“This show has now made Pokémon creepy to me.” Augmented and Alternate Reality Games, Interactive Narrative and the Documentary TV Series Hellier

Presenter: David Sweeney
Registration Number: 024
Institution: The Glasgow School of Art, Scotland

Abstract: The title of this paper comes from a March, 2021 post on the sub-Reddit dedicated to the online paranormal investigation TV series Hellier (2019 - ). The poster, Dessie_Hull, states they can no longer enjoy the Augmented Reality Game Pokémon GO (released in 2016) after watching Hellier because a ‘goblin’ in the game resembles images emailed to Greg Newkirk, one of the investigators in the series, by an individual who claims these beings are real and dwelling in the Kentucky town that gives Hellier its name. The first season of the series (2019) shows Newkirk receive a series of cryptic communiques, after his first excursion to the town, from a mysterious underground figure associated with both occult practice and anarchism known as Terry Wriste (a play on the word ‘terrorist’) urging him to continue the investigation. As the season progresses, Newkirk, and the investigative team he has assembled, begin to suspect that they are being manipulated by Wriste for his own enigmatic ends: at the end of the second season (2020) they come to the conclusion that the events of the first, including a string of seeming coincidences/synchronicities, were in fact a form of esoteric initiation orchestrated by Wriste which has fundamentally altered their view of the world, even though they never actually encounter the Hellier ‘goblins’. Both seasons are presented as documentary and the team has continued to maintain that the series is a work of non-fiction. If this is true, it is possible that the team was, unwittingly, involved in not an Augmented but an Alternate Reality Game, designed by Wriste. Regardless of whether it is a genuine documentary or not, the series certainly represents the investigative team’s immersion in an interactive quest narrative comparable to such Alternate Reality Games as Joseph Matheny’s Ong’s Hat from 1988 – widely considered to be the first Alternate Reality Game and, like Wriste, associated with both anarchism and occultism - or The Jejune Institute (2008-11) devised by Jeff Hull, which appears to be influenced by Situationism. The team’s immersion parallels the experience of Hellier viewers, such as Dessie_Hull, who are active on Reddit and other social media platforms where they discuss not only the series but also the numerous esoteric texts referenced by the investigators throughout both seasons. It may be, then, that Hellier is not only a work of fiction but also itself an Alternate Reality Game, in which viewers who believe that it is a work of non-fiction are unwitting participants to the extent that, for Dessie_Hull, it has affected their participation in an Augmented Reality Game, the obviously fictional (being based on an existing media franchise) Pokémon GO. In this paper, drawing on recent discussions pertaining to both Augmented and Alternate Reality Games and the consent (or lack thereof) of participants – including claims that the QAnon conspiracy movement is an Alternate Reality Game gone awry – as well as a range of literary, media and game theory, I will discuss Hellier in the context of the history and development of such games, using the examples mentioned above as points of comparison and focusing on the interactive narrative elements of the series.

Bio: David Sweeney is a lecturer in The Glasgow School of Art's Design History & Theory department specializing in popular culture, a subject on which he has published and presented widely. Publications include journal articles and book chapters on such topics as music and nostalgia in Twin Peaks: The Return; the Marvel Cinematic Universe; the development of the Marvel comics universe; time travel cinema, digital comics and the relationship between media technology and the ongoing Folk Horror Revival. His critical studies of the novels of Michael Marshall Smith and the Netflix Originals series The OA are due to be published later this year by Subterranean Press and Auteur respectively.

Exploring-Deconstructing Reality with the Interactive Storytelling.

Presenter: Sevcan Aytaç Sönmez
Registration Number: 050
Institution: Yaşar University, Izmir, Turkey
Abstract: Black Mirror is a ground-breaking, sensational, staggering, critical science fiction TV series depicting a dystopic near future and present time. It is concerned with various themes about society, environment, technology, social media, power, dehumanization, and cyborgs. From the beginning of the series, each episode is focused on these themes with an innovative approach by using creative narration styles. But the most innovative boom of Black Mirror is definitely the interactive episode Bandersnatch. Mainly, Bandersnatch focuses on “reality.” With the characters and their actions in different pathways of the fragmented plot, the main issue is “reality” and “perception of reality,” or the illusion of the world. This questioning is being made by a medium—cinematographic narration—which constitutes itself as an art form of representing and reproducing reality but also defined as “illusion of reality” in some theoretical approaches. Nothing could be more creative than to bring together this approach on filmic reality in questioning “reality” with an interactive filmic narration. So, this article combines theories on filmic reality and the main approaches on illusion of reality in cinema, with the narrative style, spectator experience, self-reflectivity in Bandersnatch. Going further on the theme “reality and illusion” we can refer to the extensive literature of philosophy. The philosophers have been asking the question "what is reality" for ages. In relation with the focus of Bandersnatch we can remember William James with his “multi-reality” approach. Or focusing on “time and reality” notion, which is one of the constituting layers of the narrative, we should refer to Henri Bergson and his concept of multiplicity and the notion of time as “duration.” From Bergson, necessarily we should jump to Gilles Deleuze’s “time-image theory” arising from Bergson, in order to understand Bandersnatch as a philosophical narrative interrogating reality by using a new cinematographic form.

Bio: Sevcan Aytaç Sönmez was born in Turkey in 1983. She lives and works in İzmir. She is an academic at Yaşar University at Art and Design Faculty, Film Design Department. Her articles were published in national and international journals. Her first book Remembering Through the Movies was published from a well-known national publisher in Turkey. She has written book chapters, which were published nationally and internationally. A chapter entitled “Modernism, Memory and Cinema” was published in Film and Literary Modernism, edited by Robert McParland (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013). The national book chapters are “Hard Times, 1990’s Turkish Cinema” in Reflections of Modernism, edited by Eric van Zührer and Funda Barbaros, in 2017. “We Are All in Blockade, Time and Style in the movie ‘Abluka’” in New Frames: Cinema in Turkey, edited by Serhat Serter, in 2017. She is one of the editors of a recent book entitled Women’s Camera, Women Directors After 2000s, 2019. Her academic study areas are cultural studies, gender issues, and urban studies. Apart from theoretical works, she is engaged with experimental filmmaking and video art. Her films were shown and awarded in various festivals.

Patient Zero, Parasite, Epidemic Agent: The Player’s Role in Watch Dogs Legion.

 

Presenters: Riccardo Retez and Luca Miranda
Registration Number: 028
Institution: IULM University, Milan, Italy
Abstract: This research investigates the figure of the player as a pathogen agent able to impose a propagating form of homologation within the video game Watch Dogs: Legion (Ubisoft 2020). The study involves the analysis of the role of the player in Watch Dogs: Legion, according to a multiple configuration: as patient zero, parasite, and epidemic agent. Therefore, the role of the player is potentially expressed through his being a starting point of contagion, a parasite that raids and bends the bodies of NPCs (non-player characters) and an epidemic agent—a potentially uncontrolled transmission medium. Rafizadeh, Manavirad and Liberati (2020) state that in video games, players are able to move and progress in the interactive world of the game while watching the avatar from an external point of view. The relation between virtual worlds and players can be highlighted as a form of social and political agency. As Daniel Muriel and Garry Crawford (2018) asserted, video games can provide perspectives on political actions, as well as on the hallmarks of the contemporary. By choosing a specific role, the player expresses political, social, and anthropological attitudes, useful to frame cultural configurations and visual representations through relational models—amidst instances in contemporary texts. Watch Dogs: Legion is set in a totalitarian London of a hypothetical future. Johnson Craig and Tulloch Rowan (2017) stated that the video game landscape is permeated by dystopian settings, where social collapse and totalitarian frames are amongst the favourite scenarios depicted. As stated by Jacob Aron (2020), in the game there is not one or more narratively relevant avatars: the player can impersonate any NPC in the game world. Since this contagion is the fundamental mechanic of the experience, this paper shows how it is not the NPC to represent and be subject to an idea of homologation—a standardized concept in the video game industry—but how it is the player himself who imposes a propagating form of homologation— with his tastes, choices, and political, social and anthropological behaviours. Regarding the game narrative framework, it is possible to state that the totalitarian form implemented in the game design—through narrative and gameplay dynamics—is addressed by the player across an epidemic process and expression. Compared to the video game’s trend to homologate the player to ideologies, constructs, and mechanics of the product, the analysed text proposes an inverse process. The paper argues that as an epidemic agent, the player both generates and fights (as a network) a process of homologation, creating kindred avatars and tackling totalitarianism.

Bio: Riccardo Retez
Riccardo Retez is a PhD student in Visual and Media studies at IULM University, Milan. His research project investigates the behaviour and attitude of the game live streaming spectator through phenomena of social, economic and sexual consumption. He received a Master's Degree in Television, Cinema and New Media at IULM University in 2019 and a Bachelor’s Arts Degree in Graphic Design and Multimedia at the LABA of Florence in 2017. He recently published his first academic book, Machinima vernacolare (Concrete Press 2020) and has also contributed to academic publications in journals (Ludica 2020; Eracle Journal 2021) and volumes (Machinima, The State of Art 2021).

Bio: Luca Miranda
Luca Miranda is an independent researcher and artist that lives and works in Italy. His research is focused on game and visual studies, the relationship between reality and simulation, and the aesthetic potential of the avatar. He experiments with game photography, machinima and visual investigations. In 2020, he received a Master’s Degree in TV, Cinema and New Media at IULM University in Milan and in 2016 a Bachelor’s Degree in Media and Art at the University of Bologna. In 2018, he co-founded Eremo, a Milanese artistic collective, and since 2020 he collaborates as a curator with the Milan Machinima Festival. His first book, Giocare a camminare, will be published in 2021.

As We Have Watched: What Now Arises from a Reconsideration of the Concept of Interactive Digital Narrative.

 

Author: Hanney Roy
Registration Number: 056
Institution: Solent University, Southampton, UK
Abstract: If we consider the publication of Bandersnatch (Slade, 2018) by Netflix as a watershed moment for interactive digital narrative (IDN), are we to believe that we have now moved into a golden age, or are we still in an age of discovery? In 2008, Tom Abba, writing in the Journal of Media Practice, situates that moment as a turning point for IDN, offering several pertinent insights into the nature of interactive storytelling. Though Abba concludes that the degree to which experiments in IDN have been enabled has been, up to that point in time, extremely limited. Whereas now, some twelve years later and three years’ post-Bandersnatch, the opportunity to experiment has been granted as a plethora of emergent platforms offer just such a possibility. Having taken advantage of the opportunity to collaborate with Stornway.io (an online IDN story map editor) and experiment in the creation of IDN with a group of second-year media production students at a UK university, this paper revisits Abba’s 2008 article and asks questions about the nature of IDN in the current technological and cultural context. It offers a reflection on issues that emerge from the experience of introducing IDN to undergraduate students on a programme of study. The paper explores a model for teaching and creating IDN that draws on conversations with the founders of Stornaway.io, library research into IDN, as well as personal reflections by the researcher and the students involved in the collaboration. Initial findings point to the importance of agency as a key topic for anyone teaching IDN ideation and story development. Those with experience of teaching screenwriting will recognize the difference between story and plot as an important threshold concept, one further exacerbated by the need to include decision points that initiate branching narratives. The interaction between the decision points and "the story," rather than "the plot," being an important factor in providing the audience with satisfaction through meaningful action. An etymological exploration of the contrast between the terms "affect" and "effect" provides a playful means of thinking through these issues and arriving at a basis for an aesthetic of dramatic agency. Throughout this discussion, the paper also re-evaluates the difference between IDN and other forms of interactive experience, such as computer games, ARG's or transmedia experiences in order to establish a framework for thinking about interactive fiction video as a distinct and unique practice. In conclusion, the paper poses a final question asking if we can now reconsider IDN in terms of what we have watched rather than, as Abba terms it, what we might watch. 

Bio: Hanney Roy has extensive experience of leading academic teams and has published on the use of live projects to bridge the divide between higher education and the world of work. More recently, Roy has turned towards creative talent development and community engagement as an important strand of his work. Alongside this, he continues to grow as a creative practice researcher and the developer of community driven, immersive, audio-visual arts projects. Recently funded projects include Darkside Portside AR/poetry-film trail, Cursed City Dark Tide transmedia experience, and the Snow Witch Art Exhibition in the city of Portsmouth, UK. He is the festival director for Making Waves International Film festival and for DVMISSION 48 Hours Film Challenge.