Capstone Project Blog Post

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For my Capstone Project, I’m going to adapt an academic paper to a website that includes an animation and remixed video. The paper will be written by me and will discuss what I call the Indie Game Maker (IGM) Problem. This boils down to the idea that indie game makers are thought of as occupying a privileged position of personal artistic expression through the games they create (often by themselves or with very small teams), however the participatory nature of digital games resituates much of the authority of the author to the player. Thus, the IGM is an anomaly, trapped in a liminal space between opposing conceptions of the author: the first as gate-keeper of official meaning, and the second as facilitator of the meaning-making process.

My argument focuses on two games by Davey Wreden: The Stanley Parable (2013) in which players choose whether or not to follow the narrator’s story, and The Beginner’s Guide (2015), a curated series of games through which players are guided in an attempt to understand the games’ creator.

For this project, I’d like utilize some of the technologies from DTC 201 to present my argument in ways that the traditional academic paper won’t allow, such as creative ways to incorporate sources. For instance, I plan to animate a sequence that explains the idea of the textual machine from Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext rather than just block quoting the source. I’d also like to create a mash-up of scenes from the two games to assist in my close readings of them, hopefully expressing the similarities and differences in a more engaging way than simply writing could produce.

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