The Birth of Heteroludoglossia from the Dissonant Languages of Videogames

Abstract

This paper employs Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia as a framework to interpret internal tensions within contemporary digital games. To that end, I propose to acknowledge the multimodal character of entertainment software, with audial, visual, haptic, spatiotemporal and systemic elements of a game in constant interaction. But to properly understand said tensions - frequently dubbed "dissonance" in game criticism - it is important to acknowledge the complex multimodal structure of games that attempt to utilize culturally-rooted ways to describe the world, sometimes trying to combine several such ways at once. As a result, ,game-languages' are born: ways to utilize all game components to cover the specificity of certain narrative genres, to explain the nature of the world in terms consistent with its ideological stance. Quite often, one game combines several game-languages, and their mutually exclusive ideologies are a source of tension and dissonance. To illustrate the issue, I describe how three primary game-languages of Uncharted 3 - the language of Adventure, the language of Heroics, and the language of the Traditional Game - compete to describe an armed conflict to the player.