Abstract

Keywords: Digital Narrative, Recursion, Level Design, Hauntology, Critical Design

This paper collects a series of heuristics in game level design to articulate the relationship between designed experience, perceived experience, and the mechanics of play. This work aims simply to illuminate core concepts as a guide for framing the relationship between designer/ author and player/participant. It is offered simply as a philosophical lens for perceiving and designing the dynamic between created works and their perception by players. It does so by offering the concept of nested narratives recursively experienced between the played narrative and the designed narrative. It is an adaptation of Derrida’s Hauntology, applied to the context of narratives in game design, at the scale and pace of 21st century game design. In short, games are always haunted by the ghosts of the author’s designed narrative, it’s manifestation in player’s actions, and the player’s self-authored explanation of their experience. This view can be used to design experiential, multi-narrative focused games and plays on the notion of games as penumbra. They are the penumbra which lay like ghosts in each new design.

• Lindsay D. Grace is Knight Chair of Interactive Media and an associate professor at the University of Miami School of Communication, USA. He is Vice President for the Global Game Jam™ and Vice President of the Higher Education Video Game Alliance. His work has received awards and recognition from the Games for Change Festival, the Digital Diversity Network, the Association of Computing Machinery’s digital arts community, Black Enterprise and others. He authored or coauthored more than 50 papers, articles and book chapters on games since 2009. His creative work has been selected for showcase internationally including New York, Paris, Sao Paolo, Singapore, Chicago, Vancouver, Istanbul, and others. Lindsay curated or co-curated Blank Arcade, Smithsonian American Art Museum’s SAAM Arcade, the Games for Change Civic and Social Impact program and others. He has given talks at SXSW, the Game Developers Conference, Games for Change Festival, the Online News Association, the Society for News Design, and many other industry events. Between 2013 and 2018 he was the founding director of the American University Game Lab and Studio in Washington, DC. From 2009 to 2013 he was the Armstrong Professor at Miami University’s School of Art. Lindsay also served on the board for the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) between 2013-2015.

Full text (PDF) p. 356-369