Tamer Thabet

With impunity, millions of players traverse the fictional landscapes of video games every day. Video Game Narrative and Criticism treats gameplay as the player's own psychological experience where fears, desires, and anxieties are projected onto the game's fictional world. By exploring the structural peculiarities of storytelling in video games, the book develops a critical paradigm that explains the meaning of gameplay as self-discovery. The player-response criticism considers the nature of game fiction by centralizing the player in the analysis. This interpretative model is not a rigorous analytical toolbox. Rather, it responds flexibly to the essential fluidity, temporality, and openness of a player's own experience in an intelligent fictional world.

This book is about the three identities of the videogame, the gamer, and Game Studies. I write that there are no definitive truths but rather discourses and constructions; ideas, actions, beliefs, and practices related to videogames are discourses that merge and shape our perception of videogames as an area of study of its own right. These discursive responses meet and clash creating what we call truths, which are temporary and negotiable.

This perspective is inspired by Foucauldian ideas and present few questions about videogame-related identities in and outside of academe. Does Game Studies have a conceptual core? What makes game studies difficult to be disciplined in academe? What do we learn from the scholarly and popular discourses on videogames that would help understand the identity questions related to games?

I go on to describe what makes the videogame identity according to game studies: aesthetics, fictions, meaning-making, performance, transformation, etc. and what makes it difficult for game studies being an open market of ideas and an academic "un-discipline". This leads me to the gamer's identity: an aficionado first, and a connoisseur of fictional worlds.

In diesem Aufsatz wird eine Vorstellung der Beziehung zwischen Romanen und Computerspielen in der Gegenwart vorgestellt. Es wird vorgeschlagen, Computerspiele und den Roman als Teil eines gemeinsamen Netzwerks narrativer Erzählwelten zu verstehen, gestützt auf die Beispiele Halo und BioShock, die sich des Romans bedienen, um die spezifischen Möglichkeiten jener Form zu nutzen. Das Kapitel stellt zunächst eine Version des Computerspielnarrativs vor und geht der Frage nach der relativen Position von Roman und Computerspiel im zeitgenössischen Roman-Netzwerk nach. Dabei wird für die wichtige Möglichkeit argumentiert, Computerspiele als „romanhaft“ im Sinne von Mikhail Bakhtin zu verstehen, insofern als sie Eigenschaften aufweisen, die normalerweise als Domäne des Romans verstanden werden. Diese Eigenschaften sind es, die es sowohl ermöglichen, dass Narrative in Franchiseromanen aufgegriffen werden, während sie Computerspielnarrative selbst dem Ideal des Romans immer näher bringen.

Thabet and Lanzendörfer present a version of the relationship between novels and video games in the contemporary moment, suggesting the importance of understanding the video game and the novel as sitting in a shared network of narrative story-worlds, focusing specifically on the examples of Halo and BioShock as franchises making use of the novel in efforts to utilize the specific affordances of the form.

In terms of good and evil, our simple goal is to show how grey are three videogame characters in The Cave (2013) in the light of the postmodernist convention of antihero. As in all media, Postmodernism seems to have permeated videogame stories as well. Throughout the article, we will try to highlight slipperiness of the distinction between the hero and the antihero in The Cave as opposed to the moral clear-cut demarcation in other games.

The Canadian/Brazilian production Red Foot Saga (RFS) is a narrative videogame about the cultural memory of Londrina city. Our goal is to examine the function of symbolic mediation through the videogame’s nonverbal language. The authors illustrate that symbolic mediation requires adaptation and recoloring.

I would like to invite you to play "The Red Foot Saga", a free to play 3D browser adventure game about the history and culture of Londrina city. This is the first product of the "Local Video Games Project", which is an international partnership between universities and private sector leaders to explore new horizons in game design and content and to use games to create bridges of knowledge between world cultures.
Watch the gameplay video on youtube.
Our choice of Londrina city in Brazil for our first game resulted in the creation of the Red Foot Saga by Canadian and Brazilian academics, developers, and entrepreneurs. The Local Video Games project aims to train postgraduate students on game design and development to employ local culture, fiction, folklore, and history in video game content to communicate local narratives and contexts in an interactive medium.
The Red Foot Saga renders a modern Brazilian narrative local to the city of Londrina. We built four extensive levels at high-end sophistication that render tens of historical and cultural experiences playable. Our goal from the beginning was to express the unique identity of Londrina internationally and the game making techniques we followed were specifically designed to engage the player in an experience that is both realistic and surreal. We pulled through different deadlines to launch the game on December 10, 2014, which is the 80th birthday of Londrina. In the first few hours we had 400 people playing the game from four different continents.

The Local Video Games model includes educating graduate students on game making, theory, and design approaches, which was the case in Londrina where 20 Ph.D. master’s, and undergraduate students participated in the project. Students, researchers, and entrepreneurs traveled between Canada and Brazil and spent months in the studio to conceptualize and build the game. Our next stop will be somewhere in Northern Ontario, and will soon be publicized.

Please enjoy the game.
Tamer Thabet, Project leader