This video essay examines how genre knowledge shapes player engagements with NORCO (Geography of Robots 2022). Informed by research on genre uptake (Freadman 1987), I argue that NORCO prompts players to adopt the hermeneutic practices of detective fiction without explicit instruction, relying instead on players’ familiarity with mystery’s genre conventions. I compare two of my own playthroughs, one completionist and one “anti-completionist.” I explore how the game’s branching endings are keyed to a player’s willingness to inhabit investigative play rather than master it. Drawing on activity theories of tertiary contradiction, I demonstrate how walkthroughs, forum commentary, and community knowledge recursively influence a player’s relationship to the game and alter perceptions of any “correct” mode of engagement. Ultimately, NORCO becomes an example of how narrative games may treat genre as something more than scaffolding. Both an activity and a mechanism of procedural rhetoric, genre interrogates how players learn to play, how they are taught to care, and how conventions themselves become sites of ludic negotiation.
is an English instructor at Bunka Gakuen in Tokyo, Japan. Her main research interest is how internet culture accelerated the rise of far-right movements. Her SSHRC-funded MA thesis at the University of British Columbia connected the origins, narratives, and rhetorical devices of the QAnon conspiracy theory with early-2010s alternate reality games on 4chan.