Symbolic Mediation in the Red Foot Saga

Resumo

The Canadian/Brazilian production Red Foot Saga (RFS) is a narrative videogame about the cultural memory of Londrina city. Our goal is to examine the function of symbolic mediation through the videogame’s nonverbal language. Our analysis of the RFS reveals how the interactions with the symbols in the game world allows the player to construct either evocative or enacted stories inspired by Londrina’s cultural and territorial history. In this article, the authors elaborate that the nonverbal language that RFS uses for symbolic mediation is composed of the virtual places, identity markers, and player’s performance. After that, the authors illustrate that symbolic mediation requires adaptation and recoloring. While the principal goal of this article is to articulate the evocative and the enacted type stories that occur in RFS according to Henry Jenkins’ theory (2004), the last part of the article is a reflection upon the memory adaptation theme in the RFS project and the cross- cultural game design ideal.