One Does Not Simply Play a Game: Tapping into Game Worlds as Cultural Texts

Abstract

As a widely used, popular medium, digital games successfully circulate a variety of narratives, discourses, and practices among highly diverse audiences. While games are often riddled with references, players sometimes encounter narratives that draw on recent or more distant pasts, or that engender connections with contemporary issues and topics. This paper explores how digital games may be read, studied, and crafted as cultural texts. I argue that games have the potential to address and document topics and concerns that are contextual to and reflect discourses which are prominent in the public imaginary. I begin by clarifying what I mean when I speak of digital games as cultural texts. Then, I draw on Sanford, Hopper, and Burren’s expanded definition of intertextuality, as they propose that game texts connect to a wide range of other types of texts, including lived experiences (Sanford, Hopper, and Burren 2016). I move on to quests, random encounters, and the combat system from the game The Elder Scrolls Online (ZOS 2014), for examining how referencing the real world illustrates the intertextual character of digital games, as well as their worth as cultural texts. My close reading of the game intersects with literature on digital games concerned with historical problem spaces (McCall 2022), ecocriticism (Remesal and Manuel 2019; Backe 2017), neoliberal subjectivities (Patterson 2014; Voorhees 2009), and procedural rhetoric (Bogost 2007). I conclude by revisiting Sanford, Hopper, and Burren’s arguments for a complex learning system that draws on the intertextuality inherent in digital games, and I outline additional affordances specific to the medium that could be imagined in pedagogical spaces.