Beyond the Game Itself: Understanding Authorial Intent, Player Agency, and Materiality as Degrees of Paratextuality

Abstract

Video games present a complex medium for the study of paratextuality due to their fringed textual, authorial, and material borders. This paper addresses how previous and current research in video game paratextuality informs analyzes of authorial intent, player agency, and materiality with regard to the text–paratexts relationship established in video games. The first part of this article revisits Genette's concept of paratexts in light of video game scholarship. It then offers a detailed analysis of authorial intent and player agency as well as materiality in terms of paratexts by looking at sandbox games, narrative games, and first-person shooter games as case study groups. Distinguishing between instances of high, medium, and low paratextuality shows that ancillary material is located at different distances from the text and with varying influence on its reception, proposing paratextuality as a gradient scale.