Location

Wiesner Room, 2nd Floor, MIT Media Lab

Description

Games are a type of performance activity, with the player becoming a performer while playing a videogame. In the case of story-based games, the player’s performance brings together story and game.
This presentation will focus on adventure games, a story-based genre whose gameplay mainly consists of puzzle-solving. An adventure game is also a simulation, the intersection between the rule system of the game and its fictional world. The simulation provides a performance space and establishes how the player can act in it. The player does not perform directly in the fictional world, but through the player character. The game design establishes a specific set of actions necessary to complete both the game and the story; these actions constitute a behavior that the player must restore through performance. The player thus becomes an actor without a script, and has to figure out what actions will simultaneously make her progress in the game and advance the story.
These concepts will be illustrated by demonstrating Rosemary, a short adventure game about remembering. This game models the mechanics of memory, inspired by Quintillian’s Memory Palaces. Rosemary does not rely on the player’s memory; rather the player performs the actions that help the player character remember events and people. By exploring the world, the player will uncover the missing script of her performance.

Biographies

Clara Fernández-Vara is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Her work concentrates on adventure games, as well as the integration of stories in simulated environments. She is particularly interested in cross-media artifacts from the standpoint of textual analysis and performance. Clara holds a Ph.D. in Digital Media from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She earned a BA in English Studies by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (2000), and was awarded a fellowship from the La Caixa Foundation to pursue a Masters in Comparative Media Studies from MIT (2004).