Seventeenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Video games have, in the last two decades, received revived attention on playful technologies as alternative spaces of public pedagogical interest, where institutional and disciplinary boundaries have faded, and innovative ways of creating and disseminating knowledge emerged. Play holds, in this context, an affective appeal, which lies on its perceived heterodoxal character with respect to learning, and the institutions that it occupies, on the one hand, and on the deployment of playful agon imaginations, on the other. There is, however, ambivalence in this reception of heterodoxy: game-based platforms are dependent on story and community cohesion, while either suppressing dissenting voices, or logging them as temporary disruptive drives towards innovation -and ultimate (re-)integration. Cutting through these opposites, the relationship between algorithmic harmonious flow and narrative dissent, I argue, constitutes a public pedagogical event, the mechanisms of which beg examination. Drawing on critical theories, I am proposing a framework for interpreting rhetorics of heterodoxy on contemporary technological design, by asking how aesthetic conflate with often conflicting structural elements. These conflation points serve to obscure encoded rigidity, epistemological introversion, and the identity politics that intersect them. This paper utilizes case study material from an interactive novel game, Eliza, in order to examine heterodoxy as a narrative trope, methodology, and public pedagogy. Through the examination of game instances where deviation from predictive algorithms are allowed and evaluated, new insights on how orthodoxy is remediated, transmitted and critiqued in contemporary cultural texts emerge.