To be entirely honest, the prospect of playing a game revolving around Alaskan folklore and climate did not excite me. I was weary of didactic proselytization of climate change that aims to and ends in "raising awareness", while simultaneously suspicious of the essentializing tendencies of distributed tourism, through documentary or games. Never Alone proved I was too cynical.
In class someone mentioned that the documentary bits are presented as rewards you earn, so you would desire to watch the videos. Adding on to that, the content of the videos themselves also made them approachable. There was no unfaced narrator who gives you a history lesson. Everything you learn is through personal tellings that traverse many emotional tones and personalities. Overall there doesn't seem to be a defined set of message or knowledge you're supposed to download from the game. You're just getting to know some people.
The game/action part of works well with the video to situate the stories told as real, which is difficult to achieve with other medium. For example, saying "they believed in the existence of sila" indicates the belief is false, and even saying ".....in Alaskan folklore" situates the belief as falsehold constructed by some "folks", the audience perhaps observes and examines, but never empathize with. It would also be blatantly wrong to just say "there are spirits" as if one really believes in it. In gameplay, the dichotomy of belief/disbelief is suspended. One accepts the "realness" of the game world by moving through and playing in it.
All of the readings this week is concerned with this idea of generating experience, what Bogost calls "procedural rhetoric". Yet, even though Never Alone ticks off a lot of "embedding strategies" listed by Kaufman and Flanagan paper, it feels very different from the test games the researchers designed. Even though one can extrapolate points of learning from the game, it's hard to locate what exactly it is embedding, pursuading. Is it Native Alaskan culture? The importance of working with nature? Imminence of climate change?
What I'm trying to say is that the model of "embedding" again situates the "message", the seriousness of serious games, as ontologically separate and functionally distinct from the game, the fun and play. As Zimmerman writes, gaming literacy, "the ability to understand and create specific kinds of meanings", is not only about serious or persuasive games. Never Alone creates meaning exactly because it doesn't try to "impart some kind of message or social agenda". In telling a story in a novel form, the concerns and meanings surfaces themselves.
In a informationally saturated time when every message and agenda has been delivered a million times, it is difficult to paint ideology in a positive light. Staunch statements and "truths" are often chewed clean of meaning. As we are making the final projects ourselves, I'm wondering how much value there is really to try to "embed" a critique or a message, in contrast to making a genuine observation, that always contain a stance and a question anyways.
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