Infrastructure in Video Games

This book will sketch the dynamics of infrastructure in video games, focusing on the relationship between game rules, fictional world, and player interaction. It will discuss a variety of commercial video games, both mainstream and somewhat niche, that use infrastructure in different ways: Control, Wolfenstein, Fallout, This War of Mine, Exocolonist, Cyberpunk, and Frostpunk.

Video games offer a particularly rich field for thinking about the relationship between narrative and infrastructure. The infrastructures that exist in the fictional worlds of these games define the experience of play in a very direct way: how players are instantiated in the game, how they move around the play space, the resources that are available, and so on. And those infrastructures in turn very directly definite the nature of the fictional world. In contrast to literary fiction, were infrastructures might remain on the periphery of some stories, by virtue of the centrality of player interaction video games are inherently infrastructural.

Daniel Punday is Professor of English at Mississippi State University, USA. He is the author of six books, including Playing at Narratology: Digital Media as Narrative Theory, Five Strands of Fictionality: The Institutional Construction of Contemporary American Fiction and Writing at the Limit: The Novel in the New Media Ecology.