Abstract
Recent years have witnessed an increase in the visibility of the so-called 'art games' both in the gaming community and in academic reflection. This label applies, as a rule, to relatively short indie games that appear to have a message about the human condition, life, psyche, society and, often, also about the game genre, in a self-referential loop. Depending on game topics and rhetorical approach, commentators have advanced a variety of tags to describe them, including 'experimental games', 'news games', 'grave games', 'existential games', or 'not games'. Scholarly literature has discussed their rhetorical specificity with a focus on procedurality and players' creativity. Games are seen essentially as an ensemble of rules and mechanics, working in conjunction with a narrative layer, inviting players to interact and thus to (re)create meaning. There are two dominant controversies that structure game studies: (1) whether and how games can be studied as narratives and (2) what is the relative importance of procedurality versus creative gameplay. These debates obscure another specific element of game rhetoric: the message of art games is substantially elaborated in the community of players, through comments, reviews, and comments to reviews - amounting to a large cloud of textual, interactive, online reflection. Players engage in the game but, often, also read and write comments and reviews, thus confronting their experience with others' and exploring a larger spectrum of interpretations. Games propose a time for gameplay and also a time for conversation. Therefore, we argue that the rhetoric of art games relies not only on procedurality and creative gameplay, but also on the distributed, multivocal reflection of an online community of players. Art games are embedded in a plurilogue through which they are interpreted and re-interpreted as art objects and social critique, and their message is formulated in text. In this article we explore 'Every Day the Same Dream', an art game that has elicited a variety of gameplay experiences, emotions and assessments. We examine player comments and reviews and we discuss their role in interpreting games and formulating their messages. |
