A Plague Tale: Requiem
Game
Documents about A Plague Tale: Requiem
Whitepaper4 pages
Post-Heroic Play in Social Work Education: Structural Constraint and Impossible Care
This paper proposes a conceptual framework for using digital games in social work education to provoke reflection on intersectional discrimination and the limits of individual agency within structurally unjust conditions.
- The paper proposes using "post-heroic" gameplay, where individual action cannot resolve systemic injustice, as a pedagogical space for social work students to confront the tensions of the field's triple mandate: normalizing clients, empowering them, and upholding human rights and social justice.
- The framework rests on a comparative reading of Papers, Please (2013) and A Plague Tale: Requiem (2022), treated as complementary sources: Papers, Please models how discrimination is produced and normalized through bureaucratic procedure, while A Plague Tale: Requiem generates affective identification with persecution and vulnerability.
- The concept of "ethical cognitive friction" describes the tension between what a game communicates procedurally and what it signifies narratively or symbolically, and is a core component of the framework.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper4 pages
A Plague Tale: Autoethnography and Authenticity in Historical Games Research
This paper examines how autoethnography can rehabilitate the concept of authenticity in historical game studies, using the Plague Tale duology (A Plague Tale: Innocence and A Plague Tale: Requiem), both set in 14th-century France during the Black Death, as its case.
- The paper argues that authenticity, widely invoked in historical game discussions but often conflated with accuracy and dismissed by historians as subjective, can become a meaningful analytical category when defined through the player's affective experience rather than strict historical fidelity.
- The authors propose autoethnography, using thick description and evocative narrative, as the method for capturing lived experience, anchored in Ellis et al.'s notion of verisimilitude: the sense that a represented experience feels lifelike and possible.
- The methodology is retrospective collaborative autoethnography, with two authors drawing on memories, notes, and conversations about playing the games to the end of their main story arcs, supplemented by additional gameplay done explicitly for data collection.
DiGRAJun 2025