Playing with Identity. Authors, Narrators, Avatars, and Players in The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide

This article offers a comparative analysis of Davey Wreden’s The Stanley Parable (Wreden 2011 / Galactic Cafe 2013) and The Beginner’s Guide (Everything Unlimited Ltd. 2015) in order to explore the interrelation of authors, narrators, avatars, and players as four salient functions in the play with identity that videogames afford. Building on theories of collective and collaborative authorship, of narratives and narrators across media, and of the avatar-player relationship, the article reconstructs the similarities and differences between the way in which The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide position their players in relation to the two games’ avatars, narrators, and (main) author, while also underscoring how both The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide use metareferential strategies to undermine any overly rigid conceptualization of these functions and their interrelation

Referential multimodality in “animated documentaries” and “documentary games”

From John Grierson’s influential early definition of documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality” through documentary studies’ reconstruction of the multitude of existing forms to philosophers’ attempts to develop comprehensive accounts of documentary as a specific kind of nonfiction film, the concept of documentary has been both fiercely contested and, through these debates, continuously expanded to refer to an ever more extensive corpus of works. By now, there is a broad consensus that documentary film as a genre cannot be reduced to supposedly “objective” recordings of the “actual world,” as both various kinds of reenactments and sometimes radical forms of subjectivity have (yet again) become well-established elements of many documentary films. However, it would seem that summarily treating “hybrid” documentary films, “animated documentaries,” and “documentary games” as nothing but the most recent chapter of the history of documentary occludes more than it illuminates. Instead, this article proposes to examine “animated documentaries” such as Chicago 10: Say Your Peace (Brett Morgen, 2007) or Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008) and “documentary games” such as JFK Reloaded (Traffic Games, 2004) or The Cat and the Coup (Peter Brinson and Kurosh ValaNejad, 2011) through the lens of post/documentary, thus emphasizing not just their semiotic but also their occasionally rather complex referential multimodality

Video Game Characters: Theory and Analysis

This essay develops a method for the analysis of video game characters based on a theoretical understanding of their medium-specific representation and the mental processes involved in their intersubjective construction by video game players. We propose to distinguish, first, between narration, simulation, and communication as three modes of representation particularly salient for contemporary video games and the characters they represent, second, between narrative, ludic, and social experience as three ways in which players perceive video game characters and their representations, and, third, between three dimensions of video game characters as ‘intersubjective constructs’, which usually are to be analyzed not only as fictional beings with certain diegetic properties but also as game pieces with certain ludic properties and, in those cases in which they function as avatars in the social space of a multiplayer game, as representations of other players. Having established these basic distinctions, we proceed to analyze their realization and interrelation by reference to the character of Martin Walker from the third-person shooter Spec Ops: The Line (Yager Development 2012), the highly customizable player-controlled characters from the role-playing game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda 2011), and the complex multidimensional characters in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Star Wars: The Old Republic (BioWare 2011-2014)

Playing with Identity.: Authors, Narrators, Avatars, and Players in The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide

This article offers a comparative analysis of Davey Wreden’s ;The Stanley Parable (Wreden 2011 / Galactic Cafe 2013) and The Beginner’s Guide (Everything Unlimited Ltd. 2015) in order to explore the interrelation of authors, narrators, avatars, and players as four salient functions in the play with identity that videogames afford. Building on theories of collective and collaborative authorship, of narratives and narrators across media, and of the avatar-player relationship, the article reconstructs the similarities and differences between the way in which The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide position their players in relation to the two games’ avatars, narrators, and (main) author, while also underscoring how both The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide use metareferential strategies to undermine any overly rigid conceptualization of these functions and their interrelation

Introduction: Playfulness across Media

This is the introduction to the guest-edited Playfulness across Media issue of Eludamos. The articles collected here seek to demonstrate the productivity of the concept of playfulness across disciplines and the importance of moving beyond the study of primarily game-based playfulness in order to explore how a playful mood, attitude, or state of mind can manifest itself in and be encouraged by a range of different practices of play and a range of different (post)digital media forms that include, but are certainly not limited to, digital and nondigital games. While there obviously are some very productive intersections between game studies and playfulness studies, the articles also clearly show that the latter cannot and should not be conflated with the former

Storyworlds across Media

The proliferation of media and their ever-increasing role in our daily life has produced a strong sense that understanding media—everything from oral storytelling, literary narrative, newspapers, and comics to radio, film, TV, and video games—is key to understanding the dynamics of culture and society.Storyworlds across Media explores how media, old and new, give birth to various types of storyworlds and provide different ways of experiencing them, inviting readers to join an ongoing theoretical conversation focused on the question: how can narratology achieve media-consciousness? The first part of the volume critically assesses the cross- and transmedial validity of narratological concepts such as storyworld, narrator, representation of subjectivity, and fictionality. The second part deals with issues of multimodality and intermediality across media. The third part explores the relation between media convergence and transmedial storyworlds, examining emergent forms of storytelling based on multiple media platforms. Taken together, these essays build the foundation for a media-conscious narratology that acknowledges both similarities and differences in the ways media narrate