I wanted to separate this reflection because it's only tangentially related to the reading, but it's more of a personal experience relating to Gee's 6th property - the one that deals with "player-enacted stories or trajectories" (75).
When I was younger, my favorite game series was The Legend of Zelda. I played through parts of the original one at a friend's house got Link's Awakening for my Game Boy, and got Ocarina of Time for the N64. I played through all of them and enjoyed myself, inserting myself into this fantastical story of heroes and goddesses and legends. It was all pretty standard storytelling stuff - be the hero, defeat evil, know sacrifice, all very standard. Without realizing it, I was recognizing standard thematic tropes, stock characters, and plot structures. This isn't to say I didn't love it.
So when I bought Majora's Mask, I expected more of the same. Instead, I got this strange, Groundhog-esque type game. If you aren't aware of the basic plot, Link - the protagonist, is searching through the woods to find an old friend from Ocarina of Time. His horse is stolen by a masked imp, and he gives chase, falling into a hole. When he awakes, the imp transforms his body into this strange plant-monster thing. (A deku scrub if you're familiar.) Chasing the imp, he arrives into this world that's a distorted version of the one he came from. The locations are all different and strange, but the people are doppelgangers from his home. They all act differently though, with unique personalities.
Through some evil magic, the imp has caused the moon to start hurtling toward the earth, threatening to destroy the town, and everyone in it, in 3 days. Through some strange time-manipulation, Link is able to relive the same 3 days over and over, accomplishing tasks, learning about the people and their routines, acquiring items, and discovering the history of this world.
Now, I really engaged in this sort of memorization. I followed each NPC to discover everything they did and said over these three days. Some characters had complex story lines, spanning days and multiple interactions that could go differently based on my actions. These "people" lived their lives while facing this threat of Armageddon. Some ignored it, some laughed about it, some fled the town as the moon approached. All "lived" these three days whether or not I interacted with them.
As games go, Link defeats the great evil, saves everyone, and all these people breathe easier. There is redemption, loss, and all those other familiar adventure things.
The strange thing that happened to me didn't occur until years later.
I have strong memories about this game. Real, visceral memories of interacting with these people, this world, in a complex and real way. I remember dark, twisted things happening in the game - people losing hope when I failed to deliver messages, people cowering in corners, watching people cross each other for money, hold grudges. I remember the history of a desert place being blood-soaked and tragic.
The weird thing about all these things? Most of them weren't actually in the game. I created most of these elaborate backstories and personal conflicts. These interactions could have happened - in fact, many of them probably would have been included if the hardware was more sophisticated.
But this where the 6th property comes in. This game allowed me to enact my own trajectories - to fill in plot points and social interactions. I don't know if this game taught me to "look deeper" into stories - to not assume that people are telling the truth - but it certainly stuck with me. Even now, I prefer games, movies, and books that make me "work" to figure how everything and everyone fits together - something very helpful in my ordinary social interactions and in my managing skills.
Again, I'm not sure how much I buy into the argument, but I can see it.
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