ABSTRACT

This article investigates three storytelling arts as spaces of narrative play: theatre, film and narrative-based gaming. It traces the lineage from Oedipus Rex and early tragic theatre to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film Rope, followed by The Walking Dead Telltale Games series, relating how each text presents protagonists who are marked as criminal from the opening of the narrative. Rope and The Walking Dead both work from the prophetic prototype developed in the Oedipus myth and use reflexive engagement with their own storytelling practices to ask open questions of stigma, sexuality, ethnicity and problems in the ongoing negotiation of play as both a coping strategy for social and legal marginalisation, and a safe space for interrogating our precognitive moral intuitions and biases. All play is fragile, and serious consequence always threatens the boundaries of Huizinga’s ‘magic circle’ of play; this means that play statuses must be consistently negotiated and updated by those participating, a concept I refer to as ‘the invitation to play’. This article explores how storytellers navigate such distinctions in asking participants to reflexively consider the boundaries of consequence in the narrative arts and in their lives.

摘要

本文研究了三种叙事艺术作为叙事游戏的空间：戏剧、电影和基于叙事的游戏。它追溯了从俄狄浦斯王和早期悲剧戏剧到阿尔弗雷德希区柯克 1948 年电影《绳索》的血统，然后是行尸走肉Telltale Games 系列，讲述了每个文本如何呈现从叙事开头就被标记为罪犯的主角。绳索与行尸走肉两者都来自俄狄浦斯神话中发展的预言原型，并利用他们自己的讲故事实践的反思性参与，在正在进行的游戏谈判中提出关于耻辱、性、种族和问题的开放性问题，作为社会和法律边缘化的应对策略，以及一个审问我们预知的道德直觉和偏见的安全空间。所有的游戏都是脆弱的，严重的后果总是威胁到惠辛加游戏“魔法圈”的边界；这意味着参与者必须不断协商和更新游戏状态，我将这一概念称为“邀请游戏”。本文探讨了讲故事的人如何在要求参与者反思性地考虑叙事艺术和他们生活中后果的界限时驾驭这些差异。