Ad Fontes, or: What to Apply When Applying ‘Paratext’ to Video Games

Few weeks ago, August 28–29, I was invited to the beautiful city of Bergen, Norway, to participate in a small scale workshop on “Paratext in Digital Culture: Is Paratext Becoming the Story?”, an event hosted by the research group “Digital Culture” (formerly known as “humanistisk informatikk”) at the University of Bergen.

The August workshop was the final event in a series that started in December 2012 that led to the forthcoming anthology “Examining Paratextual Theory and its Applications in Digital Culture” (IGI Global). I contributed to this anthology with the discussion of the applicability of the Genettian concept of paratext to the analysis of video games – with a brief, critical look at the more or less fruitful attempts to apply the concept in new media studies.

I presented my thoughts and deliberations on the subject in a promotional talk during the workshop (with material from the first-person shooter horror survival game Bioshock) that inspired an intense discussion.

The anthology will be published within the next few weeks or so, so stay put! I’ll send out pdfs of my chapter, “Video Game Framings” upon request.