We’re all familiar with epistolary novels, where a fictional story is told through assembled ephemeral documents – letters, newspaper clippings, diary entries, etc. This is not mere collage; all of these source documents are themselves fictionalized. Frankenstein, Dracula, the early works of Jane Austin, and House of Leaves are popular examples of this form.
There are epistolary films too, though nobody really calls them that. Perhaps the film is composed of footage from home movies, news broadcasts, youtube videos, etc. The Blair Witch Project’s “found footage” conceit inspired many similar epistolary horror films. Here, this structure is used to enhance verisimilitude, bringing the horror closer to reality – could it possibly, conceivably be real?
Recently we’ve also seen experimental film use real documentary footage to tell fictional stories, like the use of hours of cut together surveillance footage to create a narrative in Dragonfly Eyes, or the use of an obscure, obsessive youtube user’s hundreds of videos to construct a dark fictional narrative in Fraud. This form allows the filmmakers to really prod at questions of documentary ethics, the evidentiary value of video, and the latent pathologies bubbling under the surface of their source footage. I don’t know whether you’d really call this trend “epistolary”, but it’s too cool not to mention.
In recent years, we’ve started seeing epistolary games. This is pretty interesting stuff! What are the sorts of ephemeral materials that can be brought together to tell this kind of narrative in this relatively young medium?
The Beginner's Guide
The Beginner’s Guide has you play through the collected works of a fictional indie game developer while you listen to commentary layered over them by the developer’s friend. You learn about the developer’s history and his issues through playing his games. This is sort of a museum style experience where you learn about and analyze an artist’s curated works, but it’s also quite voyeuristic in tone, as you feel you’re learning more about him than he really wanted anyone to.
Hypnospace Outlaw
Hypnospace Outlaw takes place entirely within a fictional 90’s operating system and web browser. You play as a moderator hired by this big AOL-style corporation that runs its own walled-garden internet. You browse websites taking down violations, you check your email, you download goofy software widgets and midis. You immerse yourself in this skewed version of the 90’s internet and take a very morally ambiguous role in corporatizing the wild old web.
Tacoma
Tacoma is a science-fiction walking simulator that takes the epistolary format to very original places. You are a sort of insurance investigator type who explores an abandoned space station to retrieve AI data and piece together what happened there. Everyone on the ship was equipped with augmented reality devices, and the metadata from those devices is still logged on the ship’s computer.
In each room of the ship, you can download its most recent AR metadata and play it back. This metadata can tell you a whole lot. You can see silhouetted outlines of the crew members’ bodies as they move through space. You can hear their voices as they talk. When they open up their own little smart devices, you can see exactly what emails, web pages, or other materials they were viewing at that time. I really enjoyed the way this game gives you the full epistolary narrative experience through a kind of document that doesn’t even exist in the real world.
What epistolary games have you played? How do they use this form in interesting or surprising ways?