No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Narrativa y Gameplay en Abyme en Firewatch
Abstract
Firewatch (Campo Santo, 2016) es un videojuego con apariencia de aventura y misterio que pertenece al género denominado walking simulator. En estos videojuegos, el jugador explora un amplio espacio caminando, manipulando objetos y, en ocasiones, resolviendo acertijos simples. El entorno espacial, la estética y la música construyen una experiencia lúdica centrada en la experiencia emocional de los personajes dentro del desarrollo de una historia. Firewatch sigue las convenciones de este género y utiliza varias tramas cuyo objetivo no es componer un mosaico narrativo de personajes e historias, sino explicar, reforzar y clarificar la historia principal, la relación de Henry, el protagonista, con su esposa. El objetivo de este trabajo es explorar el funcionamiento de los niveles narrativo y lúdico de Firewatch aplicando una metodología analítica basada en la narrativa especular, ampliamente estudiada en la literatura por Mieke Bal, Genette y especialmente Lucien Dällenbach, la mise en abyme. El diseño del juego persigue más que componer una trama convencional, construir la representación jugable del mapa mental y emocional del personaje.Firewatch (Campo Santo 2016) is a video game with an adventure and mystery appearance that belongs to the walking simulator genre. In these video games, the player explores a wide space by walking, manipulating objects and sometimes solving simple puzzles. The spatial environment, aesthetics and music build a playful experience focused on the emotional experience of the characters within the development of a story. Firewatch follows the conventions of this genre and uses several plots whose objective is not to compose a narrative mosaic of characters and stories, but to explain, reinforce and clarify the main story, the relationship of Henry, the protagonist, with his wife. The objective of this paper is to explore the functioning of the narrative and playful levels of Firewatch by applying an analytical methodology based on specular narrative, widely studied in the literature by Mieke Bal, Genette and especially Lucien Dällenbach, the mise en abyme. The design of the game pursues more than composing a conventional plot, building the playable representation of the mental and emotional map of the character. Keywords.
... After the emergence of the genre with the commercial release of Dear Esther (The Chinese Room and Briscoe, 2012), and its explosion as an aesthetic practice after the critically praised Gone Home (The Fullbright Company, 2016), First Person Exploration (FPE) games, ambience action games (Zimmermann and Huberts, 2019), wandering games (Kagen, 2022), or walking simulators (WS)-as they were originally and derogatorily labeled-have received much critical attention (e.g. Carbo-Mascarell, 2016;Grabarczyk, 2016;Navarrete-Cardero and Vargas-Iglesias, 2018), even more after the release of Death Stranding (Kojima Productions, 2019) (see also Cuadrado, 2022;Ferland-Beauchemin et al. 2019;Jørgensen, 2022;Kagen, 2022;Majewski and Siuda, 2023;Montembeault and Deslongchamps-Gagnon, 2019;Zimmermann and Huberts, 2019) as Hideo Kojima's conception of the new strand game genre 1 . ...
This paper considers the two short indie video games It’s Winter (2019) and ROJO: A Spanish Horror Experience (2020) as a comparative case study suggesting that the walking simulator genre is an exceptional vehicle for a playful communal exploration of authoritarian pasts, inasmuch as the nostalgic aesthetics and historical backdrops of these games—post-Soviet and post-Francoist nostalgia, respectively—made them go viral in their home countries when released, stirring up controversy in the local press as well as in various digital forums. Following a qualitative method design, our study aims to answer the question: do these games have the desire to become a representation of the past or are they just examples of how new generations of gamers relate to it? With this in mind, we analyzed nostalgic discourses found in the comment sections of online streaming parties, press coverage, and official websites of both games. After analyzing 711 interactions on It’s Winter and 599 on ROJO, we found marked social differences in the discursive approach to the games’ nostalgic aesthetics as well as differences across platforms, particularly in the case of ROJO. Our analysis shows that these games do not talk about the past in a historical or narrative sense, rather the aesthetic legacy of the spaces represented relates them to historical processes of unresolved national pasts.
Tras tener un papel central en los inicios de los game studies, la ontología del videojuego se ha convertido en un tema poco explorado dentro de la disciplina. Existen razones históricas para la progresiva desatención de esta línea que, a pesar de algunos acercamientos recientes, se mantiene implícitamente estancada en la conciliación entre las posturas de la narratología y la ludología. Sin embargo, el videojuego ha seguido avanzando y cambiando; sus valores esenciales no son los mismos que hace dos décadas. En este artículo se propone una nueva perspectiva sobre la ontología del videojuego que atiende a su carácter dinámico como medio artístico, partiendo de la concepción de Tyniánov y otros autores del formalismo ruso para contrastarla con las posturas desarrolladas desde los game studies. Para demostrar la utilidad de esta perspectiva, se hace un análisis de la consolidación del walking simulator como género, partiendo de la hipótesis de que supuso un cambio paradigmático en la ontología del medio al establecer la narrativa como una propiedad esencial y como centro de la experiencia estética videolúdica.
The aim of this paper is to contribute both theoretically and methodologically to discussions on walking simulator video games. We base our reflection on results grounded in a video game design project conducted as part of our master's thesis. Our research perspective is rooted in pragmatist and constructivist theories of design, such as the epistemology of practice (Schön, 1983; 1992) and project-grounded research (Findeli, 2005). To define the player's experience, we relied on John Dewey's (1934) concept of aesthetic experience. In this context, an individual's experience is characterised as reflective, i.e., meaningful, introspective, creative, and situated. Our project consisted in designing a tailored reflective experience for a unique player-the designer's younger sister. This involved creating a playable prototype featuring gameplay characteristics that game theorists and critics might consider elements of a walking simulator. We describe how the player had a reflective experience both during her interaction with the game and thereafter. Adopting a reflective approach allowed us to better describe and appreciate the life-changing potential of simulators and to ultimately shed light on their capabilities, rather than concentrate on their limitations (Clarke, 2017). We therefore propose a new label, namely, "reflective simulator," as a way to contribute to theoretical discussions about walking simulators. This case study provides a methodological contribution to the field of game studies by describing and reflecting upon the theoretical anchors underpinning game design.
La mise en abyme constituye, como es sabido, un recurso prolífico utilizado no solo en el ámbito literario. Hallamos bellos exponentes en su aplicación a diferentes géneros y ramas artísticas, así como en diversas épocas. A partir de los estudios clásicos de reconocidos teóricos como Lucien Dällenbach, Gérard Genette o Mieke Bal, y del análisis de un corpus de obras que abarca distintas artes y géneros (desde la pintura hasta el cine, el teatro, la novela, el relato y la lírica), este artículo ofrece una tipología que permite clasificar cada uno de los casos propuestos, a pesar del amplio abanico de matices que se despliega en ellos.
This research aims to clear some of the questions that game designers have faced throughout the existence of video games; how to reflect a love story in a way that is considered mature, deep, real and, at the same time, using the main characteristic of this media, interactivity through mechanics, to get a reliable reflection of love. Therefore, we will see through the analysis of the theory of love exposed by Erich Fromm in his book The Art of Loving, what are the requirements for love, the types and
what is the difference between falling in love and loving. About ludology, we will study game design concepts that can be applied in a complementary way to Fromm's analysis, such as player agency, bleeding effect and the space of possibility. As culmen these concepts will be applied in our study case, Firewatch, in which we intend to subtract the previously mentioned objectives to obtain patterns and design elements that can be used in future works.
This article explores how the walking simulator Firewatch (Campo Santo, 2016) successfully problematizes toxic, traditional videogame hypermasculinity, inviting instead the performance of a care-oriented masculinity. Henry is characterized as a hypermasculine protagonist, but the game actively refuses to let the player perform that masculinity, enabling instead the performance of a subtle, complex, and well-developed male character. This destabilization is ludologically intentional and highlights a sensitivity towards the performance of non-hegemonic masculinities. If traditional games enable players to live out a fantasy life of performing hypermasculine acts, then walking simulators reestablish an anxious homogeneity of passive non-performance. Henry's macho presentation is belied not only by the genre of the game he inhabits, but by multiple feminizing factors in the text, including the prologue, the dialogue mechanic, and the way the game constructs the character's (and the player's) paranoid sense of mystery. As the denouement reveals, the danger that loomed was centered in real world challenges like environmental protection and familial guilt, better solved through conversation and patience than violent heroics. The kind of labour the character performs, compared with the adventuring accomplished by most videogame protagonists, underscores the complexity of his identity; though Henry works hard, his hard work is mostly confined to the realm of emotional labour and therapeutic self-care. This feminized labour is reflected in the gameplay as well, highlighting the divide between "hardcore" games (typically characterized as masculine) and the "hard" work associated with femininity. By playing with genre and subverting player expectations, Firewatch enables players to practice and perform masculinities beyond the hyper.
Whether considered as an activity (play) or as an object (game), video games are marked by reflexivity: playing requires the adoption of a distanciated and metacommunicative attitude, and video games use a plethora of metadiscursive processes (metalepsis, mise en abyme and mirror effect). This connexion between reflexivity and game is particularly clear when considering the avatar: by bringing together an empirical player and a fictional character, it works as a deixis. The frequency of reflexive figures in video games and the avatar’s pivotal role in these processes question the way video games can build a narration. Because they can interrupt the construction of the fictional world in order to generate a discourse on the game itself, these figures could indeed be seen as disrupting the figurative power of the game. In order to shed some light on the mechanisms behind the transgression of the boundaries of the fictional world and their function in articulating the game and the fiction, this paper will analyze these formal mechanisms through three distinct games: Portal (Valve Corporation, 2007), The Stanley Parable (Galactic Cafe, 2013) and INSIDE (Playdead, 2016).
This essay complements my earlier symptomatic, sociological and economic reading of mind-game films (‘The Mind-Game Film’ 2009) with a reassessment of their status as a privileged (though minoritarian) object of study for contemporary cinema from a philosophical perspective. This essay also updates the analysis given in the 2009 essay, mindful that there have in recent years been a number of popular big-budget films that qualify as mind-game films. Finally, the essay presents twelve key features of mind-game films: (1) multiple universes, (2) multiple temporalities, (3) causality between coincidence and conjunction, (4) feedback: looped and retroactive causalities, (5) mise-en-abyme constructions, (6) the observer as part of the observed, (7) living with contradictions, (8) imaginary resolutions no longer dissolve real contradictions, (9) antagonistic mutuality under conditions of distributed agency, (10) agency – with the self, against the self, (11) time travel films as black boxes and (12) the mind-game film as pharmakon. Ultimately, mind-game films amplify ontological instability and dismantle both the sovereign subject and its antidote, the divided self of modern subjectivity, in view of accepting more complex but also self-contradictory, more limited but also more extended forms of agency.
![Sébastien ALLAIN [ashm]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/1082117601660932-1635008349642_Q64/Sebastien-Allain-ashm.jpg)
Traducción de: [De theorie van vertellen en verhalen] Reimpresión en el mismo año Incluye bibliografía e índice
Metagames: Postmodern Narrative and Agency in the Video Games of Davey Wreden
- J Andrews
Andrews, J. "Metagames: Postmodern Narrative and Agency in
the Video Games of Davey Wreden." PhD thesis., University of
Southern Mississippi, 2017.
The Aesthetics of Atmospheres
- G Böhme
Böhme, G. The Aesthetics of Atmospheres. Londres: Routledge,
2018.
Walking Simulators: The Digitisation of an Aesthetic Practice
- R Carbo-Mascarell
Carbo-Mascarell, R. "Walking Simulators: The Digitisation of an
Aesthetic Practice." In Proceedings of 1st International Joint
Conference of DiGRA and FDG 2016, Dundee, Scotland.
http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/walkingsimulators-the-digitisation-of-an-aesthetic-practice/
Postmodern Detective Fiction in Videogames
- C Fernández-Vara
Fernández-Vara, C. "Postmodern Detective Fiction in
Videogames."
In
L'Atalante.
Revista
de
estudios
cinematográficos, vol. 31, (2021): 57-70.
Walking Simulators: la exploración hecha videojuego
- S F Galisteo
Galisteo, S. F. Walking Simulators: la exploración hecha
videojuego. Kindle Direct Publishing (Amazon), 2019.
La narración del videojuego en el laberinto de la Mise en Abyme
- Marcos Molano
- M Santorum
Marcos Molano, M. and Santorum, M. "La narración del
videojuego en el laberinto de la Mise en Abyme" In Paradigmas
de la Narrativa Audiovisual. ASRI no 18, edited by R. Álvarez &
M. Rajas, pp. 193-203. Eumed.net-URJC, 2020.
Los caminos del videojuego y el arte: reconfiguraciones del jugador en el walking simulator
- D Maté
Maté, D. "Los caminos del videojuego y el arte: reconfiguraciones
del jugador en el walking simulator." In Panambí, no.9, (2019):
19-31.
The Walking Simulator's Generic Experiences
- H Montembeault
- M Deslongchamps-Gagnon
Montembeault, H. and Deslongchamps-Gagnon, M. "The Walking
Simulator's Generic Experiences" In Press Start, vol. 5, no. 2,
(2019): 1-28.
Caminando en los límites del videojuego: un paseo por los 'walking simulators
- M Muriel
Muriel, M.. "Caminando en los límites del videojuego: un paseo
por los 'walking simulators'." Caninomag. 8 November 2017.
https://bit.ly/3v8mZME
From Walking Simulator to Ambience Action Game: A Philosophical Approach to a Misunderstood Genre
- F Zimmermann
Zimmermann, F. "From Walking Simulator to Ambience Action
Game: A Philosophical Approach to a Misunderstood Genre." In
Press Start, vol. 5, no. 2, (2013): 29-50.