| dc.description.abstract | The cognitive benefits of playing have been established by many studies but video games are still widely considered a trivial activity compared to literary texts. There has been excellent scholarship on cognitive implications of navigating literary and ludic narratives. However, what is lacking is a comparative methodology and study to explore narratives within both art forms. My dissertation, “Down the Garden-Path, Misleading Narratives in French and Francophone Video Games and Texts,” offers an interdisciplinary study to how authors design ludic works to actively engage users, and how users navigate different genres of challenging narratives. I analyze narratives in a French video game (Heavy Rain) and Francophone texts (a classic modern novel, La Chute by Albert Camus, a postmodern experimental novel, Le Condottière by Georges Perec, and a play, Incendies by Wajdi Mouawad). These works subvert the user’s expectations regarding the plot but also regarding genre conventions. Such misleading narratives are called garden-path narratives in the field of Cognitive Narratology, a field that takes into account the cognitive processes of reader or player—such as making assumptions and decisions— when analyzing narratives. A garden-path structure is a construction with one or several anomalies designed to mislead the user by subverting a first interpretation. Once the anomaly is recognized, the user has to reconstruct the cognitive environment by integrating the new information and revising the initial expectations. I develop a transmedial analysis to uncover the core elements that make up the construction of garden-path narratives. My narratological methodology, which incorporates elements of Umberto Eco’s notions of first/second readings, Rick Altman’s following patterns, James Gee’s literacy perspective on video games, game-theory notions of asymmetric-information games, and Roland Barthes’ narrative codes, reveals the narratively complex processes that are operative in GPNs. My integration of narratology and reception theory allows me to address both internal and external aspects of what is at stake in GPNs. I demonstrate how each author takes full advantage of their genre’s specific characteristics to build unique garden-path narratives. By examining the concept of garden-path narrative in such a varied corpus, my study shows that video games can be as narratively complex as canonical literature, but also that literature can offer ludic, engaging cognitive experiences thanks to the use of garden-path narratives. As a consequence, my dissertation also suggests the benefits of game-playing, via garden-path narratives, in a pedagogical context. Bringing a more nuanced view of video games and literature through an emphasis on their literacy challenges may encourage schools to adopt a more inclusive, game-like approach to teaching reading, and thus engage struggling students and enable them to develop better literary skills. | |
