🌏 Living Narrative Worlds: Assemblage and Multistability within Ian Cheng’s Emissaries trilogy

Abstract: This essay examines how automatism and AI affect videogame ontology and aesthetics through an extended analysis of Ian Cheng’s game art trilogy Emissaries (2015-2017). The chapter begins with a literature review on assemblage theory within game studies, followed by an examination of how Emissaries functions structurally as a self-playing game and theoretically as a living game world. Following this, the rest of the chapter works to comparatively situate it in relation to various other self-playing or open-ended simulation videogames. The chapter then finishes with a broader look at live service games and speculatively positions them alongside Emissaries as living worlds. The overall goal of this chapter will be to open up space for the examination of videogames as nonhuman or posthuman assemblages, and, in effect, work to de-emphasize anthropocentric essentialisms that only allow for games to function as reactive systems that are reliant on human agency.

Keywords: videogames, game Art, artgames, contemporary art, simulation, AI, emergence, self-playing games, automation, science fiction

Please reach out to me via email if you would like to read a preprint copy of this chapter.

Recommended citation: Bailey, A. (2020) "Living narrative worlds: Assemblage and multistability within Ian Cheng’s Emissaries trilogy," in Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Narrative Aesthetics in Video Games, edited by Deniz Eyuce Sansal, and Deniz Denizel, Peter Lang Group. https://doi.org/10.3726/b18052