The Implied Designer of Digital Games
Van de Mosselaer,Nele Gualeni,Stefano
Van de Mosselaer,Nele
Gualeni,Stefano
Abstract
As artefacts, the worlds of digital games are designed and developed to fulfil certain expressive, functional, and experiential objectives. During play, players infer these purposes and aspirations from various aspects of their engagement with the gameworld. Influenced by their sociocultural backgrounds, sensitivities, gameplay preferences, and familiarity with game conventions, players construct a subjective interpretation of the intentions with which they believe the digital game in question was created. By analogy with the narratological notion of the implied author, we call the figure to which players ascribe these intentions ‘the implied designer’. In this article, we introduce the notion of the implied designer and present an initial account of how appreciators ascribe meaning to interactive, fictional gameworlds and act within them based on what they perceive to be the designer’s intentions.
Description
Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The Author(s).
Date
2023
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Research Projects
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Journal Issue
Keywords
Digital games, Narratology, Hermeneutics, Implied Author, Interpretation, Intentionality, Fiction, Imagination, Virtual Worlds, Virtuality, Death of the Author, Glitches, Videogames
Citation
Van de Mosselaer, N & Gualeni, S 2023, 'The Implied Designer of Digital Games', Estetika, vol. 60, no. 1, pp. 71–89. https://doi.org/10.33134/eeja.303