Abstracts

Cameron Vaziri (Bio)

Press Pause to Play: Stopping the Videogame as Poststructuralist Engagement

Espen Aarseth’s, Cybertext, introduces a method of textual analysis for videogames as ergodic literature. Noted for its inclusion of the reader/player as a co-author of the text, ergodic literature allows for either a collaborative or combative political relationship between the two storytellers (Hayot & Wesp, 2004).

A videogame’s ergodicism is measured in degrees depending on the amount of player input into the narrative’s development. This can be depicted as a decision tree tracking all possible permutations of player actions upon the story’s progression. That the endgame is entirely dependent upon the player’s choices reveals the contingency of any resultant outcome.

However, this still assumes a linear trajectory along a preset path. Introduced by Aarseth, this paper seeks to expand upon one of the underexplored qualities of ergodic literature – the ability to pause, save, and replay. Specifically, that the ability to pause to reflect on game decisions and to save and replay from any point in the game’s decision-path enables players to change how they consider decision-making.

The resulting game endings can take many forms. For example, playing to see all possible scenarios rendering any narrative meaningless. Of particular interest is the ability to stall any form of progression through a permanent narrative pause. A reader who stopes reading a novel may stop their emplotment, however, the structure of the narrative remains independently. In highly ergodic videogames, no conclusion exists once the player departs. In this sense, the player’s absence from the story halts not merely the witnessing of the progression but the progress itself – a response reminiscent of Bartleby’s “I prefer not.”

Thus, just as the videogame’s content can be demonstrated to be fluid through a player’s stylistic challenge to the designer’s imported semiotic meanings (Vaziri, 2013), the pause reveals the poststructuralist form of the videogame as narrative medium.