Iain Banks’ Complicity (1993) features a fictional ‘world-builder’ game called Despot that actively watches and emulates the player. This fictional game emerges as part of the Scottish Fantastic, a literary tradition that explores split selves and divided identities. Despot plays into this literary tradition as it creates a violent ludic other for the otherwise passive protagonist that plays it. Yet as a closer examination of Despot reveals, the game does not ‘uncover’ or ‘mirror’ the protagonist’s latent violence so much as it refracts it through its procedural logic. Despot prophetically predicts and critiques the rise of the quantified self within games, as features like morality meters, achievements, reputation systems and Elo ratings all ‘watch’ and create ludic versions of the player. Towards the end of the novel, the protagonist leaves Despot running and returns to find a radically altered version of the game. Without the protagonist’s interference, his empire has crumbled and been reclaimed by nature. Through this, Banks also provides a lens through which the quantified self can be subverted and repurposed in ways not limited by the cultural logics that produced it.
This paper explores the portrayal of an obfuscated female protagonist in the minimalist videogame Unpacking, which narrates its story entirely through its mise-en-scène. Adopting a social semiotics approach, the study delves into how the socially constructed elements of the game's mise-en-scène assist players in ‘unpacking’ the protagonist's identity and narrative. Unpacking introduces a novel approach to ludonarratology by intentionally omitting the direct presence of the protagonist, instead focusing on the spaces and objects that players interact with. As players progress through the protagonist's life, these spaces and objects become laden with social significance, creating a shared history between the player and the protagonist. The game diverges from traditional storytelling methods, offering an environment where the story is pieced together through the objects unpacked in each new space the protagonist inhabits. These objects serve as signifiers of her memories, aspirations, and life stages, evolving beyond mere gameplay elements into artefacts that shape her life story. A significant aspect of this paper is its discussion of the novel portrayal of a female protagonist who is omitted from visual representation. Rather than focusing on her physical appearance, the game emphasises unearthing her identity through gameplay, allowing players to discover who she is. The game exemplifies how minimalist narrative techniques, rooted in social semiotics, can foster rich and engaging storytelling experiences. By omitting a visible protagonist, Unpacking allows players to explore and interpret the narrative through the spaces and objects they encounter and the connections they establish between them. This article's significance lies in its examination of Unpacking as a case study for understanding how minimalist narrative techniques can effectively convey a complex and emotionally resonant story through unconventional means.
Nostalgia as a longing for a place or time can simultaneously act as an invitation toward belonging and also as a barrier that divides. Utilizing Svetlana Boym’s (2001) framework of restorative and reflective nostalgia, this study undertakes an analysis of press coverage (n=8) and fan comments on YouTube videos (n=400) addressing the digital videogame Lies of P (2023) as a nostalgic trigger. Understanding Lies of P, both in press coverage and fan discussion was often laden with nostalgia for the 2014 videogame Bloodborne and various adaptions of the children’s story The Adventures of Pinocchio. In the case of fan comments in particular, reflective nostalgia, which allows for the possibility of both longing and critical thought to manifest together, emerges strongly as fans contest their understandings of videogames and childhood stories. Lies of P as a nostalgic trigger precipitates fan participation in analysis and critical reflection of media they might otherwise consider above critique. Understanding such gaming and gaming-adjacent spaces where critique and affection blends offers further insight into the social and technical structures that facilitates boundary maintenance.
This paper investigates how players engage with and reflect on the construction of the nation and its place in history in the turn-based strategy game series Civilization (1991–2025). The Civilization series has been studied extensively concerning portrayals of history and nationhood within the games, mainly through their rule systems. This study’s purpose is to add a player-centered perspective to this body of scholarship and thereby critically challenge assumptions about players’ reception of the games’ portrayals of the nation throughout history. For this purpose, a structuring qualitative content analysis was conducted to analyze player discussions on the largest German-speaking Civilization forum. As this study demonstrates, players neither simply internalize nor ignore the games’ ideological underpinnings inherent to the structure of their rules as previous literature assumes. Rather, players negotiate Civilization’s portrayal of the nation throughout history in complex ways that are, most of all, dependent on their own national identities and feelings of belonging. The study thereby speaks to broader disciplinary discourses within game studies by critically investigating whether or how ideologies ingrained within games’ rule systems are perceived, discussed, negotiated, or sometimes even subverted by players.
This article examines a particular relationship between game authors and players: the possibility for game authors to co-opt the role of players in the very game they created. Among the various ways in which this can occur, the article concentrates on ‘antagonistic game design’: the creation of games meant to frustrate and provoke their players. Player engagement, I argue, does not solely arise from the pleasure of overcoming in-game obstacles, participating in the unfolding of the game’s narrative or defeating other players, but can also emerge from resisting and opposing an imagined persona: the off-putting and often sadistic (implied) author behind the work. By projecting an unsympathetic and adversarial attitude towards players, antagonistically designed games can establish an asynchronous adversarial relationship with them and foster distinctive avenues for meaning-making and the self-validation of players.
