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Player identification in American McGee’s Alice : a comparative perspective

Abstract

In this paper I analyse personal identification in three incarnations of Alice in Wonderland: the original novels, the 1950s Disney animation film and the computer game American McGee’s Alice. After presenting the research corpus, I lay out the analytical framework derived from Kendall Walton’s theory of representational artefacts as props for evoking imagining in games of make-believe. From this perspective, the Alice heritage relies on spectacle rather than plot to entertain. This spectacle differs across media as each medium’s strengths are played out: language-play in the novels, colour/motion/sound in the film and challenges in the game. There are two types of imagining involved: objective, whereby a person imagines a scene outside of himself, and subjective, in which case the imagining revolves around a version of himself. Both the novels and the film primarily evoke objective imagining whereas the game invites the player to be introjected into the Alice character evoking subjective imagining. The picture is not unambiguous, however, as the novels and the film stage a broad array of subjectifying techniques and the game objectifying ones. This gives us some indication as to the nature of representation which, to be of interest, presents a tension between here and there, between the self and an other

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