Performing walking Sims:from <i>Dear Esther </i>to <i>Inchcolm Project</i>

In 2012 The Chinese Room launched Dear Esther, a video game which would go on to shape video game history and define a new genre: the walking simulator. Walking simulators renounce traditional game tropes and foreground walking as an aesthetic and as a dramaturgical practice which engages the walker/player in critical acts of reading, challenging and/or performing a landscape. In October 2016, Dear Esther was adapted as a site-responsive, promenade performance set on the Scottish island of Inchcolm in the Firth of Forth. The resulting performance, Dear Rachel, was then experienced alongside the game under the umbrella name Inchcolm Project. This hybrid event - multi-media (promenade performance, gameplay, musical performance) and mixed-reality (with physical, augmented and virtual components) - required the development and implementation of complex processes of remediation and adaptation. Drawing from theoretical landscape and practitioner reflection, this paper puts forward a design framework – storywalking - which reconciled the two adaptation challenges: responding to the site, and to the game

Dirty footprints and degenerate archives: Tabitha Nikolai’s impure walking sims

Tabitha Nikolai’s Shrine Maidens of the Unseelie Court and Ineffable Glossolalia are impure specimens of the walking sim. While these are still first-person games that see players exploring eerily underpopulated environments and archiving textual fragments, they are at once more aesthetically reflexive and more refer-entially dense than many walking sims. Accommodating giant spiders, Weimar sexologists, messageboard trolls and quotations from Roman poetry, Nikolai’s unorthodox spins on the ‘archival adventure’ reflect her interest in queer and trans history and her commitment to interrogating discourses of purity, progress and redemption. Reviewing critical discussions of the walking sim alongside queer, trans and decolonial perspectives on archives, identity and subjectification, the article argues that while walking sims have often been praised for telling emotion-ally engaging stories, in Nikolai’s hands the form assumes different function: that of reckoning with history and exploring subjectivity

Thinking and Doing: Challenge, Agency, and the Eudaimonic Experience in Video Games

The nascent growth of videogames has led to great leaps in technical understanding in how to create a functional and entertaining play experience. However, the complex, mixed-affect, eudaimonic entertainment experience that is possible when playing a video game—how it is formed, how it is experienced and how to design for it, has been investigated far less than hedonistic emotional experiences focusing on fun, challenge and ‘enjoyment.’ Participants volunteered to be interviewed about their mixed-affect emotional experiences of playing avant-garde videogames. New conceptions of agency emerged (Actual, Interpretive, Fictional, Mechanical) from the analysis of transcripts and were used to produce a framework of four categories of agency. This new framework offers designers and researchers the extra nuance in conversations around agency, and contributes to the discussion of how we can design video games that allow for complex, reflective, eudaimonic emotional experiences