Titans of T-Posing : So-Bad-It's-Good in Deadly Premonition

Abstract

This paper analyses the concept of So-Bad-It’s-Good, the phenomenon of enjoying works precisely because they do not fit into our normative standards of good art, usually for the purposes of being laughed at. Drawing on work from film studies, we outline a cohesive definition of this phenomenon that can be applied across mediums, as well as categorise the most common ways in which it is communicated throughout the texts, highlighting the relationship between the forms and the cultural horizons of the reader. In particular, this thesis applies this definition to digital games, a medium currently lacking in research on this topic. To do so, we have conducted a close-reading of the game Deadly Premonition, a much-noted representative of this concept, attempting to isolate how So-Bad-It’s-Good is expressed through play, rather than through narrative or visuals, and document how the player responds to the text. In doing this, we discovered insight into the differences between digital games and other mediums: the long run time requiring pacing and varied levels of quality to be pleasurable, and the interactive nature necessitating more focus on this badness being benign. Along with this, the ways in which the forms specific to play can be enjoyed for being bad. So-Bad-It’s-Good highlights the importance of how the cultural horizons and expectations we have when entering into a work affect our reception of transgressive qualities, and this paper represents the first step towards exploring that through play.