Unnatural Games?: Innovation and Generification of Natural and Unnatural Visual Effects in Dead Space and Alien: Isolation

How do we as recipients deal with a text, film, or computer game in which the fictional world is very different from our own? While many traditions of artistic representation try to copy our world more or less closely, other strands explore strange new worlds or enchanted or nightmarish versions of our own world. For example, in the stealth-action game Dishonored (2012), the player’s avatar is an assassin with superhuman powers who can teleport himself onto high ledges or manipulate distant objects. In another game classic, Half Life 2 (2004), the player uses a device called a gravity gun with which large objects can be lifted and flung about effortlessly. Neither of these capabilities exists in our real world, but in the games their existence is readily accepted by the player, who performs a cognitive operation termed “naturalization” by Monika Fludernik (1996): elements that are incompatible with our own world are hereby explained, or naturalized, to fit in with our world knowledge. In the above examples, the fantasy or science-fiction genre serves as a naturalizing frame. But there are other examples, such as the protagonist’s transformation into a chimpanzee in Will Self’s Great Apes (1997), which cannot be naturalized as easily by the recipient. These examples have been classified as unnatural.

A recent trend in cognitive narratology focuses on unnatural narratives and has developed many new insights in a variety of media. Taking its cue from literary narratives as well as other media, such as comics and film, the unnatural perspective has challenged established modes of how recipients—often unwittingly—naturalize strange storyworlds that appear incompatible with real-world experience (cf. Alber and Heinze 2011). As Jan Alber, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson outline the theory, “unnatural narrative theorists oppose what one might call ‘mimetic reductionism,’ that is, the claim that the basic aspects of narrative can be explained primarily or exclusively by models based on realist parameters.” More concretely, they examine “the ways innovative and impossible narratives challenge mimetic understandings of narrative” (2013: 1, 2). Unnatural narratives are thus anti-mimetic in the Platonic sense of mimesis, in that they “do not try to imitate or reproduce the parameters and principles of the empirical world” (Alber and Hansen 2014: 2). The approach, departing from Fludernik’s earlier work on natural narratology, demonstrates that the cognitive operation of naturalization serves the central purpose of making sense of otherwise nonsensical or contradictory textual or audio-visual information.¹ Works of art thus play with readers’ expectations by complying with them but also confounding them.

The dichotomy natural versus unnatural furthermore points to the fact that recipients have often become so accustomed to naturalizing unnatural phenomena due to established conventions of a genre or medium that the inherent unnaturalness has often faded into obscurity. Alber has recently referred to this process as generification:

In certain cases, the process of blending or frame enrichment has already taken place and the unnatural has already been conventionalized. … Readers may thus account for certain represented impossibilities (such as the speaking animal in beast fables or time travel in science fiction) by identifying them as belonging to familiar literary genres and generic conventions.

(2014: 274)

The unnaturalness has become naturalized and thus recedes into the background. Here, a look at a neighboring area, namely, into the theory of aesthetic illusion, proves instructive (see Wolf 1993). In many cases and across different media, unnatural storyworlds and modes of narration do not reduce or destroy a recipient’s aesthetic illusion or even immersion. Rather, by naturalizing the unnatural, aesthetic illusion is maintained, and in cases where this naturalization has become customary—for example, in a fixed genre convention—an absence of unnatural markers paradoxically leads to a reduction or even destruction of illusion. In these cases, unnaturalness marks an artifact as art. This is a point that has been rather neglected so far in the discussion, and I want to integrate this aspect later on in this article.²

Despite its current flurry of...