Through analysis of three case study videogames – Left 4 Dead 2, DayZ and Minecraft – and their online player communities, Digital Zombies, Undead Stories develops a framework for understanding how collective gameplay generates experiences of narrative, as well as the narrative dimensions of players' creative activity on social media platforms. Narrative emergence is addressed as a powerful form of player experience in multiplayer games, one which makes individual games' boundaries and meanings fluid and negotiable by players. The phenomenon is also shown to be recursive in nature, shaping individual and collective understandings of videogame texts over time.
Digital Zombies, Undead Stories focuses on games featuring zombies as central antagonists. The recurrent figure of the videogame zombie, which mediates between chaos and rule-driven predictability, serves as both metaphor and mascot for narrative emergence. This book argues that in the zombie genre, emergent experiences are at the heart of narrative experiences for players, and more broadly demonstrates the potential for the phenomenon to be understood as a fundamental part of everyday play experiences across genres.
Author(s): Lawrence May
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 264
City: London
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Illustrations
Figures
Table
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: Introduction
Undead stories
Methodology
Artefacts
Structure of this book
Notes
Chapter 2: Stories of the undead
Emergence
Emergent narrative
The zombie
Zombie stories
Complex systems, complex terrors
Notes
Chapter 3: Rules of emergence (and the emergence of rules)
Game rules
Rules for emergence
Structural and textual affordances
The emergence of rules
Notes
Chapter 4: Familiar storytelling and popular memories
(Re)creating familiar stories
(Re)creating familiar spaces
Real-time emergence
Notes
Chapter 5: Making, breaking and bending rules at the textual margins
Thresholds of emergence
Role-play at the frontlines of the apocalypse
Building regulations: Minecraft’s gentle guidance
Deciding who to leave for dead: Paratexts’ unforgiving directives
Whose Left 4 Dead?
Anticipatory and delayed emergence
Notes
Chapter 6: Unstable media, infectious stories and migratory rules
Engines inside textual machines
Lifting the hood on constitutive rules
Glitches and generative rupture
Hacks, speedruns and subversive rupture
Transient emergence
Notes
Chapter 7: Delayed apocalypse, deliberate design
The narrative tendencies of zombie media
The spectre of other media traditions
Delayed emergence
Notes
Chapter 8: Conclusion
Rules for emergence
Times of emergence
The emergent undead
Beyond digital zombies
Notes
Appendix
Data sources
Data gathering and analysis
Artefacts
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Bibliography
List of references
List of media
Index
