“It’s Like It’s from a Movie or Something”: Narrative Instability, Remediation, and Cultural Prestige in the Indie Video Games <i>Hotline Miami</i> and <i>Katana Zero</i>

Abstract This article identifies a trend in contemporary indie video games to consciously obfuscate the process of narrative understanding, which it investigates as part of a transmedia embrace of ‘narrative instability.’ It argues that a number of indie video games have recently taken up narratively unstable elements in order to self-reflexively probe their own narrative capabilities. In addition, these narrative and discursive ambitions are used as a means of achieving cultural legitimacy and prestige, and they enmesh the games in US cultural politics that characterize other narratively unstable texts as well. To illuminate this particular trend, the article first introduces a general understanding of narrative instability. Afterward, it analyzes two exemplary indie games, Hotline Miami and Katana Zero , for their narrative instability, establishing how and with which discursive elements instability is created, what it is used for, and how it fits into a larger interpretation of these games’ thematic interests. While this section forms the analytical core of the article, the article then contextualizes these findings in two different directions: regarding a discussion of cultural prestige in the context of media convergence and alongside the cultural politics of the two games.