Welcome to the Fall 2024 special issue of First Person Scholar examining game paratexts!
While the vast majority of game studies work examines games themselves, the paratexts that surround them are equally important for giving games their cultural meaning. We consider paratexts themselves as artifacts, pieces, and/or objects that are game-adjacent or surround the main artifact. Harvie (2017) importantly explores how they are meaningful in terms of influencing our reception of the gaming text, such as the way loading screens and main menus introduce us to relevant parts of gameplay and give us additional information about how to play the game. Paratexts can include interview material, pop figures, magazines, wikis, websites, videos, game walkthroughs, and guides. They, as Fernández-Vara (2019) notes, may influence the player to “read the text a certain way” (p. 7). As such, the exploration of game paratexts is deeply connected to our study of games.
This issue we have five articles that look a different interpretations of paratexts in games:
- “Listening, Watching, Gaming: The Ambient Paratext” by Dr. Chris Hall, (University of the Ozarks), examines the growing phenomenon of video game soundscapes on Youtube:
- “These video paratexts, which are both within and without the game they are sourced from, capture gaming’s visual and aural scenery and reconfigure them into extended ambient milieus emerging from game spaces that might otherwise be passed over.”
- “TRPG wiki writing: Creating a Paratext” by Joseph Arnaud (Canterbury College) looks at tabletop role playing game wikis as a form of paratext similar to game rulebooks.
- “Rulebooks are a received paratext, carrying the values and framing developed by the game designer. A wiki represents a paratext shaped by the GM and players. Wikis can echo elements from rulebooks through art, font, or other content, such as rule snippets and setting material; but this represents a choice by the player group to embrace and emphasise those elements, not just receive and react.”
- “Queer Games and Straight Play?: Queer Representation and Enacting Dominant Sexualities Through Game Playthrough” by Luke Hernandez (University of Texas at Dallas) dives into Youtube playthroughs as paratext focusing on heronormative playthroughs of queer games by straight Youtubers.
- “Yet, I would argue that compared to Dream Daddy, Uncle Neighbor is ostensibly a queer game. It does what Dream Daddy actively chooses not to do through its design. Uncle Neighbor explicitly names its main character as gay and actively engages with the struggles of life as a queer man living under oppression. It also has explicit gay sexual content that is unavoidable. Though it was released three years after Dream Daddy, we can see how the lack of engagement renders Uncle Neighbor almost invisible despite the fact that it is an important and actively queer game. Though not entirely without its fault, it shows how queer representation must contend with the erasure and resistance generated from straight play within mainstream playthroughs.”
- “The Stanley Paratexts: Poaching, Nostalgia, and Malleability” by Miriam Scuderi (Johannes Gutenberg Universität of Mainz) showcases the many ways that the Ultra Deluxe edition of the Stanley Parable incorporates paratext (such as steam reviews of the original game) into the text itself.
- “Ultra Deluxe’s poetic form does not simply include additional gameplay content that expands on The Stanley Parable, but additional texts, taken from the web and conveyed visually for the player to read. This can be interpreted as an act of authorial communication that places the new text in discourse with the audience both as a response to criticism and as a reflection on the intervening years since the game’s original debut.”
- “Ultra Deluxe’s poetic form does not simply include additional gameplay content that expands on The Stanley Parable, but additional texts, taken from the web and conveyed visually for the player to read. This can be interpreted as an act of authorial communication that places the new text in discourse with the audience both as a response to criticism and as a reflection on the intervening years since the game’s original debut.”
- “Descending Deeper Still: Revisiting Spec Ops: The Line A Decade Later” by Chris Martin (University of Waterloo) looks at the paratext of title screens, loading screens, and cutscene transitions in Spec Ops: The Line.
- “In this descent, the game’s levels always involve the player moving down, cleverly masked by strong level design. They are always descending into gaping pits, rappelling down into deeper and deeper darkness, a motif that recurs in the game’s loading screen art as the game goes on. It creates an oppressive atmosphere, and from the perspective of a metaphysical interpretation, a clear symbol for Sgt. Walker’s descent into hell.”