Recapture in Contemporary Games: Undertale, Oneshot

RECAPTURE IN CONTEMPORARY GAMES: UNDERTALE, ONESHOT, PONY ISLAND Michelle Raudsepp University of Florida Honors Thesis August 2017 Recapture in Contemporary Games Raudsepp 1 ABSTRACT This paper aims to take Terry Harpold’s concept of recapture – a storytelling technique that embodies a phenomenon exhibited in gaming wherein narrative and game mechanics come together to maintain player immersion – and use it as a lens to analyze contemporary game titles such as Toby Fox’s Undertale, Mathew Velasquez and NightMargin (Casey Gu)’s OneShot, and Daniel Mullins’ Pony Island. In order to explore this concept’s validity and value, examples of recapture within these games are recorded and analyzed. The idea is to explore how these games take mundane mechanics, such as saving and loading a game, character movement, and menu screen navigation, and, using the concept of recapture, maintain player immersion despite having typical gameplay interruptions. Recapture in Contemporary Games Raudsepp 2 INTRODUCTION Video games offer an interesting form of storytelling in that they not only tell a story through the progression of the narrative and the characters they follow, but oftentimes through the use of game mechanics as well. This is backed by Kamal Sinclair of “The Art of Storytelling” who said that “this particular medium makes way for original voice and has potential for unique ways to present... creation.” Specifically, with this medium, it can be hard to remain consistently immersed within a fictitious world. An audience’s suspension of disbelief – that is to say, their ability to relinquish all sense of “realism” and simply accept a story’s world and its rules – is lost primarily with the use of a controller or keyboard to control the player character. As well, more times than not, narratives are played through with many interruptions, whether they be tutorial scenes, pauses, game overs, or the like. Seemingly, it is hard to play through video games with complete immersion. However, few game titles exist that take advantage of the mechanics they implement and create new forms of unique storytelling, immersing the player further into the narrative. With this in mind, we ask: How do contemporary games bridge the gap between narrative and game mechanics to create this unusual form of storytelling? There is a common trope found in most forms of media that creates a separation between audience and narrative. This imaginary “wall” keeps the world’s rules in place, ensuring that the audience is completely immersed and no hints of fiction seep through. Often for comedic relief, this wall is sometimes broken – a character might hint at knowing they are fictional beings, for example, or the game itself might address the player directly – and the illusion is lost. In some rare cases, this wall is broken to the point where this self-awareness becomes integral to the world’s rules and the player is pulled within the confines of the narrative. Recapture in Contemporary Games Raudsepp 3 Flint Dille and John Zurr Platten of The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design wrote, “Video game storytelling primarily exists to give meaning to gameplay.” In other words, it would be obvious to think that one cannot exist without the other, especially when attempting to create complete immersion. To answer the aforementioned question, this paper examines games that exhibit this phenomenon – games that, to quote Terry Harpold of “Screw the Grue: Mediality, Metalepsis, Recapture,” introduce game mechanics as game world rules or realities to “[mask] their potential disruption of the world” and maintain player immersion. For the purpose of this paper, this concept will be referred to as recapture, a term that Harpold considers a “fundamental operation of videogame expression [as] it is hard to see how lines of code and a box of hardware could seem to constitute a world without it.” This brings to light that narrative and game mechanics can come hand in hand to promote a more sophisticated and enticing storytelling technique, exemplified by Toby Fox’s Undertale (2015), Mathew Velasquez and NightMargin (Casey Gu)’s OneShot (2014), and Daniel Mullins’ Pony Island (2016). These three games are pivotal in exploring the concept of recapture as Harpold’s mention of the term is the only one found in the current literature. The purpose of this study is to explore this uncommon phenomenon in gaming beyond Harpold’s own analysis. While he used the term regarding late 20th century games including Infocom’s Zork 1: The Great Underground Empire (1980), Reactor, Inc.’s Virtual Valerie (1990), and Pulse Entertainment’s Bad Mojo (1996), this paper aims to use the concept of recapture as a lens for more contemporary games. The idea is to bring about more advanced examples of this phenomenon with games that take full advantage of and push their game mechanics capabilities to the most unique extremes – games that take mundane gaming tasks, Recapture in Contemporary Games Raudsepp 4 such as saving and loading a file, movement, and menu screen navigation, and heighten them through the use of recapture in order to create seamless immersion. Dille and Platten wrote, “These are the media elements you have with which to tell the story. Think of them as story elements. Don’t forget – story in video game terms is anything that helps you immerse yourself into the game-playing experience.” With this paper, the goal is to gain a better understanding of the concept of recapture and promote its use in gaming. At the very least, it can be used as an analysis of three games that exhibit very unique storytelling methods. While using just three games in addition to Harpold’s original three is not enough to validate the concept, the idea is also to encourage other gaming analysts and researchers to explore recapture through their own means. Katarina Ferk of “Storytelling in Literature versus Video Games” said, “In literature, the protagonist is presented to the reader (its audience), while in gaming, the protagonist is experienced by the audience.” Considering these as more than just the protagonist, an entire world could be experienced through the unique storytelling techniques used in gaming. The concept of recapture is an interesting one and promoting its use for future purposes is useful to not only the gaming world in general, but research and analysis, as well. Recapture in Contemporary Games Raudsepp 5 LITERATURE REVIEW “Screw the Grue: Mediality, Metalepsis, Recapture” Terry Harpold Terry Harpold’s “Screw the Grue: Mediality, Metalepsis, Recapture” covers the concept of recapture, a term that encapsulates that moment in video games when game mechanics are turned into integral narrative tools, ensuring that player immersion is never broken, at least through gameplay. Harpold analyzes three games – Infocom’s Zork 1: The Great Underground Empire, Reactor, Inc.’s Virtual Valerie, and Pulse Entertainment’s Bad Mojo – with recapture as a lens. His formal analysis provides examples that support his introduction of this new concept. Harpold argues that game mechanics and narrative cannot act without the other and expertly weaving them together makes for a more immersive gaming experience. This source is the foundation of this study. The concept of recapture is one proposed by Harpold himself and, because of this, there was no other existing research on the topic. The aim here is to take his analysis and emulate it through more contemporary games – games that were released in the last five years. Undertale Toby Fox Toby Fox’s Undertale is a game that expertly uses the concept of recapture. It follows the story of a young child lost in the Underground, a world that is inhabited by monsters of all types. Long before the narrative begins, humans and monsters were at war. When the humans won, they sealed away all monsters into the Underground. Every so often, a human child falls in. Recapture in Contemporary Games Raudsepp 6 The player must take this particular child through the Underground, surviving the monsters they encounter, and eventually making it back to the surface. Undertale exhibits an intriguing use of game mechanics. It takes advantage of what would typically be player-only actions (saving and loading the game) and turns them into powers that certain characters can manipulate. Some of the characters even directly address the players themselves. It is a game that presents characters that are very self-aware and provides ample support to this story. OneShot Mathew Velasquez, Night Margin (Casey Gu) Mathew Velasquez and NightMargin (Casey Gu)’s OneShot is a game that follows the story of a young, cat-like creature named Niko. Niko is a young, gender-ambiguous character (who, as such, will be referred to in a neutral third person - “they,” “them,” etc.) who, at the start of the narrative, wakes up to find themselves in a dark world inhabited by robots. This world is not theirs but after speaking to a robot they encounter, they realize that they are the messiah of the world meant to bring back the light. It is their mission to take the world’s Sun (a light bulb they find) to a tower in the world and it is the player’s mission to help and guide them. OneShot holds a lot of interesting game mechanics that keep the player intrigued. It is a game where Niko, the player character, explicitly knows who the player is, as they share a caring relationship. The game and its characters address the player by name. It removes the idea that the player controls or role-plays as Niko and instead suggests that they guide them, almost like some sort of deity. The player is just as much a part of the story as Niko is and one cannot see it through without the other.

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