Unraveling Stealth Gameplay with Toni Pape!
This Arcade Talk explores the genre of stealth games, which task players to achieve a goal without being detected by enemies. Our guest speaker Toni Pape will share insights from his forthcoming book The Aesthetics of Stealth. Where does the idea of stealth come from? What is its history in gaming? And what different types of stealth gameplay are there? Toni’s talk will answer these questions through number of short case studies. We will compare the sneaking stealth of Splinter Cell to the social stealth of Hitman and the surveillance stealth of Assassin’s Creed. Toni’s talk will show that each of these gameplay styles assign different functions to stealth, which range from targeting-to-kill to creative worldmaking.
Toni Pape is associate professor at the Department of Media Studies (University of Amsterdam). He is the author of Figures of Time: Affect and the Television of Preemption (Duke UP 2019), The Aesthetics of Stealth: Digital Culture, Video Games, and the Politics of Perception (MIT Press 2024), and co-author of Nocturnal Fabulations: Ecology, Vitality and Opacity in the Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (OHP 2017). Toni is a co-editor of NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies and the 3Ecologies imprint at Punctum Press.