MC: Dr. Astrid Ensslin: Analyzing Literary Games: Ludostylistics, Cultural Narratology and Medium-specific Multimodality

In this hands-on workshop, we will be examining how narrative/literary games can be analyzed through the lenses of postclassical, medium-specific narratology and multimodal social semiotics. Participants will be introduced to the toolkits of functional ludostylistics (Ensslin 2014), procedural multimodality (Hawreliak 2019; Ensslin 2012), as well as structural and cognitive ludonarratology (Schröter & Thon 2014), and we will also cover some aspects of critical game analysis, looking at audiovisual representations of bodies and voices in narrative games (Gray 2014; Ensslin 2010). Participants are encouraged to bring their own analytical objects (e.g. characters, mechanics, world elements) into this class for joint project work.

_References:

_{Ensslin, Astrid (2010) “Black and white: Language ideologies in computer game discourse,” in Sally Johnson & Tommaso Milani (eds) Language Ideologies and Media Discourse: Texts, Practices, Policies. London: Continuum, 205-222.}

_{Ensslin, Astrid (2012) The Language of Gaming. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.}

_{Ensslin, Astrid (2014) Literary Gaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.}

_{Gray, Kishonna (2014) Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live: Theoretical Perspectives from the Virtual Margins. New York: Routledge.}

_{Hawreliak, Jason (2019) “On the Procedural Mode,” in Astrid Ensslin and Isabel Balteiro (eds) Approaches to Videogame Discourse: Lexis, Interaction, Textuality. New York: Bloomsbury, 13-38.}

_{Schröter, Felix and Jan-Noël Thon (2014) “Video Game Characters: Theory and Analysis.” Diegesis, 3(1): 40-77.}

// Dr. Astrid Ensslin is the associate professor at the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies of the University of Bergen. Her research sits at the multiple intersections between digital media/culture, literary studies and applied linguistics. Her research involves numerous interdisciplinary projects, such as combining digital fiction research with body image psychology; and studying speech accents in videogames using machine learning techniques. Currently she is working on a monograph project with Dr. Alice Bell (Sheffield Hallam), which examines reader/players of digital fiction (from hypertext to VR) from a cognitive-empirical narratological point of view. Her past and current teaching has been mostly in Digital Humanities, media, communication and cultural studies, and particularly in digital media, videogames, electronic literature and digital fiction, transmedial narratology.