Peter Wikström

Boxes/Booklets/Bonus Contents: Archival Exploration of the Multimodal Rhetoric of Video Game Packaging and Paraphernalia

Welcome to take part of an exhibition of historical video games from the Embracer Games Archive!

The exhibition is part of an ongoing collaboration between the archive and researchers at Karlstad University. Boxes/Booklets/Bonus Contents is a project in development, in which we aim to explore the rhetorical functions, both aesthetic and commercial, of video game packaging and paraphernalia through case studies of commercial, off-the-shelf games from the massive collection housed by the Embracer Games Archive, a unique and world-leading archive of video game materials located in Karlstad.

Video games are complex cultural works that communicate and interact with their players in a great variety of ways across many modalities. Especially in the early days, the physical paratextual materials – such as packaging, manuals, booklets, maps, gadgets, and trinkets – were central to how video games conveyed their aesthetics, themes, and narratives, and manifested their imaginary worlds.

With this exhibition, we try to illustrate some of the dimensions along which video game paratexts carry meaning, build worlds, and stoke and transform passions, focusing on three themes: Transformations over time; transformations across space; and transformations across media.

Joakim Kilman is a Lecturer in English at Karlstad University. He has also worked as a freelance video game journalist and critic for well over a decade. Currently, he teaches a course on the historical development of video game narratives.

Peter Wikström is Associate Professor of English at Karlstad University, Sweden, specialized in digital and multimodal discourse analysis, and a life-long gamer. His main areas of interest include linguistic and metalinguistic aspects of social media communication, language and gender, discourses of race and racism, and – more recently – discursive aspects of video games.