Banton, JEW.2023

Stray’s linear approach in progressing through its levels creates a unique gaming experience to both gamers and non-gamers alike. It involves adventuring a city called Walled City 99 through a cat’s perspective, still capturing the heart of its audiences. The fictional city has backstory and background through its urban spaces and the perspectives of its inhabitants. It makes it immersive to explore and study the game’s urban setting. With that, this study aims to unravel the fictional walled city’s backstory and background through a combined theoretical approach of Jane Jacobs’s urban concepts on Safety and Contact within streets and Henry Jenkins’s ludology on Spatial Exploration and Environmental Storytelling through Embedded Narrative. The theoretical approach will begin with the stray cat and its robot companion B-12 exploring Walled City 99’s alleyways through its Slums with the task of gathering objects placed throughout its spaces. From there, it will apply Contact and Safety to see the treatment and interaction the playable characters receive regarding their quest, leading to the unveiling of its Embedded Narrative. There is no academic study that incorporates Jane Jacobs’s urban theory on a video game’s urban setting, so this study will showcase that it can also be applied to cities in video games.

Keywords: Embedded Narrative, Safety, Contact, linear, exploration, spaces, streets