READING THE GAME: EXPLORING NARRATIVES IN VIDEO GAMES AS LITERARY TEXTS Andrew C Turley Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in the Department of English, Indiana University December 2018 Accepted by the Graduate Faculty of Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. Master's Thesis Committee ______________________________________ Megan Musgrave, PhD, Chair ______________________________________ André Buchenot, PhD ______________________________________ Thomas Marvin, PhD ii © 2018 Andrew C Turley iii Dedication For every kind heart, wherein the spirit of adventure abides. iv Acknowledgements I want to acknowledge, first and foremost, Dr. Megan Musgrave, Dr. André Buchenot, Dr. Thomas Marvin, Dr. Carrie Sickmann‐Han, and Mike Hughes for their unwavering mentorship and support of my research at IUPUI. This project could not have been without their help. Additionally, I want to thank Dr. Karen Kovacik and the School of Liberal Arts as well as Zebulon Wood, Travis Faas, and Matthew Powers of the School of Informatics for their significant aid in my research. I wish to thank Dr. Eva White and Dr. Joe Keener of Indiana University Kokomo both for their mentorship and for guiding me to a lifelong love of literature and critical theory. Education is a long road, and along the way I have encountered many influential educators—too many, in fact, to name here. I offer my gratitude to them all for impacting my life with their teaching. I also wish to thank my husband, Robert Durham, for his unwavering support and for his help in shaping many of my ideas for this project. Thank you to my parents and brothers for believing in me and supporting me every step of the way in my education. Thank you to “The A Team” (Amy Simonson, Angie Therber, Alix Teague, and Ryan Collins) and to Ian Swift for all of your help and support through the program at IUPUI. You all helped greatly in refining many of my ideas about teaching and literature. Thank you my friend Nathan Name, for your support as I started this project and this program. Thank you, Maxwell Kottlowski and Tyler Nelson for helping me discover a love of video games as a kid and for seeing, as I do, the wonderful stories they contain. v Andrew C Turley READING THE GAME: EXPLORING NARRATIVES IN VIDEO GAMES AS LITERARY TEXTS Video games are increasingly recognized as powerful tools for learning in classrooms. However, they are widely neglected in the field of English, particularly as objects worthy of literary study. This project argues the place of video games as objects of literary study and criticism, combining the theories of Espen Aarseth, Ian Bogost, Henry Jenkins, and James Paul Gee. The author of this study presents an approach to literary criticism of video games that he names “player‐generated narratives.” Through player‐generated narratives, players as readers of video games create loci for interpretative strategies that lead to both decoding and critical inspection of game narratives. This project includes a case‐study of the video game Undertale taught in multiple college literature classrooms over the course of a year. Results of the study show that a video game introduced as a work of literature to a classroom increases participation, actives disengaged students, and connects literary concepts across media through multimodal learning. The project concludes with a chapter discussing applications of video games as texts in literature classrooms, including addressing the practical concerns of migrating video games into an educational setting. Megan Musgrave, PhD, Chair vi Table of Contents List of Figures ................................................................................................................................. viii Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Video Games as Literary Texts .................................................................................................. 7 Undertale in Literature Classrooms: A Case Study .................................................................... 8 Video Games in the Classroom ................................................................................................. 9 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 10 Chapter One: Video Games as Literary Texts ................................................................................ 11 Aarseth and the Poets of the Metal Flowers........................................................................... 18 Bogost and Play ....................................................................................................................... 32 Jenkins and Narrative .............................................................................................................. 38 Player‐Generated Narratives ................................................................................................... 44 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 55 Chapter Two: Undertale in Literature Classrooms: A Case Study .................................................. 57 Action Research Project .......................................................................................................... 62 Methodology ........................................................................................................................... 64 Initial Results ........................................................................................................................... 65 Initial Results: Teaching Days .................................................................................................. 67 Results: Quantitative Data ...................................................................................................... 71 Results: Qualitative Data ......................................................................................................... 75 Further Teaching ..................................................................................................................... 78 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 86 Chapter Three: Video Games in the Classroom ............................................................................. 88 Video Games in the Literature Classroom ............................................................................... 91 Access .................................................................................................................................... 102 Further Research ................................................................................................................... 106 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 108 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 110 Works Cited .................................................................................................................................. 115 Curriculum Vitae vii List of Figures Figure 1 .......................................................................................................................................... 66 Figure 2 .......................................................................................................................................... 66 Figure 3 .......................................................................................................................................... 71 Figure 4 .......................................................................................................................................... 72 Figure 5 .......................................................................................................................................... 72 Figure 6 .......................................................................................................................................... 73 Figure 7 .......................................................................................................................................... 73 viii Introduction This study explores the potential for video games to be examined in the same or similar fashion as traditional literary texts. Moreover, I argue that narrative video games are literary texts worthy of exploration, interpretation, and literary criticism. Responding to the ongoing debate between ludology and narratology that surrounds the question of video games as texts, I present my theory of player‐generated narratives, which recognizes the design of narratives in games, their functionality, and how they begin to be interpreted. This project argues, through research and empirical data gathered through classroom experimentation, that video games are viable texts in literature classrooms. The narratives video games employ intersect with those of traditional texts and students are able to explore them in a similar fashion. Individual agency on behalf of the player/reader creates player‐generated narratives from which the player/reader