Playful Literature and Literary Games: Medial Correlations between S. and Gone Home
When readers get their hands on “S.”, a novel by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst, they might be surprised: the story begins not on the first page of the book, but as soon as it is put out of its slipcase. Soon after opening the book one becomes lost in a dense web of closely interconnected paratextual material and participates in a literal paperchase for narrative information. The game “Gone Home” follows a similar approach: the player walks through an abandoned mansion and picks up objects and documents, piecing together a narrative puzzle to find out what happened to the family who lived there. Even though the medium of the digital game and the medium of the printed novel could arguably not be more different from one another, both case studies feature similar aesthetic and narrative approaches to engage the reader and the player in their respective stories. After introducing different storytelling techniques related to the narrative objects which can be found in the game and the novel, I will show to make sense of the different medialities from a theoretical standpoint. I will shortly apply frameworks such as Rajewsky’s notion of Intermediality (2011), Jenkins’ concept of Transmedial Storytelling (2006), and Bolter and Grusin’s model of Remediation (2000) to see where our conceptional possibilities and limits lie when we talk about a “multimodal novel” (Hallet, 2014) like “S.” and a “Walking Simulator” like “Gone Home”.
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