Click here to download and play “You’re ruining my lore” (via Holly Nielsen, itch.io)
This is a short interactive fiction vignette I created to explore some of the ideas (and my own personal perspective and feelings) around “lore” in games, what it has come to mean, and the role of players in the creation of lore through wikis, fan-sites and forums. Lore is often seen as an unchanging tome of facts- a backstory and “history” of an in-game world or character that even if told only in part is “true” and therefore immutable. Lore is therefore something to be unravelled, understood, solved, and catalogued. This perception is of course counter to what history actually is. History is a written constantly changing human created thing, it should be re-visited and re-written. This view of lore, as well as how narratives are sometimes presented in games and in player-made media, can lead to tension.
Holly Nielsen is a historian, writer, and narrative designer based in London. She is currently completing her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her thesis is titled ‘British Board Games and the Ludic Imagination, c.1860-1939’. She has published a number of academic pieces about her research exploring topics such as; geographies in nineteenth century board games, imperial preference in interwar British trade games, the depiction of the gendered experience in twentieth century chance-based board games, and multipurpose domesticity. Alongside her academic work Holly is a game developer, working as a writer and narrative designer for video games. Her latest work can be seen in the IGF Excellence in Narrative nominated game, Neurocracy. Before pivoting to academia and games, Holly was a journalist and arts critic, with bylines including The Guardian, The New Statesman, and Vice, among others.