“If anyone’s going to ruin your night, it should be you”: Responsibility and affective materiality in Undertale and Night in the Woods

Abstract

Affective materiality is a tool for exploring how engaging with textual structures shapes the affective experience of a story. The experience of video games is distinctive because their modes of engagement can lead to players feeling responsible for the decisions they make within the diegetic space of the game and its contextual storyworld. Night in the Woods and Undertale both use the perception of responsibility found in video game modes of engagement as an active storytelling tool, but apply it in different ways. Despite the differences in their contextual application, both games use affective materiality to encourage players to reflect on the consequences of their decisions in multiple arenas: within the context of the game, their engagement with other games and their engagement with the wider world. In doing so, both games apply storytelling techniques that distinguish playing video games from the experience of other media forms and encourage an empathetic engagement with fictional storyworlds.

Players’ perceptions of sexuality and gender-inclusive video games a pragmatic content analysis of steam reviews

“…As our slightly unconventional efforts to provide background information about the four games selected in this study, the authors include relevant studies on these games in this literature review for readers who are unfamiliar with those games. Of the four games we chose for our study, Gone Home was most visible in the literature (Pavlounis, 2016; Sloan, 2015; Veale, 2017, Tulloch et al,2019; (Bolter and Grusin, 2002)), whereas the Night in the Woods (Veale, 2021), Undertale (Ruberg, 2018), and Dream Daddy (Dym et al, 2018; Schaufert, 2018) were only present in a few studies, or as part of broader discussions of multiple games.…”

“…Our research team hypothesizes that this is due in large part to their more recent publishing, and lack of similar adjacency to widespread controversy (though each, in its own local context, is contentious). Veale’s (2021) concept of affective materiality illuminates how players become invested in narrative structures through emotional and intellectual labor (2021). This applies to both Night in the Woods in which the players closely follow the day-to-day activities of Mae the protagonist, and in Undertale in which players take on complex ethical and moral decisions that have a real psychological impact on the players themselves.…”