Attraverso lo spazio-tempo: la narrazione ambientale in Immortality = Through space and time: environmental storytelling in Immortality

Abstract

Over the last twenty years, both in the interdisciplinary field of game studies as well as in the video game industry more broadly, much attention has been paid to the construction of virtual spaces, not only to set the limits and possibilities of game dynamics but also to contextualise the narrative. Therefore, various researchers and developers have focused on environmental storytelling: a design process with which conspicuous fragments of a narrative are present in virtual environments in the form of objects, characters, or entire areas that should stimulate the user to find them by moving the digital prosthesis. This article focuses on Immortality (Half Mermaid 2022), a videogame that recontextualise environmental storytelling since it does not link space exploration to kinetic movement. However, it bases this design principle on a space-time manipulation process that hybridises the work of an archivist with that of a movie editor inside a hypertext structure formed by hundreds of clips discoverable in a different order