Masters Theses

Date of Award

5-2024

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

English

Major Professor

Hilary Havens

Committee Members

Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud, Amy Elias

Abstract

The project examines Paradise Killer and RealMyst: Masterpiece Edition as two games exemplary of the adventure game genre that evoke specific affects uniquely collocated within the genre itself. Previous research from authors like Aubrey Anable and Katherine Isbister has shown that video games make players feel and that what they make players feel is important to study. Like the novel and film before, video games are undergoing a legitimation process as objects worthy of study and cultural critique, and it is necessary to begin parsing how their multimedia existence relates to previous categories of genre and audience response. Using scholarship like Isbister’s and Anable’s, I examine two games that are exemplary of their genre to demonstrate their connections to longer literary and filmic traditions as well as their unique ability to evoke feelings of nostalgia, attention, curiosity, and pleasurable solitude in their aesthetic and mechanical forms as well as from their players. The players’ responses are gathered from Reddit and Youtube comments sections, both of which have been used in previous qualitative studies, and the tools used to analyze the comments and organize them are Communalytic and Netlytic. The project’s findings conclude that, while not every player experience is the same, there is evidence that the games do evoke these feelings from players and that they do so through remediations of older traditions and the visceral nature of the medium.

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