Year 13 OCR Media Studies

Postmodern Videogames:
Intertextuality

Learning Objectives

1. To be able to identify and discuss

intertextuality in postmodern videogames
What makes
videogames
postmodern?
 What makes a videogame
postmodern?
1. Fragmentation of representations
- characters, settings, events

2. Intertextuality
- genre hybridity, media interdependence, immersion and rabbit holes

3. Lack of Verisimilitude
- machinima, shifting contexts, temporal mastery

4. Open-endedness
- micro-narratives, sandbox style vs. linearity

5. Interactivity
- player agency and emergent gameplay
 Intertextuality
The videogame blurs boundaries between itself
and other media texts. Genre hybridity implies
interdependence rather than uniqueness
between videogames and other media texts. The
video game may borrow character, phrases,
situations, narratives etc from another media
text.

• What intertextuality examples in the videogame

industry can you think of?
 Terminology
• Horizontally Integrated Entertainment Industry:
Economic structure where by a single company may
have roots across all the different types of media
industry.

• Rabbit Holes: Entry points for audiences to access

alternate reality gaming experience.

• Synergy: Two or more agents working together to

produce a result that neither could do independently.

• Genre Hybridity: The blurring and combing of more

than one genre and their respective conventions.
Enter the Matrix (2003)
 Intertextuality Examples
• Resident Evil (1996)

• Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (2009)

• Lego Batman (2008)

• Tombraider: Underworld (2008)

• The Blair Witch Project (2000)

While pastiche and intertextuality are more suited
terms for literature, many examples appear within
interactive gaming entertainments. Let’s take the
game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City as our archetypal
example. Indeed one of the more comical aspects of
the game is that much of its cutscene storylines
borrow from references to popular culture. These
include but are not limited to Taxi, Red Dawn, Heat,
Pulp Fiction, Scarface, and Carlito’s Way. The title
‘Vice City’ alone implies not only that the setting is a
place of ‘vice’ but also makes fun of the popular
eighties television show Miami Vice.

So how can we apply this to video games?

The answer is genre hybridity.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

- Indeed, the actions of the player include the third-person over-

the-shoulder elements of shooting games; the combat system
of traditional fighting games like Double Dragon and Streets of
Rage; the driving elements of classics like San Francisco Rush,
Crazy Taxi, and Road Rage; as well as the open-ended
worldliness of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing
Games like Everquest and World of Warcraft that allow the
participant to explore a fully flushed out gaming environment.

- This genre hybridity, however, is not strict to video games

genres but can indeed cross mediums altogether. Take the
Max Payne series and examine what formats construct the
game. Max Payne combines the traditional tropes of hardboiled
detective fiction, sketch drawings as cutscenes typically seen
only in comic books, the voiceover monologues of the lead
protagonist during actual gamplay (a technique normally suited
for cinema), and the use of flashbacks as entire levels, a
common technique used in television.
“Since there are only a limited number of
storylines to tell, our only method of
inventing new styles of gameplay is to
resurrect dead genres and reconstruct
them to make something new. Narration
evolves, gameplay evolves. Hardware
merely progresses. Long gone are the
days of two-dimensional side-scrollers
and linear gameplay. The future of
gaming is here and now.”
– David Halpert 2008