Literary Studies and Role-Playing Games

Behind the Scenes at ApertureScience.com: Portal and Its Paratexts

“…For all these reasons, it is important to understand the disciplinary currents that run through Genette’s work and its reception. If the study of epitext is valuable because it orients us toward social reception and the political economy of cultural industries, as demonstrated in the work of Murray in book history and Consalvo and others in video games studies, then the study of peritext is valuable because it orients us toward the particularities of the medium ( Jara, 2013 , p. 42). The next sections will pursue this second premise through the corridors, test chambers, neurotoxin storage rooms, and other backstage areas of Portal —a game which depends upon malleable thresholds as its central gameplay mechanic, and whose thematic and material qualities alike reward inquiry at its edges.…”

“…Conversely, the expanded definition of paratextuality associated with Consalvo has also attracted some recent criticism ( Švelch, 2020;Dunne, 2016;Rockenberger, 2014;Jara, 2013), partly for the intimidating breadth of new materials it opens up for paratextual studies, and partly for its tendency to emphasize epitexts at the expense of peritexts. Although I do not join the critiques of Consalvo's treatment of paratext, and see more advantages than disadvantages in its breadth of application to the rich world of video game epitexts, there is something to be learned by grappling instead with the more difficult sub-category of peritext as it travels-with some friction-from the domain of books to the domain of video games.…”

Beyond the Game Itself: Understanding Authorial Intent, Player Agency, and Materiality as Degrees of Paratextuality

“…Concurrently, the medium's interactivity invites players to become authors, as implied in Sicart's study of players addressed above. This is a perspective that would be ignored in a more restrictive consideration of the game-text and its precisely defined authorship as proposed by Wolf (2006) and Jara (2013, p. 42). Fiadotau has therefore suggested utilizing creatorship to refer to everyone involved in making a game, which avoids the use of loosely defined ideas associated with who is and who is not the author of a game (Fiadotau, 2015).…”

Introduction: Reconsidering Paratext as a Received Concept

“…Like many scholarly coinages, the term paratext gave a name to a category of textual materials that was often overlooked in its discipline of origin, namely the reviews, blurbs, prefaces, author interviews, and other satellite texts that orbit printed books as they travel through the literary cosmos. Over the past two decades, the term and concept have migrated into the study of several other media forms (Desrochers & Apollon, 2014; Gray, 2010; Jara, 2013; Lunenfeld, 1999; Pesce & Noto, 2016; Stam, 1992; Stanitzek, 2005).…”

“…1 Although we embody a range of disciplinary backgrounds—including but not limited to literary studies—and each deploy different critical strategies in our adaptation of paratextuality, all four articles (and this introduction) attempt to disentangle the concept from Genette's original definitions. Other recent work in this area has tended to call for a more rigorous use of the term paratext , often accompanied by a critique of Consalvo's expanded definition of the concept (Dunne, 2016; Jara, 2013; Rockenberger, 2014; Švelch, 2020). However, it has become clear that debates over definitional fine-tuning may be missing a bigger picture.…”