Media Intertextuality in Digital Fiction and Games: Evolution and Tradition

Abstract

The goal of the article is to demonstrate the common threads and methods of studying digital storytelling as a unified, second-order aesthetic code. Just as the category of translation, when applied to digital literature, was expanded into a more complex set of methods known as media translation, the article applies similar logic to the notion of intertextuality and proposes an augmented form of “digital“ or “media intertextuality“. Games, interactive fiction, hypertext fiction, story generators, and other born-digital forms are all “texts” that share evolutionary poetics and intertextual strategies extending beyond language into multimodal, procedural, and embodied affordances. Drawing on the concept of structural quotation and semiotic calques, this article suggests that intertextuality should operate across multiple extra-linguistic registers: visual, procedural, and embodied. Neither evolutionary continuity nor broad intertextuality have been sufficiently emphasized in current game studies outside the literary angle. In several examples and case studies—from Zork II to World of Warcraft—this paper demonstrates how repetition with difference, brought about by intertextual links, generates evolutionary continuity and intertextual richness. In this dialogical ecology, AAA blockbusters and experimental works are worth studying together, even if, within the discourse of digital entertainment, they are currently at war. The former push the boundaries of expressive possibility, whereas the latter accrue cultural capital by reworking and critiquing shared codes.

1. Introduction

From the moment the creators of Zork, the computer text adventure game, promised the player an adventure in every room, branching in every direction; when Michael Joyce, in afternoon, a story, realized the idea of a novel that is different every time one reads it; and when Shelley Jackson, in Patchwork Girl, allowed readers to stitch together the narrative like her titular female Frankenstein—digital literature forever changed the art of storytelling. In its new form, it is defined by variability, reader agency, structural intermediality, and an aesthetics of experiential presence. The traditional novelistic form has been transformed into a narratological and epistemological generator1. The very semiotic foundation of discourse has also changed: the digital sign has acquired performative aspects, and meaning has entered into a dance with action2.

The category of digital storytelling is a handy umbrella term that includes pioneering and experimental narratives in electronic literature, computer games, literary apps, and text-based installations. All of these forms are shaped by the evolution of digital media and by storytelling techniques that operate within the new writing spaces these media create. Modes of expression, interfaces, reception models, and narrative strategies intersect, are tested against one another, and gradually stabilise. Together, they form a shared cultural ecosystem in which the centre of the field is sustained through a constant exchange with its margins. The forces that shape this field-formation process, described by Pierre Bourdieu as a tension between symbolic and economic capital, remain largely unchanged (with “bohemia” and “bourgeois” radically redefined by largely American-based power relations within the community of players and readers) (Bourdieu 1996, pp. 54–57). Over the decades, starting with text adventures and ending with smartphone novels, the emerging genre of digital storytelling maintained and evolved its core identity thanks to the semiotic mechanism that, according to the Russian formalists, such as Jirij Lotman or Viktor Shklovsky, produces a “secondary modelling system” (Baron 2019, p. 254). The medium, in this view, is a second-order system built upon all its semiotic modalities (sound, vision, procedurality). An aesthetic code, on the other hand, is born of the affordances and constraints of the medium. Process art, happenings, conceptual art, Fluxus, Situationism, techno-art, and kinetic art form a unifying foundation and a common heritage for interactive art in general.

Placing electronic literature alongside games, interactive films, and other forms of digital storytelling is justified for several reasons. Most importantly, text has not disappeared (Antonini 2022). Rather than replacing textual production with visual and cinematic forms3, the digital sphere has multiplied it, and contemporary large-scale AI text generation offers clear evidence of this trend. Hypertext, in its simplest form as a network of nodes and links, can still model narrative and cognitive processes of both human and non-human authors (Antonini et al. 2025). The shared origin of computer games and electronic literature, and the links between them, can be traced back at least to the already mentioned Joyce’s afternoon, a story. The opening scene, set on a mysterious winter night and featuring two unnamed figures, ends with a direct question to the reader: “Do you want to hear about it?”—accompanied by yes and no buttons. Although this choice is not generated by a parser, as in interactive fiction, its reference to emerging conventions of text-based adventures is clear. With this gesture, Joyce acknowledged earlier forms of writing for the computer screen and connected emerging gaming communities with so-called “serious” literature.

Beyond narrative and interface conventions, different forms of digital storytelling share a common material base: the semiosphere, defined by Jurij Łotman as the semiotic space of a given culture (Nöth 2014, p. 12). Ewa Szczęsna has shown how the digital semiosphere brings together modes of pictorial, musical, and cinematic sign organisation that were once largely separate and only occasionally combined (Szczęsna 2018, p. 122), for example, in opera. In digital media, these modes form a shared palette of expressive means ready for interactive use. The digital sign—the basic unit of this semiosphere—becomes flexible, programmable, and open to reader agency, while remaining materially connected to its environment. From this perspective, digital storytelling can be understood as a container of different but compatible codes. Vilém Flusser defines media as such containers (Zielinski et al. 2016, p. 268). The coexistence of these codes enables transfers of content and themes across different systems. These transfers necessitate a systematic approach that ensures that experience of the work, on the contemporary end, the process remains as close to the original as possible, and this also means that the ideal approach, which Dene Grigar labels as “media translation” includes any nonlinguistic codes that contribute to the meaning of the work. Media translation is the enhanced translation that goes beyond the linguistic, because digital preservationists migrate and emulate objects and media (Grigar and Pisarski 2024, p. 6).

The semiosphere functions as a shared resource for artistic expression for two main reasons. First, semiotics was too quickly dismissed as a discipline unable to account for digital communication. Espen Aarseth argued that the classical view of the sign as a binary of signifiant and signifié does not adequately describe ergodic literature or even simple games such as Lemmings (Aarseth 1997, pp. 39–41). However, Charles Peirce’s triadic model presents semiosis as an open-ended process in which new signifiers are constantly produced on top of existing ones (Atkin [2006] 2022). From this perspective, the digital sign can be seen as a second-order entity built upon traditional signs, but with a greater capacity to express features central to new media: agency, programmability, and interaction within mixed digital–analogue networks.

Secondly, semiotics is sometimes seen as a form of theoretical withdrawal at a time when digital entertainment is dominated by aggressive market logic and by the spread of non-progressive political and cultural “ideologemes”, which Julia Kristeva defined as “the intersection of a given textual arrangement” with “the utterances (sequences) that it either assimilates or to which it refers in the space of exterior texts” (Kristeva 2024, p. 38). Quotations and references form explicit intertextual links, while ideologemes create implicit connections that may remain invisible even to authors and to audiences. In the discourse of digital storytelling, the most common ideologemes are often tied to rigid genre conventions in action shooters and fantasy RPGs. This article argues instead that a semiotic approach can help bring clarity to an increasingly complex field. By focusing on shared expressive resources, intertextual relations, and media translation, semiotics offers tools for critical reflection beyond immediate market pressures4.

Augmented intertextuality plays a supporting but important role in media translation, which is central to localisation, preservation, and archiving. Understanding medium-specific, genre-specific, and work-specific conventions is essential before any migration process. Intertextuality strengthens links between genres and between individual media constellations, while interdiscursivity operates at the level of interpretation and reception. It engages audiences in discussions about how a work fulfils an expected “ideologeme”. Electronic literature enabled non-linear and choice-driven structures through a literal form of link – the hypertext link, which functions as a mechanical and performative reference. Links operate within a single work and across different works by making external sources present on screen. New forms of digital literature, including ambient literature for smartphones, VR and AR storytelling, add another layer of connection between fictional worlds and the reader’s physical and geographical environment. In Kate Pullinger’s smartphone novels Jellybone (2017) and Breathe (2018), the narrative draws on real-time data accessed through APIs, such as location, weather, time, and images of the reader and their surroundings, to create an uncanny ghost-story atmosphere. Earlier projects such as The Breathing Wall (2004), created with Stefan Schemat, relied on biometric input, while apps such as Zombies, Run! (2012) by Naomi Alderman use the moving body as a trigger for narrative events. In all of these cases, links function as embodied and performative connections.

By engaging the reader’s body, electronic literature expands the expressive range of digital storytelling and offers engagement strategies that can be adopted by computer games. Bodies, together with contextual elements such as place names, interior views, weather conditions, and day–night cycles, are drawn into fictional worlds to produce rhetorical effects of presence that operate through connotation. This form of embodied intertextuality connects texts, worlds, and bodies within a shared experiential space. Scholars have linked such effects to “presence effects,” including epiphany, “presentification,” and deixis, which Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, in Production of Presence, identified as markers of a broader cultural shift away from the primacy of meaning and toward an aesthetics of presence (Gumbrecht 2004, p. 125). Luciana Gattas has demonstrated how pioneering installations such as Text Rain (1999) by Camille Utterback and Romi Achituv, and Still Standing (2005), a collection of animated poems by Jason Lewis and Bruno Nadeau, engage the body to a radical extent, using language to point at things rather than stand for them. For example, in the installation version of the poem “Seeking Sedation,” letters are projected onto the floor and onto a large screen displaying the participant’s body. When the participant approaches the screen, the letters animate and react as if being kicked aside. Standing still for a moment rewards the participant: the text fills the silhouette and remains legible as long as the body stays immobile. The presence effect results from the metonymic relation between the poem’s theme (standing still) and its visual, animated, and interaction-driven execution. As Gattas concludes, the poem “reenacts the constraint it wishes to represent.” (Gattass 2018, pp. 327–28).

The arsenal of new tropes that expand referentiality in digital storytelling is evolving. Many rely on sylleptic effects that combine multiple meanings within a single expression. Metalepsis has received particular attention. First described by Gérard Genette as a metadiegetic device (Genette 1980, p. 234), later reworked by Marie-Laure Ryan in relation to digital narratives (Ryan 2006), and analysed by Astrid Ensslin and Alice Bell as “interactional metalepsis” and a marker of the “unnatural” in digital fiction (Ensslin and Bell 2021, pp. 49–81), it has also been examined as “ambient metalepsis” in VR and XR contexts (Przybyszewska 2024, p. 71). Metalepsis enables transfers across different levels of narrative. Related sylleptic figures have also been proposed, such as hyperlepsis, which distributes a theme across multiple levels rather than transferring entities (Pisarski 2024, p. 203). Together with other deictic figures of presence, these devices expand the space in which digital intertextuality operates. Comparing classical theories of intertextuality with practices in digital fiction and games makes it possible to identify shared structures and common roots. This article, therefore, returns to a less discussed form of intertextuality: structural quotation. This is a performative reference not to a single source but to large-scale structures such as genres. Structural quotation helps trace the movement of narrative techniques between experimental, indie, and mainstream works, as well as their dialogue with longer traditions of the novel, cinema, and oral storytelling.

2. From Zork to Baldur’s Gate 3—Heritage, Poetics, and Evolution

You are standing at the southern end of a narrow tunnel where it opens into a wide cavern. The cavern is dimly illuminated by phosphorescent mosses clinging to its high ceiling. A deep ravine winds through the cavern, with a small stream at the bottom. The walls of the ravine are steep and crumbly. A footbridge crosses the ravine to the south. A strange little man in a long cloak appears suddenly in the room. He is wearing a high pointed hat embroidered with astrological signs. He has a long, stringy, and unkempt beard. The Wizard draws forth his wand and waves it in your direction. It begins to glow with a faint blue glow. There is a loud crackling noise. Blue smoke rises from out of the Wizard’s sleeve. He sighs and disappears.

This fragment from Zork II (1981) opens a world which—although written in the simple language of a text adventure—contains, in embryo, many elements of contemporary digital entertainment. The second-person address (“you are standing”), rigorously constructed locations, sensory focalizers that deepen immersion (“the light of phosphorescent moss,” “a faint blue glow”), as well as markers of the uncanny and the sublime that govern the game world (spells, disappearances, altered laws of physics), are all present. This is a fantasy game with parser-based interaction. Each of these elements has evolved over the past four decades: narrative address to the player has been taken over by camera systems and interface paratexts; locations are visually rendered in engines such as Unreal and Unity; sensory focalizers have been expanded to include auditory and haptic means; and interaction now extends beyond text commands, encompassing gestures in VR and XR environments. However, the style remains surprisingly stable: “a lamp glows,” “a stream murmurs,” “sparks crackle”—the fantasy idiom consolidated in the 1980s has endured. Finally, interaction, once defined by typing commands, now plays out across a network of feedback loops between code, sound, image, and the player’s body.

The evolution of expressive potential in digital storytelling means that each iteration echoes what came before while introducing modifications. An apt allegory of these changes is the opulent remediation of the simple act of a dice throw that accompanies turn-based adventures in Baldur’s Gate 3. The dice throw becomes a spectacle in its own right, comparable to spellcasting, but this time performed by players. To illustrate this evolution, it is useful to draw on the intertextual reflections of the Polish scholar Ewa Szczęsna, who identifies repetition as the foundational figure of intertextuality in media. According to her typology, repetitions manifest in six primary ways: by degree of similarity, by semiotic organization, by medial affiliation, by temporality, by complexity, and by co-presence5. This framework allows one to trace the genealogy of narrative devices, visual motifs, and ludic strategies from early text adventures to the multimodal blockbusters of today. Spatial constructions of location (narrow tunnel, cavern, ravine), sensorial artefacts (glowing moss, faint blue light, crackling noise, smoke), markers of otherness (magical laws, spells, disappearances), second-person address, and the player’s responses to a wizard’s actions present in Zork II are repeated, expanded, and remediated in later games. When one encounters glowing fungi in Skyrim, treacherous bridges in Dark Souls, or the operatic spectacle of dice rolls in Baldur’s Gate 3, a repetition with a difference is witnessed—a cumulative evolution of storytelling methods.

3. Dialogicity and Intertextuality

The evolution of expressive strategies introduces a diachronic view of the genre. However, there is also a synchronic dimension: conversations that work engage in among themselves. If remediation is the overarching figure describing how media evolve, intertextuality is the ongoing dialogue between works, subgenres, and styles that deploy media and later abandon them. Current research on referencing in games has focused largely on meta-reflexivity and self-referentiality (Krampe 2025). Using Julia Kristeva’s terms, both reside on a horizontal—author-to-reader—plane of referentiality, whereas intertextuality operates along the “vertical plane,” connecting works to predecessors and cultural contexts (Kristeva 2024, p. 64). In metareflexive works, audiovisual, ludic, and haptic resources generate meta-commentary or “metaludicity.” In intertextual works, the same repertoire embodies a “mosaic of quotations” in medium-specific, procedural, and embodied ways.

Michel Riffaterre proposed a distinction between obligatory (explicit) and aleatoric intertextuality (implicit) (Miller and Valdés 1985, pp. 30–32). Gérard Genette distinguishes between interrelations among individual texts and interrelations among genres. This latter type of intertextuality, which Genette called architextuality, refers to the norms and conventions of a specific group of texts (Duff 2002, p. 56). Although these classical insights are useful for reflecting on hypertext and games, they are not sufficient on their own. The traditional division between the realm of “poetry” and that of the “image,” originating in Lessing’s modern aesthetics and still upheld by Roland Barthes, who argued that the substances of graphic and iconic structures are irreducible (Elliott 2004, p. 1), can no longer be applied to contemporary digital entertainment. If interactive fiction, literary hypertexts, and games are treated as texts, and—following Roland Barthes—the notion of authorship and stable reference framing is removed, these texts begin to form a network of intertextual links among themselves. Mutual references, or even the “interpenetration” of texts, as Norman Bryson describes this process, extend into the visual sphere as well (Bryson 1988, p. 187). Removing the frame from a painting, Bryson argues, allows paintings to refer to one another and to form a new constellation of meaning beyond their individual confines. From such a configuration, a second-order code emerges, producing a distinctive intertextual and generic identity.

If a text has always been a conglomerate of different texts and modes of representation, a multimedia artefact is even more so. Much like opera—from Monteverdi, who introduced an intermedial structure of recitative, aria, and chorus (Broadhurst and Harvey 2024, p. 4), to Wagner, who made intermediality the medium specificity of his performances—digital storytelling forms a conglomerate of modalities. Rather than being defined as a hybrid or as a condition determining its subject matter, it should be understood as a constellation of different codes in open relations. Its primary field of writing, like the screens of digital devices, is visual and spatial. The writing space is also an event space (Aarseth 1997, p. 114). It is within these events, on both sides of the communicative act, that phenomena not accounted for by traditional aesthetics occur. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht suggests that, in a culture “saturated with meaning,” phenomena of particular importance are “presence effects” and “impressions of presence” (Gumbrecht 2004, p. 125). Digital forms are particularly suited to foreground these phenomena within an experiential dimension of choice-driven, real-time interaction. For an intertextual perspective to remain valid, it must account for these extra-linguistic figures and effects.

4. Structural Quotation: Stepping Out of the Literary Angle

In her book Literary Gaming, Astrid Ensslin presents ten different forms of digital storytelling across a wide range of cognitive strategies of reading (Ensslin 2023, p. 38). On the “deep focus” side of the spectrum are genres that require interpretative effort and close reading of linguistic material (kinetic poetry, story generators, hypertext fiction). On the “hyper focus” side reside ludic works found on game distribution platforms. Ensslin gives examples such as the interactive drama Façade (2006) by Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas, the “auteur” RPG Path (2009) by Tale of Tales, or the much-discussed Myth (1997–2001) by the Miller brothers. When discussing intertextual strategies as indicators of the “literariness” of these forms, Ensslin notes that “the more critically, creatively, self-reflexively, and satirically their intertextual origins are interwoven, the more ‘literary’ they tend to appear” (Ensslin 2023, p. 41). In the context of literary studies the conclusion should be enough, but in the context of comparative media studies we should go further. Perhaps it is time to untangle intertextuality from literariness altogether and apply it to the whole range of artistic expression within a broader transmedial and multisemiotic landscape where operatic richness of games offers its own forms of intertextuality. In Cyberpunk 2077, the player can encounter poems, including Wisława Szymborska’s Labyrinth. Is this accidental encounter with poetry not a literary experience? Does Cyberpunk 2077 at that moment become a literary game?

Constructing a scale with ludicity on one end and literariness on the other conveniently allegorises the problem to a measuring device, a set of categories applied to games like litmus paper against phenomena that might be better assessed by their own criteria. A useful typology can be created. Yet, with an eye only on the literariness of games and the ludicity of literature, it is easy to ignore the semiotic richness of games. In Cyberpunk 2077, the player can encounter poems, including Wisława Szymborska’s Labyrinth. Is this accidental encounter with poetry not a literary experience? Does Cyberpunk 2077, at that moment, become a literary game?

From hypertext links to Unreal graphic engines, the evolution of interactive narratives is a history of expanding the Flusserian media as containers for codes (Zielinski et al. 2016, p. 268). Media intertextuality should follow each of these evolving codes. This article proposes the tracking of structural quotations in digital narratives as an intertextual figure. Structural quotations are supramedial forms of citation and repetition that refer not to an individual text but to the aesthetic code of a whole constellation of texts, genres, or modes. Danuta Danek, a Polish structuralist, introduced the concept to move beyond the narrow view of citation as the repetition of verbal fragments (Danek 1972, p. 75). Structural quotations, she argues, do not aim at individual utterances (parole) but instead evoke synchronic structures of langue: they quote poetics, styles, and artistic systems. To cite a given langue, one may construct new parole that embody its rules at a certain time, for example when drama includes a staging of commedia dell’arte (this is a case in Wyspiański’s Wyzwolenie that Danek discusses)6. The key characteristic of the trope is that the style it evokes simultaneously becomes its theme: the meaning of the passage lies in its formal otherness. Such quotations are marked by an accumulation of stylistic signals pointing toward the rules by which they are built, and they stand out against the surrounding text 7. In the realm of games, structural quotations can appear as playable insertions of other genres (a rhythm game sequence in an RPG), as parodic dungeons, or as complete mechanics that quote the structure of another medium (the dice roll in Baldur’s Gate 3 staging the ritual of tabletop play).

Ewa Szczęsna extends Danek’s idea by emphasising the phenomenon of structural–semiotic calques, recurrent textual and visual templates that stabilise genre recognition across media. Her prime example is the film poster: almost every poster repeats the same semiotic features—large, contrasting title; central figures of the protagonists with actors’ names; and compositional cues indicating genre (bright tones for comedies, dark palettes and jagged fonts for thrillers). These are not plagiarisms but conventionalised repetitions that allow immediate decoding. Such calques also govern advertising, where similar camera angles, rhythms, and tonalities recur (Szczęsna 2007, p. 55). In games, structural codes operate, for example, at the level of user interface (the “quest journal” screen repeated across RPGs), elements of world design (footbridge, tower, dungeon), or combat choreography (staging a boss fight quoting similar fights from other games).

The proposal of structural quotation and structural calque matters because the spectrum of interrelations extends also into the sphere of embodiment. Hypertext and games, as Mark Bernstein argues in What it Is to Be Augmented? (Bernstein 2025), function as forms of augmentation: they scaffold not only cognition but bodily experience within the Umwelt, which in this context is the semiotic environment of the digital narrative and its perception. As Mark Johnson argues in The Meaning of the Body, cognition emerges from the interaction of body and environment, from what he calls “visceral purposive engagement” (Johnson 2007, p. 101). Similarly, Rembowska-Płuciennik highlights “sensory focalization” as a key to narrative immersion (Rembowska-Płuciennik 2012, p. 189), extending Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeality. Digital fictions and games foreground these dynamics: the act of typing commands in Zork, the haptic resistance of a VR controller, or the procedural spectacle of rolling dice in Baldur’s Gate 3 inscribe referentiality into experiential phenomena. Structural quotations can activate intertextual memory in embodied action mediated through words, but also through screens, controllers, headsets, and physical interaction.

Structural quotations align with currents in contemporary philosophy and aesthetics that move away from the logocentric perspective represented by poststructuralism and deconstruction. “New Realism” (sometimes also called “Speculative Realism”), represented by Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, and Maurizio Ferraris, seeks to restore the autonomy of reality, objects, and the body in modern aesthetics8. New materialism, or Karen Barad’s “agential realism,” which treats reality as coming into being through intra-actions of matter and meaning (Barad 2007), also provides a useful context for studying experiential aspects of hypertext and games. Non-linguistic aesthetic codes can be viewed as an artistic contribution to the process of overcoming what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht describes as the “original sin” of modern philosophy: a dissociation “between human existence and space and between human existence and substance” (Gumbrecht 2004, p. 107). In practice, digital narratives, with their requirement for investment of the reader’s actions and even their bodies into the act of reading, help bring out “effects of presence” that dissolve the disconnections between epistemology and ontology, language and reality. A strong desire for presence, for experiencing things outside conscious processing of meaning, is a defining feature of contemporary culture. Gumbrecht writes:

objects of aesthetic experience (…) are characterized by an oscillation between presence effects and meaning effects. While it may be true, in principle, that all of our (human) relationships to the things of the world must be both meaning- and presence-based relations, I still claim that, under contemporary cultural conditions, we need a specific framework (namely, the situation of “insularity” and the disposition of “focused intensity”) in order to really experience (erleben) the productive tension, the oscillation between meaning and presence—instead of just bracketing the presence side, as we seem to do, quite automatically, in our so very Cartesian everyday lives

The idea that the world exists independently of human perception, discourse, or culture, for reasons that are becoming increasingly obvious today, is also a foundation of ecocritical and post-anthropocentric perspectives on culture and the human future. If studying “wandering games” that promote contemplation instead of goal-oriented action (Kagen 2022), narratives in VR and XR environments that project the reader’s body into a fictional world, or even AAA games when they introduce irony or metarepresentational experience, brings scholarship closer to these points of view, then comparative media intertextuality can be a small but valuable contribution to the most pressing contemporary issues.

5. A Case Study: The Karazhan Opera Event

Blockbuster games produced by the largest studios, and designed above all to satisfy stakeholders and only secondarily to please players, are an opera of the twenty-first century. Much as opera was once a dominant cultural form, requiring enormous resources for staging and spectacle, AAA titles today occupy the cultural centre as high-investment entertainment that is admired, consumed, but also critically distrusted.

As a genre, opera was repeatedly ill-regarded by influential intellectuals and philosophical traditions. Adorno dismissed it as “culinary music,” a stale art of consumption rather than critique (Adorno and Leppert 2002, p. 424). The New Critics considered opera unworthy of serious literary status, since the text was always subordinated to the music. Barthes saw language as a “dead speech” (Barthes 1977, p. 182), and feminist critics such as Catherine Clément questioned the formulaic operatic deaths whose victims almost always were women (Clément 1988).

The parallel with contemporary AAA gaming is clear. The model relies on formulaic structures of gameplay (quests, open worlds, combat mechanics), narrative (revenge arcs, save-the-world plots, interchangeable heroes), and visual grammar (cinematic cutscenes, spectacular but predictable mise-en-scènes). Ian Bogost dismissed “blockbuster-style spectacles” in favour of a procedural approach that decorates rather than interrogates (Bogost 2010, p. 150). However, as with opera, AAA games add value to the broader ecosystem of digital storytelling. They help establish a shared, medium-independent language of tropes, figures, and intertextual strategies that circulate beyond any single title or platform. Moreover, when franchises are long-lived, such as Zork, The Legend of Zelda, or World of Warcraft, their continuities form a genealogy and a rich repertoire of expressive practices.

In World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, players enter Castle Nathria, a gothic stronghold that serves as the raid centrepiece of the Venthyr covenant. Between boss encounters, a scene plays out: Prince Renathal and the Accuser stand on a balcony, looking down into an open space below, where dozens of vampire nobles, suspended in the air, dance in pairs. Around them are other balconies, and below—a proscenium. This setting gives the ongoing conversation an already theatrical, operatic feel: speech bubbles follow one another in rhythm, as if they were parts of a recitative. This operatic mise-en-scène offers players added value, allowing them to step into the history of World of Warcraft, because it clearly recalls another location: the Opera House in the Karazhan raid, introduced in The Burning Crusade (2007), and featuring encounters so celebrated that the developers decided to remake them a decade later (Andoris 2023).

The Opera Event in Karazhan is one of the most consequential examples of ludic intertextuality realised through extra-linguistic and game-specific modes of representation. The raid stages encounters that parody and rework canonical narratives: The Wizard of Oz, Little Red Riding Hood, and Romeo and Juliet. In the Wizard of Oz encounter, the order of bosses mirrors Baum’s plot, while boss abilities quote symbolic traits: the Strawman fears fire, the Tinhead rusts, and Roar casts fear, producing a procedural quotation of symbolic characteristics. In the Little Red Riding Hood encounter, a player who becomes “Red” through a special debuff is silenced and chased by the Wolf and its “Wide Swipe” spell9. In the Romeo and Juliet encounter—renamed Romulo and Julianne—players must ensure that both lovers die simultaneously, or one revives the other through the “Undying Love” spell. In addition to “Undying Love,” Julianne’s abilities include Blinding Passion, Devotion, Eternal Affection, and Powerful Attraction.

In this translation of the canonical plot into raid mechanics, intertextuality is embodied and enacted through a syntactic quotation of classical narrative structure, transposed into victory conditions. Intertextual links are thus tied not only to speech acts but also to challenges, actions, and rewards.

On the other hand, the concept of structural–semiotic calques helps explain how Karazhan’s Opera stabilises recognition through the repetition of genre logics. Just as film posters repeat compositional patterns (title prominence, tonal colour schemes, actor faces) to signal genre, Karazhan repeats theatrical cues to anchor its intertextual play: Barnes, the stage manager, announces each act; NPCs applaud from the audience. Curtains, spotlights, and mise-en-scène repeat the semiotic code of theatre. This “calque of theatricality” makes the Opera Event legible as both parody and homage, embedding familiar structures within MMO design.

The Opera Event demonstrates how intertextuality can be visceral: the player’s avatar is drawn into structural quotations, fleeing helplessly as Red Riding Hood or stunned for six seconds under Julianne’s “Powerful Attraction” spell. Skilful balancing of buffs and debuffs, such as during the timed interrupts against the Crone, creates tension for the player through embodied rhythm; coordinating the simultaneous deaths of Romulo and Julianne can be seen as an act of embodying tragic inevitability as a collective performance with raid participants. These effects amount to enacted quotations—narrative structures experienced through mechanics, environment, and bodily engagement, both via the avatar armed with a sword and the actual body of the player armed with a mouse and keyboard.

Procedural mechanics, raid design, and worldbuilding constitute a stage for a novel form of intertextuality. Because AAA games are authored by teams of writers, artists, encounter designers, and directors across decades—and World of Warcraft is one of the best examples—this collaborative authorship produces an internal lore, a genealogy of recurring motifs, tropes, and mechanics that accrete into an intratextual memory of the game itself. In this way, AAA games build a shared semiotic reservoir across multiple registers. As contemporary operas, they stage not only narratives but repetitions of structure, producing interrelations between media, conventions, and embodied practices. Blockbuster games, especially those with a long history, can serve as laboratories in which the semiotics of digital storytelling evolves.

6. Discussion

The use of examples drawn from large-scale commercial AAA games may appear questionable, particularly when many of the most innovative narrative strategies in digital storytelling emerge from independent, single-author, or experimental indie works, such as Dys4ia (2012) by Anna Anthropy, The Stanley Parable (2013) and The Beginner’s Guide (2015) by Davey Wreden, or “wandering games” such as What Remains of Edith Finch (2017), Return of the Obra Dinn (2018), or Eastshade (2019). These stories and games are not only well designed but also critique the major “ideologemes” of the contemporary game scene, for example derived from the “white male anxiety (Jagoda 2020), while also manage to undermine the logic of late capitalism.

In general, it is worth doing as a contribution to the diversity within the field of electronic literature and digital storytelling studies. Historical lessons from the former Soviet bloc provide examples of “engaged” literature and art (Dobrenko and Jonsson-Skradol 2018) functioning as perpetuators of either discourse monopoly, when the state introduces radical censorship, or polarisation, when monopoly breaks down into parallel cultural circulations (official and underground), as was the case in Poland before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Writing about formal qualities of art, for example the intermediality of opera, was considered non-progressive and “degenerate” in the first case, where state monopoly was strong. In the second scenario, where underground circulation was taking hold of progressive political and intellectual life, and the state monopoly was crumbling, the same writing was deemed escapist and unhelpful in reaching the ultimate goal of regime change.

AAA games occupy a comparable position in contemporary digital culture. As high-investment, highly standardised forms, they often introduce limited formal innovation. However, their scale, budgets, and extended development cycles enable the most comprehensive realisations of semiotic affordances available in current media environments. These productions frequently absorb, normalise, and amplify narrative and formal experiments first developed in independent or politically engaged games, translating them into widely disseminated and technically refined forms. For this reason, AAA games are particularly suited to illustrating the evolution of expressive potential in digital storytelling. Rather than functioning as sites of radical invention, they operate as stabilising mechanisms within the cultural system, consolidating emergent techniques into durable conventions. Their study does not displace the importance of experimental practices but complements it by showing how innovations circulate, scale, and acquire structural persistence within the broader ecology of digital narrative forms.

The basis of the augmented intertextuality proposed in this article is an expanded notion of text, necessitated by the emergence of digital storytelling and electronic literature, particularly in the context of media translation, which—as mentioned earlier—goes beyond the linguistic.

Why is The Witcher 3 so highly ranked? Why is World of Warcraft still played by thousands—if not millions—of players more than twenty years after its release? The popular and imprecise notion of “fun” remains under-theorised in current research. It is evident that “fun” is understood differently by scholars and by broader audiences. The former tend to value breaking boundaries and storytelling conventions, pushing poetic limits, and expanding expressive material—media surfaces, modes, levels, and textual areas understood as process—that can serve as means of artistic expression. Such approaches emphasise what becomes possible when the rules of storytelling derived from the traditional book paradigm and from standardised game design are challenged, especially once these standards begin to generate their own repertoires of tropes and clichés. A notable example is Stuart Moulthrop’s analysis of The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide. Moulthrop—himself a foundational figure in electronic literature, cybertext theory, and combinatorial poetics—approaches “fun” within the context of avant-garde creative strategies. In this view, a medium or a medium-specific mode of narration is deliberately intensified and “overheated”, in McLuhan’s sense, until conceptual framing encounters the limits imposed by the medium’s governing affordances (Moulthrop 2020).

One may also question the necessity of reintroducing old intertextual methods (structural quotation was proposed in 1972) for studying games, digital narratives, and hypertexts. Yet they allow us to recognise that even seemingly minimal effects, constrained by the affordances of late 1980s and early 1990s hardware and software, could decisively shape the reading experience. These effects evolve and build their own history. For example, in Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden (1991), two consecutive lexias (“… and …”)—the first without any graphic elements, the second with the image of shattered glass—create a highly meaningful performative effect. Pressing the Return key triggers the shattering animation. Embodied in the reader’s gesture, it makes them sense the explosion of a bomb that may have killed Emily, one of the main protagonists (Ensslin and Bell 2021, p. 121). In another hypertext fiction, Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse (1991) by John McDaid, the reader searches fictional archives on screen while simultaneously consulting Uncle Buddy’s papers in the accompanying box, only to discover that the times on the documents match the reader’s own real-world time. Traversing the archive in real time becomes an effect of presence itself.

These kinds of effects in early born-digital fiction are worth revisiting. When incorporated into analyses of blockbuster games, especially in discussions aimed at broader audiences, they help establish a bridge between otherwise disparate domains: early hypertext fiction and the AAA gaming industry, as well as the linguistic and experiential dimensions of cognitive processes. Such a connection remains possible because the foundation of digital narrative mechanisms has always been—and continues to be—a hypertext structure combined with procedural mechanics.

Future research on expanded intertextuality should also reach beyond the well-researched figures, such as metalepsis. Gumbrecht, for example, suggests epiphany, a rhetorical, participatory effect found in ancient theater and contemporary live sport (Gumbrecht 2004, pp. 91–122). This can move the reflection into productive territory, where the poetics of modernism (epiphany is well researched in studies of James Joyce) meet digital storytelling, and where associated techniques of epiphany move beyond familiar tropes of linguistic origin toward phenomena that are harder to pin down yet deeply tangible in their experiential impact.

Finally, to further develop the notion of intertextuality in games and hypertexts, it may be productive to update N. Katherine Hayles’s notion of digital text as configurations of “flickering signifiers” (Hayles 1999, p. 30) into a notion of the aesthetic object as a “play of its appearances” and a “constellation of appearances” that differs across time—a perspective proposed by the German film scholar Martin Seel (Seel 2005). The foundations and contexts of still-undersudied visual intertextuality, in which digital works refer to one another through interface-level and visual markers, can be built within these and related aesthetic frameworks.

7. Conclusions

This article advances two main claims. First, attention to how expressive means are refined, recalibrated, and transformed across decades of technological and cultural change establishes fertile ground for comparative media studies, adaptation and translation studies, and for identifying key priorities in the preservation of born-digital works. From text parsers to cinematic cutscenes, from ASCII labyrinths to motion capture, digital narratives repeatedly restage familiar figures through shifts in semiotic codes. What was once expressed through text alone—such as a player’s dialogue with an NPC—has been reformulated in later media in forms appropriate to evolving expressive environments: a quest window in early World of Warcraft, a cinematic camera shift in Baldur’s Gate 3, or a filmic dialogue sequence in Path of Exile 2. These are not breaks with the past but repetitions with differences, shaped by changing media conditions.

Second, the article proposes an expanded notion of intertextuality that follows Barthes in understanding “text” broadly and draws on Clara Fernández-Vara’s conception of games as texts (Fernández-Vara 2024). This approach extends intertextual analysis beyond verbal quotation to include procedural rules, structural repetition, and embodied experience. Drawing on Danuta Danek’s concept of structural quotation and Ewa Szczęsna’s category of structural–semiotic calques, the analysis shows how intertextuality operates through recurring mechanics, spatial logics, and multimodal templates. Games quote not only dialogue but also genres, narrative structures, modes of play, and other media, including film, cartoons, and animation. From this perspective, intertextuality is procedural and experiential, enacted through bodily interaction with systems and environments.

This framework also allows a reassessment of the position of AAA blockbusters within the ecology of digital storytelling. Although often dismissed as empty spectacle—whether as “culinary” art in Adorno’s sense or as shallow spectacle in Bogost’s critique—they remain valuable for tracing the evolution of digital narrative forms and the emerging networks of intertextual reference. High-budget productions such as World of Warcraft expand the available expressive repertoire through multimodality, while low-budget and artistic works, operating with limited resources, generate symbolic capital by selectively reworking mainstream genres and high-cultural traditions. Together, these poles form a dialogical system in which spectacle and experiment mutually inform one another. Digital storytelling thus emerges not as a collection of isolated works but as a tissue of quotations—repetitions and calques that bind genres, media, and embodied practices into a broader cultural text that exceeds purely linguistic or epistemological models.