Dear Esther
Game
Documents about Dear Esther
Environmental Storytelling and Active Spectatorship in Walking Simulators and Exploration Theatre
Environmental storytelling in exploration-based immersive theatre and walking simulators is the subject of this study, which argues that both forms place the surrounding environment at the centre of narrative meaning and offer participants exploratory freedom without the power to alter the story's events.
- Environmental storytelling in exploration-based immersive theatre and walking simulators places the surrounding environment at the centre of narrative meaning, while giving participants freedom to explore but no power to change the story's events.
- The study frames audiences and players as "active spectators": their agency is confined to interpreting spaces, traces, and atmosphere rather than intervening in the narrative.
- The analysis identifies two main environmental strategies: indexical storytelling, where objects and arrangements act as cause-and-effect clues inviting participants to reconstruct past events, and atmospheric storytelling, where mood and sensory qualities convey meaning affectively.
Making Friends with Death: Posthuman Post-Life Play
The document explores how videogames can facilitate a posthuman reconceptualization of death, dying, and grief, moving beyond traditional humanist, capitalist, and neoliberal perspectives that view death as an interruption or enemy of progress.
- The paper argues that games about death, dying, and grief, such as Spiritfarer, Gris, A Mortician's Tale, and Last Day of June, can reframe mortality away from humanist, capitalist views of death as an interruption of progress toward a view of death as one phase in a generative, interconnected process.
- Drawing on critical posthumanism, feminist, new materialist, and rhizomatic theory (notably Rosi Braidotti), the author reads both Spiritfarer and Gris as enacting postdualistic relations with death, in which the ego and its anxieties dissolve into ongoing processes of becoming.
- Spiritfarer is interpreted as embracing a notion of final destination through its ferrying of spirits to the afterlife, while Gris conveys grief as both overwhelming affect and a process of discovery through its score, restored colour, and backward-moving mechanics.
Gamification of Gothic
Tanya Krzywinska's "Gamification of Gothic" argues that a Gothic critical lens offers sharper insight into videogames than has previously been applied, despite the frequent appearance of Gothic themes across game genres.
- Krzywinska's "Gamification of Gothic" argues that a Gothic critical lens yields sharper insight into videogames than prior scholarship has applied, fusing Game Studies with Gothic Studies and treating gamification as a form of remediation.
- The work proposes five coordinating nodes for evaluating Gothic in games: character and story patterns, mise-en-scène and style, affect, entropy, and the sublime, with the "false hero" protagonist serving as the initial benchmark.
- The analysis contends that most mainstream games, built around progression, winnable conditions, and temporary death, resist the entropy that defines authentically Gothic experience.
Subtle Playability: Orienting Players' Actions Beyond the Threat of Failure
This extended abstract proposes that "walking simulators" and "notgames," despite removing traditional failure conditions, still possess an underlying ludic structure that differentiates them from non-ludic interactive artifacts.
- The paper argues that walking simulators and notgames lack a failure state yet still have an underlying ludic structure, challenging Leino's view that a failure condition is the decisive marker of playability.
- It proposes 'subtle playability': a system of valorised outcomes embedded in an artefact that orients player behaviour without any explicit failure state.
- Proteus (structured as progression toward an ending) is contrasted with Traversing the Sectors (open-ended exploration with no goal or win condition) to illustrate how orientation can exist without a win or lose state.
From Walter Benjamin to the Walking Sim: Flânerie in the Age of the Metaverse
The document explores the concept of "digital flânerie" in contemporary open-world video games and walking simulators, drawing parallels to Walter Benjamin's 19th-century flâneur.
- Maughan argues that Walter Benjamin's flâneur, the idle urban wanderer, has returned in digital form through open world games and the 'walking simulator' genre, and that this framework can illuminate the coming metaverse.
- The central thesis is that digital flânerie is an unstable design principle oscillating between expansiveness and enclosure, hesitancy and frenzy, subjective observation and ubiquitous surveillance.
- The paper's scope centres on AAA and independent titles including Assassin's Creed: Unity, Grand Theft Auto V, Assassin's Creed: Origins, Spider-Man, Dear Esther, Proteus, and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture.
How Not to Play the Game?: Disinvolvement and the Philosophical Analysis of Inaction in Computer Games
The document explores the concept of "inaction" in computer games, proposing a philosophical framework of "apraxeology" or "disinvolvement" to analyze games that minimize or delegate player activity.
- The paper argues that games increasingly foreground non-action, contemplation, and "disinvolvement" over active play, and asks whether inaction offers players critical distance or has become a mechanism of control within a market that demands constant engagement.
- The authors propose developing an "apraxeology," a theory of inaction, and ground it in philosophers including Agamben (humanity's capacity for its own inability), Arendt (labor, work, and action), Benjamin (contemplative painting vs. immersive cinema), and Bataille (ecstasy).
- Inaction-oriented games are classified into three types: reflective games that break the fourth wall (The Stanley Parable, The Beginner's Guide), contemplative games that minimize player activity (Dear Esther, Mountain), and zero-player or idle games (Game of Life, Cookie Clicker).
Ludonarrative in Game Design Education: A Concrete Approach
This paper, written by Hartmut Koenitz, Teun Dubbelman, and Christian Roth of HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, argues that narrative has been underserved in game design education and presents a concrete pedagogical model for addressing this gap.
- The paper argues that game designers can be trained to become interactive narrative designers, crafting game systems so that meaningful narratives emerge in players' minds through interaction.
- Narrative-focused games such as Dear Esther, Gone Home, The Walking Dead, and Firewatch are presented as evidence of a distinct space for interactive digital narration rather than a mere adaptation of print or film storytelling.
- The authors identify a skills divide: scriptwriters are skilled at fixed storytelling but struggle in interactive contexts, while game designers understand interaction but often lack deep narrative knowledge.
I Cried to Dream Again: Discovery and Meaning-Making in Walking Simulators
The document "I Cried to Dream Again: Discovery and Meaning-Making in Walking Simulators" argues for a re-evaluation of walking simulators as complex, self-contained game worlds that engage players through experiential aesthetics and exploration mechanics.
- The paper argues that walking simulators such as Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, 2012) and Proteus (Ed Key and David Kanaga, 2013) should be recognised as complex, self-contained game worlds rather than dismissed as minimal experiences.
- Its central claim is that the peaceful, single-player, first-person, non-competitive gameplay enabled by the island setting heightens affective, narrative, spatial, and kinaesthetic involvement for players.
- The island works as a practical design tool: its tension between desirability and inaccessibility limits the game world while drawing on players' cultural associations that shape expectations and reception.
First-Person Walkers: Understanding the Walker Experience through Four Design Themes
First-Person Walkers represent a distinct genre challenging conventional game definitions through their emphasis on minimal player interaction, deliberate pacing, and often ambiguous objectives.
- The report defines First-Person Walker games (e.g., Dear Esther, Proteus, Gone Home, The Stanley Parable) by constrained interaction, deliberately slow movement, and ambiguous goals, distinguishing them from combat-oriented shooters like Half-Life 2.
- Its central finding is that limited controls, the absence of obstacles, and contextual "use" actions lengthen the time players spend in each environment and shift them from active challengers into attentive observers.
- The study identifies four design themes (player interactivity, temporal space, player focus, and ambiguity), derived from a qualitative method combining interaction mapping, interface study, object inventory, and gameplay logging across four representative games.
Hackers and Cyborgs: Binary Domain and Two Formative Videogame Technicities
Brendan Keogh's paper "Hackers and Cyborgs: Binary Domain and Two Formative Videogame Technicities" uses Sega's Binary Domain as a lens for arguing that two competing modes of identifying with videogames have shaped the medium.
- Using Sega's Binary Domain as its lens, the paper treats the cyborg as a resistant and complementary perspective rather than a strictly opposed one, arguing the two identities are entangled and interdependent.
- The author contends the hacker ideal is masculinist and that this "technicity" influences which games get made, which are celebrated as exemplary, and how scholarly and popular discourse values the medium.
- Mainstream journalism and design privilege skill-based mastery, leading critics to dismiss exploration-focused and queer or women-created titles such as Dear Esther and Gone Home as "not real games," a rhetorical policing that also hits casual and avant-garde games reaching broader, more diverse audiences.
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