Postmodern Detective Fiction in Videogames

Resum

The tropes of the detective genre have been challenged, subverted, re-appropriated by authors such as Robert Coover or Paul Auster, which exemplify the foundations of postmodern detective fiction. In these stories, solving the mystery is not central to the story, and the investigation is transformed or derailed by becoming a discovery of something completely different. In some cases, the detective, along with the reader, explores an encyclopedic space of information without quite solving the case. This article examines how videogames open up new territory in the genre of postmodern of detective stories by comparing them with their literary counterparts. Videogames can have the player explore aspects of the narrative that may not be directly relevant to the mystery to be solved, or by create a mystery that may be unstable and dependent on the choices of the player. The novels analyzed are Coover’s Noir (2008) and Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1985), which will be compare with the games Her Story (Sam Barlow, 2015), Blade Runner (Westwood Studios, 1997) and Deadly Premonition: Director’s Cut (Access Games, 2010). This comparison allows us to identify three basic features of postmodern detective fiction that transfer well to digital games: the city as an explorable and navigable space, unstable identities, and metafictional references.