strategy games. More wide-ranging and focused work is certainly required as there is a major lack of sustained scholarly engagement with Gothic in videogames.[1] In an effort to begin the task of remedying this and as part of a more extensive project (a book entitled ‘Gothic Games’ [forthcoming]), this paper plots some initial coordinates of the domain, locating some of its major features, and provides a framework for evaluating the uses of Gothic in games. The foundation on which this analysis rests is an amalgam of two materials. The first is comprised of concepts, models and ideas that have been developed specifically for the analysis of videogames within what has become known as Game Studies. The second is drawn from concepts, models and ideas developed for the analysis of Gothic within what has become known as Gothic Studies. Game and Gothic Studies are both based in the Humanities and share through the lens of Cultural Studies a common attentiveness to the formation and reception of certain types of texts and their “meaning potential”; laden with signification and organized around patterns, texts both carry and are constitutive of culture. As Mikko Lehtonen puts it, “texts are not stuck on top of the rest of the world, as messages detachable from it, but participate in a central way in the making of reality as well as forming our image of it”(2000, 11). Gothic Studies evaluates texts, the way they are used and engaged with across a range of media and cultural practices. Game Studies focuses specifically on the formal specificities of games and the way they are played and engaged with. This paper calls on material from both provinces to fulfil its primary aim of understanding the effect that videogame media have on the appearance of Gothic in games and to stage its argument that videogame media has the capability to produce a powerful and compelling addition to Gothic fiction’s arsenal of affect. [1] While there is work focused specifically on horror games, such as Perron’s collection Horror Video Games (2009), there is no book or edited collection on the topic of Gothic in games. The author has however written several articles on the Gothic in games including entries in Blackwell Guides to the Gothic - See more at: http://www.revenantjournal.com/contents/the-gamification-of-gothic-coordinates-in-videogames/#sthash.fmc6fBZN.dpu

Conspiracy Hermeneutics: The Secret World as Weird Tale

Through close consideration of the multiplayer online game The Secret World (2012), this paper works towards a definition of “Weird Games” as a basis for advocating the aesthetic potential of Weird for digital games. The paper forms part of a more expansive project to examine the uses and formal specificities of Gothic and Weird in digital games. While the Weird Tale shares some features with Gothic, it has a very distinctive form that is beautifully summed by H.P. Lovecraft: The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space. (Cited Joshi, 1990: 6. My italics.) The Weird Tale may be regarded broadly as a part of twentieth-century populist or even trash writing, but, as this special edition of Well-Played attests, it also has a place in digital games and like Gothic it crosses genres and (plat)forms. Indicative of its presence in Indie games are: Alone (Greenwood Games,2013), developed for the immersive context provided by Oculus Rift providing many opportunities for breaking the fourth wall; Dear Esther (thechineseroom, 2012), which pushed horror grammar towards atmosphere rather than action and The Binding of Isaac (Headup Games, 2011). To these I add examples from prior, bigger budget games such as the Lovecraftian homage Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (Silicon Knights, 2002), the early entries in the Silent Hill series (particularly 1 and 2) and the Twin Peaks-like Deadly Premonition (Access Games, 2010/2012), where a real-time mechanic contributes to the creation of its version of Weird. More than simply adaptation, Weird is exerting an influence on the formation of innovative contemporary game grammar, largely in contention with established conventions. The analytic framework around this assertion is based in an investigation of the ways that the participatory and rule-based nature of digital game form shapes, at a fundamental level, the ways that the Weird tale manifests in games and I will truncate the term to “Weird”, which further helps relocate it outside text-based literature and places emphasis on its affective coordinates. As such, the paper works towards the proposition that there are certain properties of digital games that are capable of generating a new dimension to the affective experience of Weird

Formations of Player Agency and Gender in Gothic Video Games.

This essay contextualises and investigates critically the connections between the design of player agency and formations of gender within the Gothic video game. In order to help locate a general rather than specialist reader, it begins with a short account of the scope of the Gothic in video games and demonstrates how certain formal qualities of games shape the way that the Gothic is articulated. From this foundation, the essay goes on to argue that the conditions of player agency within many (but by no means all) video games drains power from the more radical and subversive gender formations often found more generally within Gothic fiction (in for instance Dracula [1897]or The Old Dark House [1932]). This thesis is supported by Gothic video game examples such as Clive Barker’s Undying, Typing of the Dead, Resident Evil, Plants vs. Zombies, Left 4 Dead. However, here the argument turns to place greater emphasis on the analysis of games where a more subtle, ambiguous or subversive approach to player agency is taken; where alternative methods and contextualising representations are deployed by game designers to create models of player agency that do not, through the usual trope of mastery, align with dominant notions of masculinity or a phallic economy. Examples include the use of masquerade and ambiguity in Castlevania, cosmic horror and webs of conspiracy within The Secret World, and agency had through an excess of rationalism in American McGee’s Alice. This essay builds on existing critical writing that identifies power and, crucially, powerlessness as characteristic of the Gothic, and where that axis of power is correlated with a structural understanding of sex, sexual relations and gender (as in Sedgwick for example). Representation is considered, but our focus is mainly on the role of the player in the thick of the Gothic game text and the gendered, contextual economy of the power (or powerlessness) that they are afforded. To flesh that out a little more, within the confines of an abstract: within the context of most media, the audience’s experience of power and powerlessness is mediated; shout as we might, there is nothing we can do to save the hapless girl who with a relentless inevitability wanders into the terrible place oblivious to the signs of imperilment that noisily excites the audience. Games are different. Players are afforded agency (although it may be taken away or limited too). Some Gothic game designers are finding innovative ways of playing with and subverting the conventional, gendered plotting of power. It is therefore the principle aim of this essay to show how

Playing the Intercorporeal: Frankenstein's Legacy for Games

With so many games falling into the generic categories of science fiction and horror, and very frequently calling on vocabularies of the Gothic, you’d expect at least one or two direct adaptations of Shelley’s Frankenstein. While there are legions of vampire and zombies, the legacy of Frankenstein for games is far more subtly manifest than with all those other monsters. This paper analyses some of the ways in which games carry the Frankenstein legacy, from the ‘stitched horrors’ of World of Warcraft to the monsters of Half-Life. Focusing on monsters and mad scientists, the paper creates a map for understanding the terrain of legacy for games. I start with a general examination of the terrain including signalling how the posthuman in games is often highly indebted to Shelley’s novel. I then move to address moral and existential dimensions of this legacy evident in many games that draw on Gothic approaches to science (Half-Life and Bioshock for example), focusing on the ambiguity of monster/creator and the operation of hubris.  I tie these elements into the paper’s main focus on death. Here I am concerned with the pleasures of games for players as well as with representational forms. My core claim in the paper is that games and Shelley’s Frankenstein (the character and the novel) are predicated on a denial real of death. This is a gambit I shall explain and explore. As the paper draws to a close my argument becomes clear: the reason that the legacy is (pervasively) implicit rather than explicit in games, is due to the fact that the denial of death in games is structural (and crucially not thematic as it is in Shelley’s novel) and this is why the novel I tragic, but the normative vocabularies of games are such that tragedy is near impossible – they offer then a very different form of catharsis

Curses, Rites and Questionable Offerings

A major aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the presence of folk horror iconography, settings, themes and structures in videogames. Given that games present us with a modality of interaction absent from other media, it is also important to give some sense of how the formal characteristics of game media shape the articulation of folk horror in game contexts. While there are elements of folk horror in board games, such as those based on the Lovecraft mythos or those parented by comics or other media, such as the Lock and Key board game, I will focus instead on videogames across a range of game genres; mainly those that fall into the category of Adventure or Horror ‘role-playing games’, both single player games and multiplayer games

Online Games and Genre

Genre is used by game developers as a means of targeting certain markets providing easily-identified product differentiation. This entry provides an overview of the development and diversity of genre in online games and maps out the major factors that drive genre formations. In addition, academic approaches to the study of genre are addressed in conjunction with the commercial and cultural contexts that shape online game genres

From Immersion’s Bleeding Edge to the Augmented Telegrapher: A Method for Creating Mixed Reality Games for Museum and Heritage Contexts

Immersive technologies can be used to broaden the possibilities of storytelling in heritage contexts, to enrich the ways in which museum collections are interpreted, and to facilitate more active engagement with history. To this end, as part of the United Kingdom's Industrial Strategy, new models, methods, and workflows are being developed to help realise the value of such technologies across the country. However, prior art shows that immersive technologies present particular challenges with respect to usability, uptake, on-boarding, sustainability, and authenticity. Towards addressing these challenges, a programme of action research has been established across a series of museums in Cornwall. Focusing upon the Augmented Telegrapher at Porthcurno Telegraph Museum, a co-designed social escape room experience that utilises the Microsoft HoloLens to simulate a telegraphy training exercise from World War 2, this article addresses what partnerships with smaller, rural establishments need to effectively realise the value of immersive technologies. Using the work of Erik Champion as a critical lens, the article shows how an iterative constructivist approach leveraging game design principles can underpin success. This is distilled into a set of recommended interaction blueprints and transdisciplinary working practices that will be of interest to curators, researchers, and serious game developers

Typologies and Features of Play in Mobile Games for Mental Wellbeing

Background: The smartphone market is saturated with apps and games purporting to promote mental wellness. There has been a significant number of studies assessing the impact of these digital interventions. Motivation. The majority of review papers solely focussed on the impact of strict rules and award systems of the apps. There is comparatively little attention paid to other game techniques designed to encourage creativity, a lusory attitude, and playful experiences. Results. This gap is addressed in this paper in a consideration and analysis of a purposive selection of six mobile games marketed for wellbeing, our focus is on both external and internal motivations that these games offer. Our specific interest is how these games balance rule-based play with creativity. We find that ludic play is a highly-structured, rule-bound, goal-oriented play, in contrast to paedic play which a freeform, imaginative, and expressive. We argue that while ludic play is purposed towards the promotion of habit formation and generates feelings of accomplishment, it nonetheless relies heavily on extrinsic motivation to incentivise engagement. By contrast, paidic play, specifically role-playing, improvisation, and the imaginative co-creation of fictional game worlds, can be used effectively in these games to facilitate self-regulation, self-distancing, and therefore provides intrinsically-motivated engagement. In the context of games for mental wellbeing, ludic play challenges players to complete therapeutic exercises, while paidic play offers a welcoming refuge from real world pressures and the opportunity to try on alternate selves. Conclusion: Our intention is not to value paidic play over ludic play, but to consider how these two play modalities can complement and counterbalance each other to generate more effective engagement

Gaming Horror’s horror: Representation, Regulation and Affect in Horror Videogames

This position article outlines a personal perspective on the way that Horror games create affect in a complex play between representation and performance and that, in some cases, operate against the usual Vitruvian coordinates of games that are used in order to work with the types of affect associated with pleasure, agency and assuredness. The author argues that against the usual informative pleasures of self-affirmation and a clockwork universe, Horror games configured against normative game vocabularies have the potential to create a more complex form of ‘pleasure’ that is both complex and transformational

Transmedial Aesthetics: Where form and content meet - Film and Videogames

This chapter uses the lens of transmediality (co-ordinated storytelling or world-building across different media platforms) to investigate the specific relationship of form to content in videogames. Through close textual analysis of two transmedial franchises, it is argued games and other media have grown closer in terms of content and representation. This paper was written before ‘movie-games and game-movies’, although published later, and there is a strong relationship between the two. The paper develops on Krzywinska’s work other work on game form and transmediality, but distinctively here a case is made against formal determinism. This is regarded as an inadvertent consequence of the advocation of games as a unique media – a rhetoric necessary in the early days of Game Studies to demonstrate their importance. While there are formal distinctions between games and other media, games nonetheless still draw heavily on cinematic vocabularies, not just through tie-ins but also more generally, in the deployment of familiar narrative formations, tropes and genres. The overarching aim of this chapter is to bring greater nuance to the present, hyperbolically polarised argument and show that games should not be regarded as hermetically sealed from broader media and cultural trends. This brings games under the umbrella of ‘the humanities’; a topic that Krzywinska is currently developing and invited to speak on at the Institute of Education in Winter 2013. It is also consideration of affect conjured up between player and text that is informs her current book project on the gamification of the Gothic. In addressing the solicitation of affect, the chapter makes sustained use of theoretical models derived from French philosophy, designed to move Game Studies away from formalism. The chapter was commissioned by the editor on the basis of Krzywinska’s previous work on videogame form; unusually each paper was anonymously reviewed by three other contributors