Journal Articles
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/7915
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Item Friendship isn’t an emotion fucknuts: Manipulating affective materiality to shape the experience of Homestuck’s story(SAGE Publications, 20/06/2017) Veale KRHomestuck is a textual and experiential chameleon that manipulates its own structure to shape the audience’s affective experience of the story by mimicking not just the storytelling techniques of other media forms, but their modes of engagement as well. This article introduces terminology to illustrate how and why the online serial Homestuck qualifies as a distinctive form of storytelling. I introduce the term transmodal engagement to illustrate how Homestuck uses the affective, experiential affordances of different media forms to sculpt and shape the experience of the text in completely different ways to ‘transmedia’ storytelling. The second term this article introduces is metamedia storytelling, which describes how the audience’s familiarity with storytelling across multiple media forms can be used to manipulate their experience of fiction. Homestuck deploys metamedia storytelling to continually destabilise the reader’s understanding of the text and their investments in the storyworld by forcing re-evaluations of not just what is happening, but what kind of mediated relationship the readers have with the content of the story.Item Gone home, and the power of affective nostalgia(Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 9/08/2017) Veale KRGone Home is a videogame that uses storytelling specific to the ‘affective materiality’ of its medium to produce a sense of responsibility for the player, reinforcing their affective investment in the storyworld. The game employs this affective materiality for political ends – to create empathy for the queer sister of its protagonist – by placing it within a recent but unsympathetic historical moment. Gone Home understands nostalgia as a way to recognise the positive and negative elements of the past, and then reflect on them in order to take action for a better future. It uses nostalgia in this mode to highlight the differences in how progressive the western world is in treating LGBTQIA+ youth: through their own decisions, the player gets to know two young women as they come to terms with their sexuality and identities against a backdrop that is even less welcoming to difference than today. The historical and political engagement of the videogame resonates with attempts by museums ‘to educate or otherwise influence how people understand and use the past to understand themselves and others’, through embracing the links between recollection, affect, emotion and empathy.
