In this paper, I discuss videogames as a form of cultural ecology using the examples of Flower (2013) and Shadow of the Colossus (2011). This conception of games and play construes the meaning-making process as an interaction between different elements (culture, player, game), while rejecting linear approaches to it. As such, I regard video games as multi-faceted phenomena and as hybrids between many things, the predominant form of which intermingles the qualities of traditional games and (participatory) narratives to involve the player in diverse ways. Such deliberations involve a discussion of fictionality, which I will describe as upholding a specific, aggravated relation (referentiality) between the fictional and empirical world, and the experience of meaning in games. Moreover, by describing the act of playing dystopia from a phenomenological point of view, which is nonetheless anchored in structuralism and narratology, the book expands its horizon to create a coherent theory of aesthetic response for video game narratives. The benefits of such a study are first of all the establishment of a framework to categorise and describe the video game dystopia as a genre-the results of which are of additional importance to utopian studies in a transmedial environment. This conceptual player is described in a non-personified way as the affordance and appeal structure of a game (and as a system of perspectives that constitute the game) that involves the empirical player in a creative negotiation of its bounds through play. Thereby, I am heavily influenced by theories of aesthetic response form representational art and literature (specifically Kendell Walton’s and Wolfgang Iser’s) and make abundant use of the concept of the implied player. To describe this aesthetic response to playing dystopia (and the resulting ethical incentive to gradually change the world), I analyse the tripartite dialectic between empirical player, dystopian game, and culture (empirical world). This venture into the fictional reality of dystopia shows potential to warn players about negative trends within empirical reality and to explore emancipatory routes that may transform the gameworld-and, in the long run, their empirical surroundings.
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By sending players on a journey through hell but retaining a hopeful (utopian) core, it involves them in a playful trial action (or test run) in which they may test, track, and explore in detail an estranged gameworld and an alternative societal model through imaginative and ergodic means. I am thereby arguing the video game dystopia describes a new strategic enterprise of the utopian philosophy. My aim in this book is to scrutinise the video game dystopia as a genre and to analyse the player’s aesthetic response to its nightmarish gameworlds.
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