Place Representation and Player Perception in an In-Game City: The Case of Revachol in Disco Elysium

초록

This study compares place representation in the in-game text with place perception in Steam reviews, focusing on Revachol, a central in-game city in the narrative-oriented RPG Disco Elysium. A total of 812 in-game text entries containing 'Revachol' were collected from Disco Elysium Scribe, and 702 English Steam reviews mentioning 'Revachol' were selected from 53,099 reviews using the Steam Reviews API through Python. The data were manually coded into six categories: Physical and Environmental Place, Relational and Lived Place, Affective and Sensory Place, Historical, Political, and Social Place, Symbolic and Personified Place, and Unclassified. The results show that Historical, Political, and Social Place was the most frequent category in the in-game text (40.4%), indicating that Revachol is constructed as a central site of world-building shaped by revolution, occupation, class conflict, policing institutions, and ideological tensions. In contrast, Affective and Sensory Place was the most frequent category in Steam reviews (27.5%), suggesting that players tend to articulate Revachol as an affective place associated with melancholy, nostalgia, immersion, beauty, and loss. This study suggests that place meanings in narrative-oriented games are not completed solely by designed textual and spatial structures, but are reconstructed through players' experience, memory, and linguistic articulation.

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