Games, literature and imagination

Abstract

The game world has recently been experiencing a renaissance of games that lean strongly on the use of text to communicate their worlds, characters and events. Games like Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer, 2013), Device 6 (Simogo, 2013), 80 Days (Inkle Studios, 2014), Blood and Laurels (Short, 2014) and A Dark Room (Doublespeak Games, 2013) are examples of text-heavy indie games that have not only been incredibly successful commercially, but also raised the bar in terms of the quality of writing found in games. It is also evident that the writing employed by these games has aspirations of literariness. These games are a continuation of a trajectory in indie game design that moves markedly away from the drive towards mimetic representation found in mainstream game titles by requiring more active engagement of the player’s imaginative faculties through the employment of more low-fidelity visual representation, more abstracted simulation and the use of text, among other things. The emphasis on imagination (Bateman, 2011) of contemporary indie games highlights a continuity between print, electronic texts and cybertexts that we too often take for granted: the printed, spoken or flickering word’s main function is to connect our imaginative faculties. The tightest relationship between literature, electronic literature and games therefore lies in way they each shape our imagination. The other papers in this panel will tackle this issue in relation to literature and electronic literature. This paper will explore the games’ constituent elements: their mechanical systems, representational layers and hardware affordances shape the imagination, comparing and contrasting these elements with those found in print literature and electronic texts. These constituent elements form the percepts that stimulate our imaginative faculty into internal images that allow us to experience the fictional/simulated world. Theorists have used various terms to account for this blending of perception and imagination in consciousness, but the co-dependence of these faculties seems to be an area of agreement. Sartre calls the percept “the physical analogue” (Sartre, 1972) which we experience in consciousness by “dressing” this analogue with our imagination in a process he calls “synthetic projection”. Walton calls it a “prop” (Walton, 1996) which is invested with imagination in the process of “fictionality” (Walton 1996, 2013), a term shared by Walsh (2007) in his work on fiction in literature. Iser (1979) has similarly built his theory on the psychology of reading on the coming together of text and mind within the imagination. Within cognitive psychology Kosslyn et. al. (1999) have conducted a series of experiments that prove that mental imagery is activated with every form of sensory input, concluding that the imagination plays an important part in perception. This view is shared by a number of researchers of visual perception that have studied the imagination including Kearney (2002), Richardson (1969), Finke (1989) and Block (1981). This paper will thus explore the relationship between the representational elements of text-heavy indie games and the mental images these create as they combine with the mechanical rule systems that animate them. In so doing I will argue that the combination of minimalist and abstract visual representation together with a tightly designed mechanical rule system that has been created from the ground up specifically for the individual game (unlike the majority of mainstream games) creates a vivid imaginative experience that gives the indie games considered here their alluring power. They provide hints, metaphors and indications of the worlds they represent, leaving it up to the player to fully flesh out those worlds, characters and events with their own imagination giving players an engaging and memorable gaming experience that they have had a stronger role in co-creating.