| dc.description.abstract | Despite the rapidly growing popularity of video games, their ideology remains a disputed and controversial topic. This paper examines several influential games through postcolonial and Brechtian lenses, in order to provide a new methodology by which to analyze the ways in which specific sub-genres of games engage with player autonomy and inevitably fail to meaningfully allow player manipulation beyond the scope of coded interactions. The first section discusses “endless” games (such as Animal Crossing, Minecraft, and The Sims), which represent themselves as good-natured fun with no ideological commitments. We find that these games encourage and often require the player to engage in behaviors that colonize the game’s virtual world in pursuit of this fun. These games purport to give the player limitless freedom and tools to express themselves creatively, but in the end the player’s only choice is to what extent they appropriate and utilize the world around them. The second section examines narrative games, like Pathologic and the Mass Effect series, comparing the experiences they engender to theater, but arguing that they are also specific to video games and irreplicable in other media. These games allow the player to behave as the audience, actors, director, and playwright of a digital theatrical production, but the player is always limited in their choices to those paths of action which the game’s designers lay out for them. Narrative games then find themselves aligning with Bertolt Brecht’s theory of alienation making the audience aware of the artifice of the theatric-ludic experiences and thus creating conclusions that otherwise could not exist without awareness of the medium. Ultimately, this thesis examines the nature of games as fundamentally hyper-constructed experiences, whether they are procedurally constructed or highly scripted. Both genres showcase how games have the potential to prompt serious shifts in consciousness, notably as Brecht hoped his theater would. | |
