Authors

Anna Murashova¹;  ¹ University of Tartu / Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History, Estonia

Discussion

LitRPG is a literary genre that portrays the story of a hero who suddenly enters the reality of a videogame and acts there as a game character, making quests, gaining experience, fighting with bosses, and level-uping. RealPRG is a genre that depicts this game-like experience in the real world that surrounds the hero. Both genres are relatively new; one of the earliest examples of LitRPG in Russian is Victor Pelevin’s novel Prince of Gosplan (Prinz gosplana). These genres started to develop extensively in mid-2010, when MMORPGs became available to a large number of users.

Both genres are quite widespread on the Author.Today, Russian online self-publishing platform, which allows everyone to publish their literary works without any publisher’s mediation. On 25.09.2023, there were 3107 texts marked by the genre “RealRPG” and 5656 marked as “LitRPG”. Using special devices such as showing numbers of experience gained, as it is done in the videogames, is an essential part of the story-making. 

To become popular on the platform, authors should follow the readers’ expectations and fit into genre conventions. This paper aims to explore how texts in both genres are constructed and what strategies authors use to make a story similar to videogame. I focus on two texts that are on the top of the genre rating on 25.09.2023: Zvezdnaya Krov'-5. Vechnost' by Roman Prokofiev in Real-RPG genre, and Otmorozhennyj by Evgeny Gartzevich in Lit-RPG. Using close reading and self-ethnography methods, with the help of narratological conceptual apparatus, I will show what story is being told and how the author does it, meaning the depiction of story and discourse: what events are narrated and how, what narrators’ types are used and why, what is the temporal organization of the narrative, and how authors convince their readers that this is true Lit-RPG or true Real-RPG story.