O gênero game narrativo: uma análise textual à luz do interacionismo sociodiscursivo

Abstract

The new social practices have given rise to a new type of text that, although not as new, operates with new and increasingly modern and changing resources: digital games or games. Games are played by millions of people around the world and currently have the greatest economic strength in the entertainment market, yet still occupy a small place in academic research. In this work, we take as object of analysis the narrative game and consider it as a genre of text. In the context of gender studies, we have positioned ourselves in the field of " crossbreed approaches", based on the combination of theoretical contributions involving different sociodiscursive and socioretorean theories, with emphasis on Sociodiscursive Interactionism (ISD), proposed by Bronckart ([1999]/2012 ), as well as considering multimodality issues. In this context, as part of the Grupo de Estudos em Letramentos, Interação e Trabalho (GELIT/UFPB), this research is inserted in an attempt to promote a theoretical-analytical reflection of the digital game as a text, analyzing its characteristics in the light of ISD. Our objective was to analyze an empirical text, the game "Batman, the Telltale Series" (2016) that works as an example to understand the structure and functionality of the narrative game genre, analyzing the textual configuration of the genre, considering its socio-historical aspects, its multimodal and hypertextual dimension, regarding the relations between the verbal and visual elements in the production of the senses, and the players' roles as narrator readers / writers. This research is justified considering that the relationship of verbal and nonverbal text is still little explored in the theoretical field of ISD. It is in this context that this research had the intention to contribute, by suggesting the establishment of ISD interactions with other theories, such as Visual Design Grammar, in order to allow the analysis of digital multimodal texts, so common in human language practices. To elucidate this research, we have become a researcher initiated and analyst. The research is qualitative-interpretative, with exploratory objectives based on the analysis of the game and the corpus generated by three collaborators during the execution of the game. We use in generation and data collection the video of each player's game screen and an individually applied questionnaire. In this perspective, we consider how the multimodal elements construct the senses in the game, the textual hyperlinks, the textual materiality, and finally, the language of the games backing us in the categories of ISD analysis (types of discourse, sequence types, textualization). We emphasize, above all, the observables of the paralinguistic order, formed by visual semiotic units, called paratextual units and the role of the player in the construction of history, its interaction with the elements of the text and intertextual relations and the consequences for the definition of history. In the analysis, we see in the game a mix between the worlds of expose and narrate, how visual elements can indicate types of speech, and how they can function as connecting resources. We have verified that the overall game plan is extremely complex, since it involves the nesting of discursive worlds associated with types of discourse and pervaded by different types of sequence. Finally, we identify the possibilities of dialogues between ISD and GDV that can provoke reconfigurations in the theoretical-methodological perspective of ISD.