The digital age has arguably changed and challenged our reading experience drastically: we skip through texts, scroll through news feeds, and watch bite-size movies on Vine and YouTube. At the same time, a new form of computer games has arisen which intertwines literature and gaming. Such games alter how we make sense of and find pleasure in a (n electronic) text. “Reading” a novel, it seems, is no longer limited to flipping through the pages of a book, but now a ludic activity that entails pointing, clicking and puzzle-solving on a screen. As a result, story-telling has become an increasingly individualized, technologically-mediated experience – something one has to download, install, load, save, and perhaps even cheat through.
Kentucky Route Zero, a point-and-click indie computer game released by Cardboard Computer Inc., will serve as a point of departure to investigate the diverse narrative forms and reading strategies visible in contemporary digital storytelling. My talk will ask first and foremost whether computer games can in fact be “read,” and if so, how they might expand our conception of “reading” to encompass a variety of haptic interactions with the story beyond that of turning a page. By gesturing back towards the beginning of the computer-game genre, namely the “point-and-click adventure,” Kentucky Route Zero shows how literature in the 21st century has transformed into a formally complex and technologically sophisticated user-experience: one which significantly expands the traditional forms that storytelling (and gaming!) can take.
About the presenterRieke Jordan
Rieke Jordan is a PhD candidate at the Graduate School of North American Studies at FU Berlin. She received her BA from Bielefeld University in 2009 and her MA from the John-F.-Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at FU Berlin in 2012. She studied at the University of Amsterdam during an ERASMUS semester in 2010/2011. From August to November 2015 she was the DAAD Global Humanities Junior Fellow at the Humanities Center, Johns Hopkins University.