Papers by Sean P. O'Brien
This paper focuses on the concepts of player roles and role affordance, drawing its examples from... more This paper focuses on the concepts of player roles and role affordance, drawing its examples from role-playing video games (RPGs). RPGs present a useful test case for exploring how player role analysis adds a more fluid, dynamic perspective to existing possibility space and player type analytical approaches. Within possibility spaces, players negotiate the enactment of designed, afforded, and constrained roles. Game designers can take these concepts of possibility spaces and possible roles into account in future designs, and the resulting combinations of spaces and roles are crucial to games’ procedural rhetorics, popular appeal, and aesthetic interest. We can better understand video games as a medium by attending to player roles in relation to possibility spaces and player types. The roles that games afford and players adopt are key to why games have become such an important cultural force in our society, and further exploration of the concept will advance our understanding of why players play, how designers design, and what meanings and pleasures emerge from players' experiences of games. This approach to analyzing character and player roles integrates the player-centric insights of player types and the game-centric insights of possibilty space analysis while addressing leading RPGs such as Skyrim, Mass Effect 3, and Final Fantasy XIII.
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The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
Time in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is characterized by a cacophony of representational ... more Time in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is characterized by a cacophony of representational forms that the narrator Saleem uses with and against each other, such as cyclical time, timelessness, and revisionary linear historical time. Existing analyses of the novel’s representations of time have generally concluded that one or another of the competing temporal frameworks in the novel is primary and that Rushdie and Saleem ultimately discard or subordinate the others. On the contrary, the novel denies a single coherent temporal structure and instead focuses on productively engaging the diversity of time in keeping with Paul Ricoeur’s theory of aporetic time. Ricoeur theorizes that every framework of representing time includes aporias, blind spots it can’t satisfactorily address, and he argues that we must explore these tensions in representations of time — a task for which narrative is uniquely helpful. Investigating aporetic time in Midnight’s Children develops our understanding of Ricoeur by providing a representation of aporetic time to supplement and challenge Ricoeur’s theoretical model (and Homi K. Bhabha’s thoughts on narrating the nation). Midnight’s Children’s narratorial ambivalence and multivalence with regard to temporal frameworks is closely tied to the novel’s major thematic concerns: constructing an understanding of oneself, one’s nation, and history in the face of conflicting experiences and imperfect narratives of significant and traumatic personal and historical events. Applying Rushdie and Ricoeur to each other productively develops our understanding of how complex, contradictory narrative representations of time and of identities can provide a way forward for individuals and nations between the twin dangers of tyrannical narrative orthodoxy and impotent relativism.
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Papers by Sean P. O'Brien
Book Reviews by Sean P. O'Brien
Conference Presentations by Sean P. O'Brien