Dream Chamber is a narrative adventure game based on dream sequences, a plot device I plan to study soon. http://www.darkwavegames.com/dream-chamber/
“The Walk” is a new app for Android and iOS by Six to Start, the creators of “Zombies, run!”. It seems a very promising game mixing physical activity with mobile storytelling, I plan to try it soon
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sixtostart.thewalk
“Continue?9876543210” by Jason Oda is a indie art game exploring the themes of death and mortality. Read a review from Jesse Singal at the Boston Globe
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/movies/2013/12/22/exploring-mortality-video-game-continue/FtYseqV8Wk0Gdi2k9VmJPP/story.html?s_campaign=sm_tw
From the game’s website: “In her mid-20’s, Kelly has moved back into her parents’ house. Back to the flat expanse of Nebraska, that seemingly endless sea of rustling cornstalks peppered by rusty silos and rustier towns. In Three Fourths Home, players assume the role of Kelly while she is driving home during this thunderstorm. The focus of the game is its narrative, conveyed through an extended conversation Kelly has with her parents and younger brother. The player must navigate the conversation while driving through a stylized representation of rural Nebraska set against rumbling thunder and the music playing from the car’s tape deck. The narrative touches on a variety of issues affecting Kelly and her family, including disability, adulthood, familial obligation, nostalgia, and loss.”
Browse the website for the game http://www.threefourthshome.com/about/ and read Nathan Grayson’s review on Kotaku http://kotaku.com/the-game-that-made-me-realize-i-ve-let-down-my-family-1663850730
Unmanned (Molleindustria, 2012) is a recent piece by Molleindustria, an hybrid between a computer game and a digital narrative – similar in some ways to what designer Paolo Pedercini already attempted in Every Day the Same Dream (Molleindustra, 2011). It is a slow-paced, reflexive game – more like a piece of interactive art than an entertainment product – that tells the story of an American soldier supervising drones deployed in the Middle-East.
The rhetorics and the narrative of Unmanned are centered around games and reality: it is a piece depicting a soldier who uses a game-like interface to control a drone on the other side of the world, pushing simple buttons to cause lethal outcomes – at the same time, the player uses another simple interface to control the game.
As a semiotician, one of the first things that I noticed is the clever use of diegesis and embrayage/debrayage. To cut short a very long story, we may say that those are semiotic tools to build different levels of fictional worlds – in a similar way to what it’s shown in Christopher Nolan’s movie “Inception”. We can call embrayage and debrayage the literary techniques to describe entering and exiting different layers of narrative reality.
Indeed, Unmanned features some interesting embrayages: the protagonist’s “entering” the point of view of the drone, as well as his dream. But, to make things more interesting, the player himself “enters” the protagonist’s reality and, through him, they control the drone.
It is a clever chain of control that challenges and problematize agency and the perception of reality. Who is controlling what in this game? Who controls the drone? and what difference is there between the dream sequence and the war sequence? And, again, what’s the difference between the player and the protagonist? and between the player and a real drone pilot?
Leonardo DiCaprio’s character from Inception may find something very familiar in this game.
More reading
Greg Costikyan on Unmanned
An interview to Paolo Pedercini
Walkthrough and review