Browsing by Subject "digital games"

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Access status: Open Access ,
Lost worlds of »Andromeda«
(Wydawnictwa AGH, 2021) Majkowski, Tomasz Z.; Kozyra, Magdalena
The paper offers a reading of Mass Effect: Andromeda (BioWare, 2017) vis-à-vis lost world romance (also dubbed »lost race romance«, or »imperial romance«), a late-Victorian era novelistic genre originating from H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines and serving as a major tool for British Empire propaganda and a source of early science-fiction conventions. We claim that the narrative failure of this ill-received game stems from its adherence to the rigid principles and forceful themes of the genre and the colonial and imperial imaginary informing it. Our analysis aims at highlighting the way 19$^{th}$-century novelistic convention can be remediated as contemporary digital games, and to expose the link between the imperial imaginary and the ways in which open-world digital games are structured, on both the narrative and gameplay levels, even when they do not directly refer to the historical colonial legacy.
Access status: Open Access ,
The future, the crisis, and the future of »replay story«
(Wydawnictwa AGH, 2021) Imbierowicz, Eleonora Teresa
The article explores the notion of replay story by Janet Murray. Replay story – a game telling a story through choices and allowing the player to access all of their outcomes – was supposed to be a step in the process of games becoming the most important narrative medium of a new era. Soon after that, the reasonable critique emerged: not every story can, and should, be told through a replay story. Some, mostly tragic ones, can even be highly controversial if told in such form. However, new ways of storytelling through replay have emerged in recent years: New Game +, multiple routes that influence one another, and games that are conscious of previous playthroughs. Three years ago, Ian Bogost stated that the possibilities of development of narrative games had already been played out, and yet, there still is a chance that replay story can once again be considered a keystone in the evolution of games.