Paper Description (2025)
This project asks you to analyze a game in terms of tragedy. I know that is not very specific, but I cannot necessarily predict what *kind* of of analysis you should do, or what “terms of tragedy” will be relevant to your experience of the game. So, if I am cryptic here, it is because I am giving you space to tell me about your game and what makes it tragic–or, what elements of the game most resonate with the scholarship on tragedy we have read.
I have one major, non-negotiable content requirement for the paper: it has to draw upon Aristotle, Curran, and one other source from Canvas, to craft a theory of catharsis. This section has to summarize, compare, and/or contrast at least 3 different versions of catharsis explored by Curran in her piece. I want someone who has never heard the term to read this section of the paper and understand that there’s several viable ways scholars use this term to describe different (but, um, maybe similar) aesthetic experiences.
You might use more than one definition of catharsis in your paper, exploring how different senses are operating simultaneously.
You might spend more time in your paper focusing on the complex ways the game modulates our relationship to the tragic protagonist.
Maybe you want to walk through a lot of scenes that show us the characters tragic flaw (hamarita) in action.
Whatever you choose to do, the paper should “close read,” similar to how we read a song in class, or the ways I try to analyze Last of Us, particular scenes. Take us really close to a specific scene–the scenes that most help us understand what, in terms of tragedy, the game does well. Or, show us what it doesn’t do well! Whatever. It is your paper, your experience. I just want to make sure that you can take esoteric, complex theory (catharsis) and apply it to a lived experience. Because that’s the world I want to live in–a world in which people can use their own experience as evidence for the world they want to construct.
Paper Requirements (2024)
The paper should be 8 to 12 pages (say 1700 to 3000 words). Some people do write more. I do not have time to read more than 20 pages.
The paper needs to explore and define catharsis, drawing on the resources listed below. The discussion of catharsis should be about a page, and should reference at least Curran and Aristotle. Essentially, Curran lays out six different senses of catharsis. You need to pick or modify one, and compare it to some others.
I have also indicated that, in addition to catharsis, you should use one of the other terms from our collaborative handbook.
The paper should then close read 2-4 scenes from the game that help me understand the answer to one (or more) of the following questions:
- Is this game a tragedy (by Aristotelian standards)?
- Did you have a cathartic experience?
- How/does the interactive nature of the game augment/diminish its potential as a tragedy capable of producing catharsis?
- Explore the complex relationship to the game’s protagonist / argue for the agent of the tragic action etc (think of the range of work we saw in the project presentations!)
Your answer(s) to that/those question(s) is your thesis. The paragraphs examining scenes are your evidence in support.
Finally–remember that this is mostly advisory. Meaning–you have to show me you can read several academic sources and define catharsis–but, after that, what you do in the paper is up to you. Make it smart. Point to specific elements, scenes, choices, dialogue in the game. But the exact argument of the paper is up to you.
Catharsis Resources
Here’s what I have:
- My Opening Lecture
- My selections from Aristotle’s Poetics (from the Butcher)
- Link to free/complete Aristotle’s Poetics
- Curran, 2016, (PDF in Canvas)
- Link to Meakin
- Link to heuristic, terms
- Pötzsch and Waszkiewicz, Life Is Bleak (in Particular for Women Who Exert Power and Try to Change the World): The Poetics and Politics of Life Is Strange
- Juul, “Fictional Failure,” from The Art of Failure (2013)[.pdf in Canvas] [see also Bushnell, 2016, “Tragic Time and Choice in Video Games”
Aristotle’s Definition of Tragedy:
VI.2-3
Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of emotions.
Here is my blog post on catharsis, which you can quote and argue against in your paper:
I’ll say that I don’t think the purpose of tragedy is to release fear or pity. That’s too narrow. Both in the sense that I don’t think tragic exploration limits itself to what we fear and who we pity (for suffering what seems injust or caprice whims of fate).
Catharsis reaches out to us and reminds us, rekindles, relights, what is already there. Our fear of death. Our fear of loss. Our struggle to find meaning in our lives. Our desire for a soulmate. The pain of rejection or betrayal. Catharsis is a term for the resonance between what we see on the stage, the screen, the page, and our own troubles. This isn’t to say we can’t have a powerful sympathetic response to a narrative to which we have no lived correlate–I find Eli Weisel’s Night to be incredibly powerful despite the fact that I have not experienced genocide. Night is doing powerful work, I would simply insist that it is not cathartic work, because there is no resonance for me. This does not mean it is not “pedagogic” instructive–it certainly aims to teach us how (not) to live. But there is no movement, connection to my life (and, without falling into the “universal” rabbit hole, etc. etc).
So, if I had to lay down a fundamental first principle for catharsis, it would be that there must be a fundamental identification between the action of the tragedy and the audience/reader/player.
