The Manchester Games Studies Network is hosting two exciting research papers on contemporary indie videogames, presented by Dr Seán Travers and Charlotte Gislam. The event will be chaired by Dr Matthew Carter (Manchester Metropolitan University).
The event will take place online, tickets are free and can be booked on Eventbrite here.
‘Nihilism, Violence and Popular Culture: The Postmodern Psychopath in Toby Fox’s Undertale’
Dr Seán Travers (University College Cork)
According to Jean-François Lyotard, postmodernism is characterised by ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’. This refers to scepticism towards the grand narratives we rely upon to explain how the world works, such as history, religion and concepts of identity. This decline of metanarratives has been found to produce traumatic effects, resulting in a profound sense of nothingness in the postmodern subject that Alan Pratt describes as ‘existential horror’. It is this experience that preoccupies a number of contemporary trauma texts. However, the protagonists of these texts are depicted as not simply experiencing existential crises, but becoming corrupt in response to this emptiness. For instance, in certain postmodern horror texts, spaces are haunted by literal emptiness as opposed to the more traditional ghost or monstrous creature, by the apparently more chilling reminder of life’s inherent meaninglessness. The residents of these houses are shown in turn to search for specters and eventually, become the monsters of the narrative.
My paper examines how this phenomenon, the trauma produced by postmodern emptiness and resulting corruption of the sufferer, is represented in video games. Moral choice games employ decision-making as one of their main mechanics, wherein elements of the narrative are altered by players’ choices. These games contain a morality system, enabling the player to take the ‘good’ or ‘evil’ path in the narrative. Recent games are taking an innovative approach to morality systems, employing metafictional techniques to make players reflect upon their immoral in-game actions. This is replaying a game making different choices from a first playthrough to access alternative narrative content, which usually entails playing a game’s evil route having previously played the hero. Such games interrogate player violence as a means of satisfying narrative curiosity, thereby incorporating the concept of corruption stemming from emptiness. My paper examines this idea of ‘turning evil’ out of ennui in Toby Fox’s Undertale.
‘Learning Spatial Grammar in The Binding of Isaac’
Charlotte Gislam (Manchester Metropolitan University)
In the rogue-like game The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth + (2015) game space is procedurally generated using an algorithmic system which takes in a seed value (a combination of 8 characters) and from that input of data produces a layout of rooms from a set of determined rules. In a typical playthrough players begin with no knowledge of the floor’s layout, having to uncover the space via moving through it, defeating the enemies they find along the way, until they find the boss room, defeat the boss, and then continue their journey down through the game’s Gothic subterranean depths. Once that playthrough ends (in either victory or failure) they are brought back to the beginning with a new seed value and a new layout of game space to explore. Consequently players cannot learn, become familiar with, and subsequently master their surroundings like players of Super Mario Bros (1985) might of World 1-1.
In this paper I will examine how the use of this procedural content generation system in The Binding of Isaac requires players to develop a different relationship to the game’s space which subsequently has an affect on how narrative is presented. To do this I will be using Michel de Certeau’s pedestrian speech acts as a way of theorising this relationship, to show that through uncovering procedurally generated space players learn the underlying grammar of the game’s spatial system, rather than being required to commit to memory a specific manifestation of that grammar. I argue that this changed relationship to space is key to understanding how The Binding of Isaac is created within the Gothic mode as the process of perpetual uncovering affects the way narrative is produced at the moment of play.