Immersion, Roleplaying, Narrative Design: Concepts for Understanding Videogame Narrative

Abstract

Single-player videogames have been at the forefront of public and academic conversations about the supposed novelty of digital, interactive narratives for the past 30 years. This perceived novelty, together with the digital medium’s capacity for remediating the aesthetics of prior popular media such as novels, film, performance, and of course games, has spurred conflicting discussions about its ontological and teleological nature. Whether one listens to game scholars, developers, or players, there is no single answer that encapsulates the wide range of disciplinary perspectives and personal fixations that make videogames interesting and meaningful. This project therefore synthesizes a range of research across disciplines to address a longstanding yet still insufficiently explored area of videogame inquiry: their historical creation, function, and consumption as a form of narrative.

This dissertation examines how narrative meaning in single-player videogames emerges in the interaction between the material, rhetorical, and formal properties of the game as well as the imaginative engagement and individual experience of a given player. In other words, it delves into how narrative has been conceived and discussed around games, how players cultivate and interpret their gameplay as a narrative experience, and how developers leverage the multimodal potential of videogames towards narrative-driven expression.

It does so through a synthesis of research around three interrelated key terms: immersion, role-playing, and narrative design. The terms immersion and roleplaying help explore how a player’s involvement in the role of a digital avatar—established through the identity and affordances presented by the game’s design and the player’s creative engagement with those fixed elements—can offer a means for subject formation, self-reflection, and critical interpretation. This involves exploring these concepts’ relations between narrative (Murray), digital technology (Coleman), and the self (Gee). The project then examines how this critical engagement textually stems from the player’s experience of a game’s narrative design: a game design concept and development practice related to the coherent integration of a game’s processes, its representational content, and the thematic and subjective meanings players uncover through the narrative event of gameplay (Berger). This framework can help develop greater literacy of the unique ways in which a videogame’s textual meaning is co-constructed between a game’s procedurality, representations, creators, and players.

These topics are supported by case studies of games—predominantly role-playing games, or RPGs—that leverage the expressiveness of the medium towards innovations in digital, interactive storytelling. By situating these discussions of videogame narrative with texts that tackle videogames’ unique media aesthetics (Calleja), indebtedness to prior media (Saler), black-boxed creation process (Švelch), genre in cross-cultural creative contexts (Hutchinson and Pelletier-Gagnon), historical marginalization and entanglements with queer (Ruberg) and femme (Chess) folks, and other relevant topics, this dissertation analyzes the ways that single-player videogames can offer narrative experiences that combine the aesthetic and technical in ways that recontextualize the self’s involvement in fictional engagement.