Scenes from the Digital Paperverse: Interactive Books in the Context of Digital Games

Abstract

In recent years, digital games have increasingly turned to remediating movable toy books, especially pop-up books, which lends more urgency to comparing the two media. In this paper, I explore the questions of how digital games remediate movable toy books and for what purpose they do so. In three separate scenes, it becomes apparent how the influence of interactive books as ludic mechanical devices extends to digital games. The article covers apps for portable devices as well as digital games such as What Remains of Edith Finch, The Room, it takes two, and Tengami. It becomes evident that digital games must be considered a hybrid experience from the get-go, melding material practices from the well-established paperverse and the fledgling digital games.