NARRATIVE GAME MECHANICS AS AN UNRELIABLE NARRATOR

Abstract

Narratives in games are now widely studied under the model of cognitive narratology, a useful approach to understanding how players construct narratives from an interactive medium such as games. Unreliable narration in particular, has become a popular narrative technique employed by game designers in recent games. Much of the understanding of unreliable narration in video games have only been explained by academics in terms of an omniscient personified narrator. However, considering the interactive affordances of video games and drawing similarities from narration in film and comics, there are a vast number of games with no omniscient personified narrator that still allow players to construct a mental narrative, which suggests the existence of a non-personified narrator. This thesis thus seeks to examine how video games without a personified narrator can create unreliable narration by means of the interactive channel through comparative close readings of three games: Tales from the Borderlands Episode 1, Firewatch and Doki Doki Literature Club. Close readings suggest that the auditory, visual and interactive channels of narration work together to create unreliability by setting up players to make assumptions about the game genre and meanings of the game mechanics and their in-game actions. It also draws player attention to the presence of an implied the ‘Game Narrator’, a concept similar to Lothe’s Film Narrator, through metalepsis. I propose that the Game Narrator is the non-personified entity that consists of all three channels of narration (auditory, visual and interactive), and encompasses the functions of the monstrator, reciter and game mechanics. As such, this thesis identifies interesting ways that unreliable narration arises in games in the absence of a personified narrator through the findings from the close readings.