Interprocedurality: Procedural Intertextuality in Digital Games

Introduction

Digital games seem particularly related to intertextuality. Since their early beginnings, games have been incorporating themes, structures and other elements from previous media like literature, comics and movies. The creator of Spacewar! (1962), for example, clearly identifies Buck Rogers novels and comics as inspiration for the ship’s design in his game, while Galaxy Game (1971) and Computer Space (1971) were both based on spaceship travel and combat as depicted in many science fiction books (Kent, 2001). Science fiction was not the only influence in digital games, though. Fantasy also was a frequent source of references and inspiration to games. Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), Atari 2600’s Adventure (1979), Dungeons (1975), Telengard (1976) and Zork (1976), had magic, dragons and castles, assumedly taking inspiration from the pen and paper role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (Jerz, 2007).

At first, this probably occurred due their technical limitations, since labeling an enemy as “alien” was an economic way to tap into a rich tradition of science fiction invasion stories, quickly giving players some narrative context about the crude pixels on the screen. Resorting to stereotypes made the apprehension of the new media by the public easier and at the same time, functioned as narrative shortcuts, saving computational resources from the duty of explaining the narrative for the players, in a similar fashion that genre-based authors make conscious use of intertextuality in order to weave complex narratives without having to include long explanations (Kaveney, 2005).

With the advancement of computers, games could store more information, present richer graphics and run complex simulations. Star Wars, Ghostbusters and other movies became games, even unofficially, as is the case of Metal Gear Solid taking many narrative elements from the movie Escape from New York (Good, 2015). Now, the links with other texts could be both more frequent and more sophisticated, creating a constant interplay between games and previous media.

However, intertextuality was never a frequent research theme in Game Studies. An inquiry on intertextuality in a number of journals related to Game Studies generates few results, revealing a field of research in need of more attention. Moreover, even the existing studies about intertextuality in digital games usually limit their analysis to games’ text, sounds and images (referred in this chapter as representation elements). While this has generated very interesting work, it does not adequately address the peculiarities of digital games. Besides representation elements, games have rules that structure their operations and are codified in procedures processed by a computer. This systemic dimension is also expressive in itself, conveying meaning through processes and algorithms. Moreover, games often copy, change and twist mechanics and rules of previous games. The authors argue that such phenomenon is very similar to intertextuality and, in this sense, looking at such rules and mechanics “migration” could be a useful way to complement intertextual approaches for understanding games.