Individualized Communal Experience: Players of Detroit: Become Human

Authors

  • Victoria Lagrange

Keywords:

immersion, players, replay, digital interactive fiction, choices, narrative exploration

Abstract

I argue that digital interactive fiction – narratives that evolve in response to viewer choices – represents a distinct form of narration and participant engagement that leads to a seemingly paradoxical communal immersion experience. In this paper, I used an online survey with qualitative and quantitative items to study the reception of Quantic Dream’s Detroit: Become Human. I ask: which factors contribute to immersion and drive choice-making in a branching narrative? Which elements affect the replay value? I show that this game promotes high immersion through players’ agency. It also allows for a seemingly paradoxical individualized communal experience leading to replay to explore the different narrative paths. Finally, it promotes imbalanced empathy for the different protagonists.

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Published

2023-06-20

Bibtex

@Conference{digra1954, title ="Individualized Communal Experience: Players of Detroit: Become Human", year = "2023", author = "Lagrange, Victoria", publisher = "DiGRA", address = "Tampere", howpublished = "\url{https://dl.digra.org/index.php/dl/article/view/1954}", booktitle = "Conference Proceedings of DiGRA 2023 Conference: Limits and Margins of Games Settings"}