Archival Adventuring

Melissa Kagen's "Archival Adventuring" examines a ludonarrative mechanic in which players piece together a story by exploring static objects, papers, and environments, as seen in the physical installation House of Eternal Return and the digital games Her Story, Gone Home, Tacoma, and What Remains of Edith Finch. The central claim is that this mechanic constitutes a form of queer gaming: by charging ordinary objects and spaces with meaning, and by requiring boredom, slowness, and purposeless wandering, it runs counter to the competitive, achievement-driven, and masculine conventions of mainstream game design. The work positions itself at the intersection of Queer Game Studies and Performance Studies.

The paper's theoretical core draws on Peggy Phelan's claim that performance exists only in the present and disappears when archived, and on Rebecca Schneider's critique of the archive as a masculine, patriarchal structure that privileges solid, written documentation over ephemeral embodied practice. Kagen argues that Archival Adventures reverse this hierarchy by using a house full of artifacts, a static archive, as a site where the player restores "flesh" to inert material. The analysis contrasts the two environments: in the physical installation, the presence of objects not made for the work heightens the sense that anything may be meaningful, while in Edith Finch the memories held in the archive are re-enacted as playable sequences whose mechanics change with each memory.

The argument is presented as an extended abstract for DiGRA 2018, and it describes a larger comparative project rather than an empirical study. No survey, sample, or dataset is reported; the conclusions rest on close readings of selected games and theoretical frameworks. The scope is therefore qualitative and interpretive, focused on a small set of narrative-exploration titles and one large-scale installation in Santa Fe, New Mexico.