Zhu | Collaborative Storytelling & The Self-Reflexive Gaze: African Exoticism Through Video Games
Channel: MSU Digital Humanities
Date: 2023-05-15

Full title: Collaborative Storytelling And The Self-Reflexive Gaze: Imagining, Visualizing, And Adapting African Exoticism Through Video Games

Shiyi Zhu | University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

There has been a fascination with the fantasy and imagination of Africa throughout history, from early colonial days to contemporary novels and digital media, a fascination that has attracted the interest of artists, novelists, literary critics, and game designers alike. This paper focuses on three video games published on itch.io: Lotus of the Nile (2020), a game in which users create African artwork and explore the cultural heritage behind it; Monster Stock Art (2022), where users can create African monsters based on mythology and their own imagination; and our recently published artwork Journey to CONLAY (2022), a digital adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s two travel writings, “Heart of Darkness” and The Rescue. Through the examination of hyperlinks and other forms of computer-human interactions in these three games, this paper examines how interactive video games can contribute to the traditional Saidian postcolonial scholarship by forming a dialog and providing insights into the binary self/other relationship. Specifically, it highlights the interactive media form as a self-referential medium that reveals and reflects upon the subject’s conscious entertainment of the otherness as an imaginary space or an “unheard-of symbolic system”, as suggested by Roland Barthes. In order to make out meaning in electronic texts, we draw on the idea put forward by Deegan and Sutherland that electronic texts can be considered collaborative workspaces in which users are responsible for manipulating and creating meaning. Thus, this paper explores how video game mechanisms can open up a new perspective on the relationship between self and other, and how narrators’ gazes can also be transformed into collaborative imaginations of exoticism and exoticization in a new medium, as well as new insights into the relationship between self and other.

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