“It's so normal, and … meaningful.” Playing with Narrative, Artifacts, and Cultural Difference in Florence

“It's so normal, and … meaningful.” Playing with Narrative, Artifacts, and Cultural Difference in Florence

“It's so normal, and … meaningful.” Playing with Narrative, Artifacts, and Cultural Difference in Florence

By Dheepa Sundaram and Owen Gottlieb

Abstract

“This article considers how player interactions with religious and ethnic markers, createa globalized game space in the mobile game Florence (2018). Florence is a multi award-winning interactive novella game with story-integrated minigames that weaveplay experiences into the narrative. The game, in part, explores love, loss, andrejuvenation as relatable experiences. Simultaneously, the game produces a uniqueexperience for each player, as they can refract the game narrative through their own cultural, identification lens. The game assumes the shared cultural space of the player,the player-character (PC), and the non-player-character (NPC) while blurring theboundaries between each of these categories. Through textual analysis, semiotics,and globalization theory, we show how Florence’s designers use game mechanics andnarrative artifacts to produce a dynamic, cosmopolitan game space that beckons theplayer to engage personally with the game’s narrative. The result is that narrativeobjects function as nonspecific cultural signifiers, inviting players to see the gamespace as global, a place in which traditionally underrepresented groups (non-whiteethnicities and non-male genders) can be posited as normative and ordinary.Specifically, the religious and cultural artifacts signify a game space in which aninterracial, interfaith love story is the default narrative – a pathway into the ordinary,rather than these artifacts functioning merely as markers of difference. Thus, theseartifacts signify a globalized community that welcomes the player into the gamespace of Florence. As such, Florence is a novel and important entry into video games’representation of culture and religion.”

Reference

Sundaram, D., &Gottlieb, O. (2022, August 4). "it's so normal, and ... meaningful." playing with narrative, artifacts, and cultural difference in Florence. RIT Scholar Works. Retrieved August 25, 2022, from https://scholarworks.rit.edu/article/2033/

Keyword

Games, game space, video games, narrative, mobile game, culture, research