decides who gets in or not; some people are escaping persecution in their country, others may be criminals but offer bribes, which may help the player keep their family alive. Papers, Please provides players with real dilemmas, rather than a Manichean view of the world.
Some games deliberately set up the player to never be able to win – Gonzalo Frasca’s September 12th (2003) gives a view of a middle-Eastern town that the player can attack in order to kill terrorists. As the player attacks and destroys the city, the relatives and friends of the dead terrorists become terrorists themselves, while the game has no end. Similarly, The Snowfield (2011) turns the player into a soldier during the first World War; the soldier looks for shelter and warmth in the freezing cold, and maybe even company, but the destruction of war means there’s not a lot of room to avoid dying from hypothermia. Both games use the properties of digital games that allow players to identify and connect with the character they control, as well as understanding the conflicts that others have to endure.
Last but not least, I would like to defend the importance of the use of the so-called genre fiction as an expressive space to understand human nature. Although science fiction and fantasy settings are often considered escapist, unreal and «not serious», truth is that genre fiction provides us with a metaphorical space to understand the human condition. Horror stories are metaphors that allow us to face our worst fears – see for example how the housing crises of the late 2000s gave way to film titles such as Rec (2007), where a disease in an apartment building ends up in the massacre of its tenants and visitors. Science-fiction has been commenting on the human condition since Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein (1818). Games also have power to use genre fiction in similar insightful ways. For example, the game Planescape: Torment (1999) is set in the world of Dungeons and Dragons, but its premise is to send the player in a quest to find the answer to the question «What can change the nature of a man?»
Games, both digital and non-digital, are cultural artefacts and artistic expressions that can help us understand ourselves and others. The only thing that is getting in the way of being perceived as such is how their makers often think of them as products supposedly devoid of ideas, instead of works that are expressive and engaged with human concerns, hopes and conflicts.
REFERENCES
Flanagan, M. and Nissenbaum, H. (2014). Values at Play in Digital Games. Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press.
Genette, G. (1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca (NY): Cornell University Press.
Jayanth, M. (2016). Forget Protagonists: Writing NPCs with Agency for 80 Days and Beyond. Medium (blog). From https://medium.com/@betterthemask/forget-protagonists-writing-npcs-with-agency-for-80-days-and-beyond-703201a2309.
Juul, J. (2009). A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players. Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press.
Ryan, M.-L. (2003). Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore (MD): The Johns Hopkins University Press.
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