The world that wasn’t there: Interstitial ontological spaces in contemporary video games
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Shawn Edrei
Abstract
This paper will examine three contemporary video games – Undertale, The magic circle and Pony Island – with an eye towards delineating the ways in which their unique storyworlds and ontological structures align with recent trends in unnatural narratology. Specifically, these games contain interstitial diegetic spaces, and empower the player to move through ‘cracks’ in the façade of the fictional world by acting as a metaphorical programmer, manipulating game files and other extradiegetic components. The metaleptic processes enabled by these actions expose aspects of the respective storyworlds which have been deliberately concealed. Consequently, the games in question literalize existing theories regarding our projection and cognitive exploration of fictional worlds, as they are singular in their capacity for experimentation and transgression of established ontological frameworks.
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© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- When not to tell stories: Unnatural narrative in applied narratology
- The “unnatural” French novel of today: Éric Chevillard’s L’Auteur et moi
- Your body is our black box: Narrating nations in second-person fiction by Edna O’Brien and Jennifer Egan
- We narration in Chang-rae Lee’s On such a full sea and Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the attic: “Unnaturally” Asian American?
- Re-imagining first-person narrative as a collective voice in John Edgar Wideman’s Sent for you yesterday
- Nonlinearity and focalisation in Attila Janisch’s Másnap
- The world that wasn’t there: Interstitial ontological spaces in contemporary video games
- Forum: Sacrificial narratives
- Sacrificial narratives: Conversation from multiple perspectives
- Reversed ventriloquism: Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s sacrificial narrative
- The concept of “bare life” in camp literature
- The Serbian mythomoteur as sacrificial narrative
- The Zrinski-Frankopan conspiracy as a national sacrificial narrative
- The poetic sacrifice: Cultural saints and literary nation building
- Mnemonic battles over the NATO bombing of Serbia – analysis and critique
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- When not to tell stories: Unnatural narrative in applied narratology
- The “unnatural” French novel of today: Éric Chevillard’s L’Auteur et moi
- Your body is our black box: Narrating nations in second-person fiction by Edna O’Brien and Jennifer Egan
- We narration in Chang-rae Lee’s On such a full sea and Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the attic: “Unnaturally” Asian American?
- Re-imagining first-person narrative as a collective voice in John Edgar Wideman’s Sent for you yesterday
- Nonlinearity and focalisation in Attila Janisch’s Másnap
- The world that wasn’t there: Interstitial ontological spaces in contemporary video games
- Forum: Sacrificial narratives
- Sacrificial narratives: Conversation from multiple perspectives
- Reversed ventriloquism: Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s sacrificial narrative
- The concept of “bare life” in camp literature
- The Serbian mythomoteur as sacrificial narrative
- The Zrinski-Frankopan conspiracy as a national sacrificial narrative
- The poetic sacrifice: Cultural saints and literary nation building
- Mnemonic battles over the NATO bombing of Serbia – analysis and critique
