Glitching Objects as Temporal Mediators: Hyperobject Temporality in NORCO

Maddalena Grattarola's article examines how malfunctioning everyday objects in the 2022 narrative adventure game NORCO make the slow violence of petrochemical contamination perceptible. Building on theories of hyperobjects (Morton), petroduration (op de Beke), the eerie (Fisher), and ephemera (Wasserman), the author proposes a four-criteria definition of "temporal mediation" and argues that glitching objects serve as the means by which vast, distributed environmental harms become felt within intimate, domestic space. The study situates its case within NORCO's real-world setting of Louisiana's Cancer Alley, drawing on the region's industrial history, including the 1988 Shell refinery explosion.

The analysis centres on four objects: a domestic window that stages past floods and a prophesied fourth flood as a collapse of stretched-out petroduration into erasure, household ephemera, a defective television broadcasting a protagonist's corrupted memories, and a hybrid Virgin Mary statue. Together these objects show how corporate reassurances from the fictional Shield Oil, illness, and grief persist in the home despite efforts to neutralise them. The author reads these malfunctions not as narrative noise but as deliberate structures of temporal disruption.

A central conclusion is that this design resists "solutionist flattening," the tendency to reduce ecological crisis to solvable gameplay mechanics. Instead, it cultivates "troubling pleasures," a sustained engagement with destabilisation and unresolved complexity that the author proposes as a viable model for ecological game design. The article acknowledges its limits: the framework has been tested only on a narrative adventure game at domestic scale, and the author calls for comparative work across other genres and hyperobjects.