Abstract
Game retellings are when a player tells of the significant moments arising from their experiences of a game. It has been suggested that retellings are a marker of a game’s success, insofar as they are evidence that the game has produced something worth telling to others. This paper argues that a subset of retellings take a critical stance towards their ‘own’ game, surfacing failures and breakdowns and rendering them the objects of shared public scrutiny. These are self-reflexively critical retellings, and they present an underutilized tool for scholars and designers of interactive narrative.
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Notes
- 1.
James Ryan identifies a failing of previous accounts of emergent narrative: previous thinking about the form assumed that the raw outputs of systems were themselves already narratives, with curation being relegated to an incidental term or ignored entirely. For Ryan, emergent narratives do not arise from systems alone, but rather in the meeting between systems and curators— be they AI or human, player or non-participating. For this reason, it seems fair to say that a retelling is a subset of what he means by curationist emergent narrative: retelling is curation with an additional, public-facing narrative layer.
- 2.
Here I borrow Eladhari’s term (interactive narrative system) [6]. My main concern and body of evidence will however focus on games in particular. Games are ‘popularized’ communal objects that create the communities within which critical retellings circulate.
- 3.
Part of why I see these retellings as explicitly critical is their use of irony. Irony, according to Linda Hutcheon, always has an 'edge' [11]: it's critical of something, and quite often the straight discourse that forms one half of its double-speak. Here the 'straight' discourse just is the narrative system.
- 4.
To list just two examples: the Dwarf Fortress retelling ‘One Stands Alone’ involves a character referencing the game’s plummeting frame-rate [16], and the famous retelling ‘Oilfurnace’ ends with a bizarre, fourth wall breaking moment that references the Dwarf Fortress community mantra— losing is fun [14].
- 5.
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Sych, S. (2020). When the Fourth Layer Meets the Fourth Wall: The Case for Critical Game Retellings. In: Bosser, AG., Millard, D.E., Hargood, C. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12497. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62516-0_18
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