Skip to content
1981
Games, Books and Gamebooks
  • ISSN: 1757-191X
  • E-ISSN: 1757-1928

Abstract

This article offers an intermedial analysis of how books are represented in , building on the media theories of Lars Elleström and W. J. T. Mitchell. The analysis shows how the game pits books against images and exposes latent tensions in the representational conventions of games. The game reflects an intermedial excess that speaks to a more profound crisis in the discursive construction of the computer games medium. Building on the analysis, the article turns to discuss how the medium of computer games is qualified through both its likenesses and differences to other narrative media, most notably literature and cinema. Compared to these media, computer games entice their players with promises of immersion and control, while ultimately failing to fulfil both. The intermedial excess of can be understood as a playful commentary on the promises and limits to the representational capacities of computer games.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1386/jgvw_00102_1
2024-11-30
2025-02-17
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Aarseth, Espen (2004), ‘Quest games as post-narrative discourse’, in M.-L. Ryan (ed.), Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 36176.
    [Google Scholar]
  2. Aarseth, Espen and Günzel, Stephan (2019), Ludotopia: Spaces, Places and Territories in Computer Games, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.
    [Google Scholar]
  3. Anderson, Benedict (2006), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso.
    [Google Scholar]
  4. Arsenault, Dominic and Perron, Bernard (2015), ‘De-framing video games from the light of cinema’, Game: The Italian Journal of Game Studies, 1:4, n.pag., https://www.gamejournal.it/arsenault_perron_deframing/.n. Accessed 7 April 2024.
    [Google Scholar]
  5. Backe, Hans-Joachim (2018), ‘Metareferentiality through in-game images in immersive simulation games’, Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, Malmö, Sweden, 7–10 August, New York: Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 110.
    [Google Scholar]
  6. Barbier, Frédéric (2017), Gutenberg’s Europe: The Book and the Invention of Western Modernity, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
    [Google Scholar]
  7. Bolter, Jay D. and Grusin, Richard (2000), Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  8. Calabrese, Omar (2017), Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times (trans. C. Lambert), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  9. CD Projekt Red (2015), The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Warsaw: CD Project.
    [Google Scholar]
  10. Consalvo, Mia (2017), ‘When paratexts become texts: De-centering the game-as-text’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 34:2, pp. 17783.
    [Google Scholar]
  11. Elleström, Lars (2010), ‘The modalities of the media’, in L. Elleström (ed.), Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1148.
    [Google Scholar]
  12. Elleström, Lars (2013), ‘Photography and intermediality: Analytical perspectives on notions referred to by the term “photography”’, Semiotica, 2013:197, pp. 15369.
    [Google Scholar]
  13. Elleström, Lars (2020), ‘The modalities of media II: An expanded model for understanding intermedial relations’, in L. Elleström (ed.), Beyond Media Borders, Volume 1: Intermedial Relations among Multimodal Media 1, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 391.
    [Google Scholar]
  14. Foucault, Michel (2005), The Order of Things, London: Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  15. Fuchs, Michael and Thoss, Jeff (eds) (2019), Intermedia Games: Games Inter Media: Video Games and Intermediality, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.
    [Google Scholar]
  16. Galloway, Alexander R. (2006), Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  17. Gualeni, Stefano (2016), ‘Self-reflexive videogames: Observations and corollaries on virtual worlds as philosophical artifacts’, GAME: The Italian Journal of Game Studies, 2016:5, n.pag., https://www.gamejournal.it/gualeni-self-reflexive-videogames. Accessed 7 April 2024.
    [Google Scholar]
  18. Hansen, Miriam (2012), Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  19. Hardwig, Bill (2020), ‘The development of print culture, 1865–1914’, A Companion to American Literature, 2020:2, pp. 30822.
    [Google Scholar]
  20. Hutcheon, Linda (2006), A Theory of Adaptation, London: Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  21. Jenkins, Henry (2004), ‘Game design as narrative architecture’, Computer, 44:3, pp. 11830.
    [Google Scholar]
  22. Jørgensen, Ida Kathrine Hammeleff (2018), ‘Media and games: An intermedial framework’, Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, Malmö, Sweden, 7–10 August, New York: Association of Computing Machinery, pp. 110.
    [Google Scholar]
  23. Jørgensen, Ida Katherine Hammeleff (2020), ‘Games as representational artifacts: A media-centered analytical approach to representation in games’, Ph.D. thesis, Copenhagen: IT-Universitetet i København, https://pure.itu.dk/en/publications/games-as-representational-artifacts-a-media-centered-analytical-a. Accessed 7 April 2024.
    [Google Scholar]
  24. Jørgensen, Ida Katherine Hammeleff (2023), ‘The qualified medium of computer games: Form and matter, technology, and use’, in J. Bruhn, A. Lopez-Varela and M. de Paiva Vieira (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 131.
    [Google Scholar]
  25. Jørgensen, Kristine (2013), Gameworld Interfaces, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  26. Juul, Jesper (2004), ‘Introduction to game time/time to play: An examination of game temporality’, in N. Wardrip-Fruin (ed.), First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 13142.
    [Google Scholar]
  27. Klastrup, Lisbeth and Tosca, Susana (2004), ‘Transmedial worlds-rethinking cyberworld design’, in Proceedings of 2004 International Conference on Cyberworlds, Tokyo, Japan, 18–20 November, Washington, DC: IEEE, pp. 40916.
    [Google Scholar]
  28. Kocurek, Carly A. (2012), ‘The agony and the exidy: A history of video game violence and the legacy of Death Race’, Game Studies, 12:1, n.pag., https://gamestudies.org/1201/articles/carly_kocurek/. Accessed 7 April 2024.
    [Google Scholar]
  29. Laurel, Brenda ([1991] 2013), Computers as Theatre, Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley.
    [Google Scholar]
  30. Majkowski, Tomasz Z. (2015), ‘Grotesque realism and carnality: Bakhtinian inspirations in video game studies’, in Proceedings of the Central and Eastern European Game Studies Conference 2014, Brno, 10–11 October, Brno: Masaryk University, pp. 2745.
    [Google Scholar]
  31. Majkowski, Tomasz Z. (2018), ‘Geralt of Poland: The Witcher 3 between epistemic disobedience and imperial nostalgia’, Open Library in Humanities, 4:1, pp. 135.
    [Google Scholar]
  32. Makai, Peter Kristof (2018), ‘Video games as objects and vehicles of nostalgia’, Humanities, 7:4, p. 123, https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/7/4/123. Accessed 7 April 2024.
    [Google Scholar]
  33. Makai, Peter Kristof (2021a), ‘A toolkit for the intermedial analysis of computer games’, in J. Bruhn and B. Schirrmacher (eds), Intermedial Studies: An Introduction to Meaning across Media, London: Routledge, pp. 30928.
    [Google Scholar]
  34. Makai, Peter Kristof (2021b), ‘Media and modalities: Computer games’, in J. Bruhn and B. Schirrmacher (eds), Intermedial Studies: An Introduction to Meaning Across Media, London: Routledge, pp. 6985.
    [Google Scholar]
  35. Mitchell, William John Thomas (1994), Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  36. Mitchell, William John Thomas (2005), What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  37. Mitchell, William John Thomas (2013), Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  38. Mukherjee, Souvik (2015), Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
    [Google Scholar]
  39. Mukherjee, Souvik (2017), Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
    [Google Scholar]
  40. Murray, Janet H. ([1997] 2016), Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  41. Nae, Andrei (2022), ‘From male to colonial gaze: The intersection of patriarchy and colonial discourse in the rebooted Tomb Raider video game series’, in D. Meinel (ed.), Video Games and Spatiality in American Studies, Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 10116.
    [Google Scholar]
  42. Nitsche, Michael (2008), Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Worlds, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  43. Pearce, Celia (2004), ‘Towards a game theory of game’, in N. Wardrip-Fruin (ed.), First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 14353.
    [Google Scholar]
  44. Purgar, Kresimir (ed.) (2016), W. J. T. Mitchell’s Image Theory: Living Pictures, London: Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  45. Rippl, Gabriele and Etter, Lukas (2013), ‘Intermediality, transmediality, and graphic narrative’, in D. Stein and J.-N. Thon (eds), Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative, Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 191217.
    [Google Scholar]
  46. Ruberg, Bo (2019), Video Games Have Always Been Queer, New York: NYU Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  47. Ryan, Marie-Laure (2019), ‘Transmedia storytelling and its discourses’, in N. Salmose and L. Elleström (eds), Transmediations: Communications across Media Borders, London: Routledge, pp. 1730.
    [Google Scholar]
  48. Schleiner, Anne-Marie (2001), ‘Does Lara Croft wear fake polygons? Gender and gender-role subversion in computer adventure games’, Leonardo, 34:3, pp. 22126.
    [Google Scholar]
  49. Schlick, Yaël (2022), Metafiction, London: Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  50. Sedlmeier, Florian (2018), ‘The paratext and literary narration: Authorship, institutions, historiographies’, Narrative, 26:1, pp. 6380.
    [Google Scholar]
  51. Stang, Sarah (2019), ‘The broodmother as monstrous-feminine: Abject maternity in video games’, Nordlit, 42:1, pp. 23356.
    [Google Scholar]
  52. Švelch, Jan (2020), ‘Paratextuality in game studies: A theoretical review and citation analysis’, Game Studies, 20:2, n.pag., https://gamestudies.org/2002/articles/jan_svelch.n.pag. Accessed 7 April 2024.
    [Google Scholar]
  53. Taylor, Nick and Voorhees, Gerald (2018), ‘Introduction: Masculinity and gaming: Mediated masculinities in play’, in N. Taylor and G. Voorhees (eds), Masculinities in Play, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 119.
    [Google Scholar]
  54. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (n.d.), Official website, https://thewitcher.com/en/witcher3. Accessed 20 December 2019.
  55. Żmuda, Michal David (2021), ‘Material windows and working stations: The discourse networks behind skeuomorphic interface in Pathfinder: Kingmaker’, Images: The International Journal of European Film, Performing Arts and Audiovisual Communication, 29:38, pp. 7394.
    [Google Scholar]
/content/journals/10.1386/jgvw_00102_1
Loading
/content/journals/10.1386/jgvw_00102_1
Loading

Data & Media loading...

This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a success
Invalid data
An error occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error
Please enter a valid_number test