Archival Adventuring

In Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return (2016–present), the site-specific art installation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, visitors explore the house and ephemera of the fictional Selig family. They cross back and forth from the family’s normal Victorian home to the wildly unearthly environments created by the Seligs’ chaotic experiments with time, space, and death. The piece's ludonarrative mechanic is something I want to call archival adventuring, a mechanic which can also be found at the forefront of several recent independent video games: you comb through inert objects, papers, bookshelves, picture albums, and computer programs to piece a story together. This talk explores that ludonarrative mechanic and compares its effects in a physical environment like The House of Eternal Return with a virtual one like What Remains of Edith Finch (Giant Sparrow, 2017). I put the concept in conversation with one of the foundational ideas of Performance Studies—the importance of the archive— and situate the archival adventure as a kind of queer gaming. I argue that this mechanic finds ways to charge (or queer) quotidian objects and spaces through the experiences of boredom, uncertainty, slowness, and intermittent purposelessness. This necessary boredom encourages a slow exploration of charged objects and is starkly at odds with prevailing masculine ludonarrativity, which privileges competition, violence, achievement, and goal-oriented activity.