نوع مقاله : مقاله پژوهشی
نویسنده
استادیار گروه هنرهای رسانهای، دانشکده دین و رسانه، دانشگاه صداوسیما، قم، ایران
چکیده
کلیدواژهها
عنوان مقاله [English]
نویسنده [English]
With the expansion of digital media and the emergence of interactive narratives, video games have become a new platform for representing fundamental human experiences. Among them, narrative-based games not only serve as entertainment tools but also provide the opportunity to confront concepts such as loss, death, anxiety, and existential displacement. This study aims to analyze the concepts of loss and existential anxiety in the user's experience of interactive narrative through a case study of the video game What Remains of Edith Finch, a work that creates an existential experience through its episodic narrative structure, cinematic graphics, complex architecture, and guided user interaction. The central research question is how this game, through its narrative and interactive design, represents the concepts of loss and existential anxiety and transforms them into a lived experience. Using a qualitative approach and interpretive-analytical method, the structural and content elements of the game have been examined based on the frameworks of existential philosophy and digital narrative theory. Data were collected through repeated gameplay observation, narrative analysis, visual content analysis, and examination of interactive elements. Selected episodes were analyzed and interpreted based on their significance in representing loss and anxiety. Findings indicate that the game's episodic structure, gradual spatial obstruction, purposeful silences, fragmented narratives, and limited agency together create a process of meaning collapse and confrontation with nothingness. Despite limited interaction, user participation plays a crucial role in engaging cognitively and emotionally with the state of loss. The user, unable to change or escape the narrative, finds themselves immersed in trauma, fragmentation, and narrative silence. The conclusion emphasizes that such games, through the integration of sound, imagery, space, and narrative, constitute a new medium for representing and embodying existential experiences. These games do not merely narrate death and loss but construct a structure in which the user's lived experience acquires an existential quality. The gradual, inescapable confrontation with death, the emergence of anxiety within silence, fragmentation, and spatial rootlessness, all demonstrate that the narrative in this game transcends mere representation and transforms into an inner, emotional experience. From this perspective, such games can be regarded not only as interactive structures but as multimedia texts with the capacity for philosophical reflection, cultural analysis, and psychoanalytic exploration, texts whose language emerges from experience, participation, and loss; a language that offers neither salvation nor a definite end, but only the possibility of movement through anxiety, loss, and silence.
کلیدواژهها [English]
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