Narrativization Processes of Video Game Tutorials: From EarthBound to Undertale

From the JRPG EarthBound to the parodic RPG Undertale, produced by the American developer Toby Fox, there is an obvious influence and continuity (in terms of narrative, aesthetics and gameplay).This trajectory therefore constitutes a fruitful prism to study the relations, influences and reappropriations connecting Japanese and Western RPGs, as they are caught in the ludo mix system and in the transmedia circulation of stories and characters (see Steinberg 2012; Jenkins 2008; Blom, 2018; among others). This paper will thus develop a comparative analysis of these two games through a focus on their tutorials, in order to determine how they articulate singularly the representation of rules and that of fiction. Video game tutorials are indeed ambiguous ludo-narrative devices: in these passages, the game addresses directly the player through hybrid expressions, mixing references to fiction and to the player’s empirical gesture (such as “presses B to run”; see Therrien and Julien 2015, Ryan 2004 and Ensslin 2015). Posing at the same time the bases for the rules and for the fictional universe, tutorials represent an ideal gateway to study the sets of constraints existing between rules, fiction and transmedia references (in the case of the semi-shared universe of EarthBound/Undertale).