Rhetoric of Let’s Play: From Play to Narrative Show

This paper will explore with the tools of rhetoric and narratology a specific form of video game reappropriation by players (or “meta-play”): the let’s play videos. Although these productions do not appear explicitly as autonomous works or as narratives (but rather as transmissions of a playing activity), their authors nevertheless develop a distinctive rhetoric and various “narrativization” processes (interpretation of a character, storytelling based on the gaming performance, translation of the let’s player’s actions in the terms of the game’s diegesis, etc.) which situate the let’s play in an intermediary space, between the game’s fiction and the empirical world. These formal mechanisms can construct a strong effect of deviation in relation to the original game’s narrative, message or grammar (like when let’s players exploit and twist the content of horror games in order to produce a comedic counter-narrative, for instance). This communication (based on a chapter of Fanny Barnabé’s PhD dissertation) will thus examine a corpus of English-speaking let’s plays (across several sub-categories of videos), in order to determine through which “figures of reappropriation” these videos deviate from the games that support them and, thereby, build representations of play that contribute to renewing the gaming cultures.