The 25-hour Moment: How Pathologic 2 Facilitates Presentness and Constructs Its Ludonarrative

Abstract

This thesis investigates how interactivity, one of digital games’ most prominent and productive aspects, can be leveraged to produce particular experiences within games. I demonstrate how Pathologic 2 is designed to leverage interactivity in order to immerse the player within its fiction and world, primarily by the player’s own continuous interaction with the game system as represented in the game’s fictional world. This interactivity, made meaningful through its systemic context, is shown to also be crucial in the construction of the game’s ludonarrative, during which the player engages in continuous embodied thinking. This ludonarrative is made legible through the game’s consistent representation and allows for interpretation and a deeper analysis of the game’s fiction as well as the embodied player’s role within it. The concept of “difficulty,” a prominent device in games, is also accounted for and discussed. This “difficulty,” encompassing both the game system as stress-inducing and the fictional world’s as informationally ambiguous, motivates player action and is key in the further facilitation of immersion and, especially, the facilitation and nuancing of the player’s embodied thinking. The cohesive and uncompromising design of Pathologic 2 becomes a complex system of mutual reinforcement, with the player’s actions, guided by the game’s design, as its primary and ever-present driving force.