~ Victorian Activities and
the Play of Genre in
Video Games ~
Jentery Sayers | UVic | Media Studies + English
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Outline for the
Next 40 Minutes
Why the Victorian period for Game Studies?
Why neo-Victorianism for Game Studies?
Activity theories of genre and play
Activity analysis: 80 Days and neo-Victorianism
Inkle developed 80 Days and published it in 2014.
They are based in Cambridge and also created inklewriter.
Why the Victorian period for Game Studies?
Precedent for understanding:
1) the neoliberal optimization of
play for productivity ("playbour")
Examples from the Victorian period:
the development of team sports, social campaigns against idleness, and the standardization
of games and their rules
I've not read it, but Christopher A. Paul just published Optimizing Play (2024).
Also see Patrick Jagoda's Experimental Games (2020) on gamification.
Precedent for understanding:
2) the ongoing treatment of games as ephemera
Example from the Victorian period:
the use of print technologies to manufacture
board games and gaming manuals for
middle-class consumers
See Douglas A. Guerra's Slantwise Moves (2018) for more on nineteenth-century board games.
Precedent for understanding:
3) moral panics about screen time
Example from the Victorian period:
the stereoscope in Harper's Monthly (June 1860)
Precedent for understanding:
4) Twitch streaming and at-home theatre
Example from the Victorian period:
the home theatrical publishing industry
See T.L. Taylor's Watch Me Play (2018) for more on Twitch.
Precedent for understanding:
5) the appeal of life sims
Example from the Victorian period:
dollhouses, doll play, and doll fiction
Precedent for understanding:
6) the design of "casual empire" (Harrer)
This significance of genre in the
Victorian period brings me to ask,
Why neo-Victorianism for Game Studies?
Because it's everywhere?
Bloodborne, Dishonored, Final Fantasy,
Sunless Sea, The Great Ace Attorney, Bloodstained,
The Order: 1886, Alice, Fallen London, Assassin's Creed, Amnesia, Strange Horticulture . . .
Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn stress that
the neo-Victorian is:
"creative, playful, metafictional" (4)
"more than historical fiction set
in the nineteenth century" (4)aware of its own "belatedness" (4), and
"self-consciously engaged with the act of
(re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision
concerning the Victorians" (4).
This conference adds "re-imagining" to that list.
See Heilmann and Llewellyn's Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999-2009 (2010).
They also call it a genre (6).
I like to think of it as a "genre set":
a loose constellation of coordinated genres.
See the work of Amy J. Devitt for more on genre sets.
From this perspective, neo-Victorianism may
intersect literary or storytelling genres with
game genres and even everyday genres.
Strange Horticulture, e.g.
puzzle game
business sim
role-playing game
bottle episode
occult detective fiction
"Neo-Victorian" doesn't merely describe, classify,
categorize, or label Strange Horticulture for
efficient circulation in the market.
It mediates the relationship between
players and their motivations for play.
Uptake is crucial. Genre sets work to
establish and sustain a context for play.
As a genre set, Strange Horticulture is social:
a rnetwork rather than a container.
It helps players to build genre knowledge
while experiencing a vibe or shared pulse and
even motor empathy with player characters.
See David Russell and Arturo Yañez's "'Big Picture People Rarely Become Historians'" (2003)
for more on genre and networks. See Anna Gibbs's "After Affect" (2010) for more on the notion of a shared pulse.
"Neo-Victorian" is, in short, an activity.
Activity theories of genre and play
Now let's consider an example.
Activity analysis: 80 Days and neo-Victorianism
Video from my playthrough of inkle's 80 Days.
About 80 Days
Starts in London, 1872
Goal: travel the world (going east) and return to London before midnight on the 81st day
Reward: 20,000 pounds
190-200 cities on the map
Average journey: 22 cities
Passepartout is the player character.
About 80 Days
Time is a resource that shapes decisions.
Phileas Fogg's health is 0-100. Passepartout
must ensure it doesn't drop to 0.
Passepartout's verbs include sleeping, running
errands, visiting the bank, wandering, helping
kitchen staff, conversing, trading, selling, and
attending to Mr. Fogg's wants and needs.
A day-night cycle shapes when
these verbs can be performed.
About 80 Days
Travel from city to city occurs via gyrocopter, car,
ferry, airship, train, caleche, steamship, hot air
balloon, mechanical camel, desert caravan,
fishing yacht . . . (you can even go to Canada)
Which cities are "unlocked" and the speed of travel
depend on how Passepartout spends his time and
Mr. Fogg's money, whom he talks to, and what he wears, among other things.
Possible endings: win (with variation),
lose, death, and separation
Re-writing Verne's
80 Days (1870)
The game's narrative designer, Meg Jayanth,
was alienated by Verne's novel, especially
its treatment of Aouda.
She rewrote it to foreground the agency of NPCs.
Jayanth uses anti-colonial
design practices to:
foregound the labour involved
in maintaining Mr. Fogg,
reject casual empire as the default play state,
deny players and Passepartout opportunities
to "save" NPCs, including Indigenous
and Black characters, and
give Passepartout depth and complexity through
dialogue, alliances, complicity, and
romantic relationships (he's bisexual, e.g.).
Jayanth's approach to re-writing Verne's novel also
intervenes in genre: not just steampunk but also
what she and others in the games industry call
"entitlement simulators," which instrumentalize
fairness in the interests of cis white male play
experiences and their saviour narratives.
Amal El-Mohtar's "Toward a Steampunk without Steam" (2010) influenced the production of 80 Days and its themes.
I'll conclude by sharing my attempt to diagram
Jayanth and inkle's approach to 80 Days as a
neo-Victorian activity system.
Recalling Heilmann and Llewellyn, I'd say the game
is certainly more than mimicry or pastiche (27). It
coordinates player expectations and actions to
redefine the values and narrative trajectories of
the Victorian travel adventure genre.
Thank you
Additional thanks to Sydney Wildman and Brooke Cameron
Jentery Sayers | UVic | Media Studies + English