Paweł Frelik
(University of Warsaw)
Abstract:
Video games are, to use Raymond Williams’ phrase, structures of feeling as well as systems of affects, both emotional and bodily. Some of the players’ affective responses to game texts have now been well theorized. For instance, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow” has been repeatedly mentioned in both academic works in game studies and more popular approaches to games (e.g. Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken). Elsewhere, Aubrey Anable, in Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect (2018), provides several case studies in which she traces various affective entanglements in games to earlier cultural experiences and phenomena. Following her line of thinking, in my presentation I would like to apply her framework to shed some light on selected titles belonging to the sub-genre known as “walking simulators.” Texts grouped in this category very often lack traditional features connected with challenges or goals, and while some substitute them with strong narrative structures, there are many “walkers” that dispense even with those. As my case studies, I have selected 9.03m (2013) and Glithhikers (2014), two ephemeral texts which, to my mind, provide interesting opportunities for thinking about affect and/in games. In their analysis I would particularly like to focus on how these two texts can engender both indescribable emotions and embodied experiences. Apart from focusing on specific affective operations and qualities in them, I would also like to propose some new ways of understanding walking simulators as texts exceeding the task-and-challenge and narrative modes of the gaming medium.
Paweł Frelik is Associate Professor and the Leader of Speculative Texts and Media Research Group at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. His teaching and research interests include science fiction, video games, fantastic visualities, digital media, and transmedia storytelling. He has published widely in these fields, serves on the boards of Science Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, and Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, and is the co-editor of the New Dimensions in Science Fiction book series at the University of Wales Press. In 2017, he was the first non-Anglophone recipient of the Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service presented by the Science Fiction Research Association for outstanding service activities.