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Here, Kirkpatrick highlights how gaming is something other, or more than, narrative engagement, since gaming also requires gaming skills, the satisfactory execution or testing of which is an important facet of the pleasures of gaming. A study of self-identified gamers…, shows that the story line element of games is not particularly important (Kirkpatrick, 2013, p. The most important thing about computer games is not their content, if this is understood to mean a message that is transmitted and then interpreted by audiences. Discussing narrative in relation to digital games, Graeme Kirkpatrick notes that While story is central to most literary narratives, story need not be a significant element in gaming. Thus, in a sense, the ergodic user’s aim is to shape the telling of the text. The risk that the cybertext poses to its user is that of “rejection”: in spite of a given user’s considerable investment of time and energy s/he may fail to gain “narrative control” over the text and to shape it to his or her own narrative ends (Aarseth, 1997, p. While a reader is “safe but impotent”, a cybertext user “is not safe” and therefore, arguably, “she is not a reader” (ibid.). Aarseth further draws on the concept of power to distinguish a literary reader from an ergodic user, arguing that a reader of literature is powerless, since s/he is not a player and since only a player can experience “the pleasure of influence” (Aarseth, 1997, p. 17).ĭefining the concept of cybertext as focused both on “the mechanical organization of the text” and on the “user” of the text, Aarseth coins the term ergodic (from the Greek words ergon and hodos or “work” and “path”) to denote the “nontrivial effort” required by a cybertext user in the traversal of the text (Aarseth, 1997, p. In Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997), Espen Aarseth discusses the concept of text in relation to both literature and digital texts, arguing that “… the real difference between paper texts and computer texts, if it exists, must be described in functional, rather than material or historical terms” (Aarseth, 1997, p. So while games invite play, literature about games and gaming invites reflection on the nature of games and their cultural and contextual meaning. While literature typically invites its readers to listen, to empathize and to reflect, digital games tend to invite their users to strategize, to master and to achieve. In several respects, literature and digital games are designed for different uses and purposes.
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War, games, ethics, narrative, Ender’s Game, The Hunger Games, Prachett Comparing and contrasting the ways that these narratives frame the interrelationship between war, games and ethics, the article reveals the development between “Ender’s Game” and The Hunger Games of an increasing focus on the effects of advanced military technology on the individual human body. Furthermore, all of the narratives explore the “fictionalization” that occurs to our perceptions of people encountered via the mediation of a screen. Their publication spanning three decades, these narratives all hinge on the premise that what some characters in the diegesis experience as an actual war, others perceive as a game, thus problematizing the relationship between the two. On the basis of this discussion, it analyzes the interrelationship between ethics, war and games in three popular fictional works: Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” (1977), Terry Prachett’s Only You Can Save Mankind (1992) and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games (2008). This article draws on Espen Aarseth’s concepts of cybertext (1997) and ludo-narratives (2012), on rhetorical narrative theory and on Miguel Sicart’s (2013) conception of the ethics of computer games, in a discussion of medial functions and affordances of games and literary narratives, and the construction of ethical fictions. War, Games, and the Ethics of Fiction by Lykke Guanio-Uluru Abstract