This overlap of thematic and ludic genres creates a complication for the application of genre and adaptation studies to video games because questions of adaptation and iteration must also consider the impact of player input on the generic experience. In examining the centrality of player input on genre expression, Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar 2018) serves as an example which seeks to adapt the Hollywood Western into the format of an open-world, third-person action game. The game’s generic alignment begins even before the world has loaded, with loading screens displaying daguerreotypes of animals, landscapes, and wooden buildings, calling attention to the environment which the player will inhabit as the play.

When the game finally loads, the screen usually shows the player’s avatar, outlaw protagonist Arthur Morgan, in a relaxed pose: crouching to observe a flower, looking at a distant mountain, observing a sunrise at the edge of a forest clearing, standing outside of a saloon, or other such calm poses. The game immediately calls attention to the character’s place in the Western landscape before handing the reigns over to the player. At this point, the game’s digital assets have loaded and the various programmed systems—meant to create the illusion of a living, breathing Western landscape replete with townspeople and wildlife—are fully functioning. If the player does not input commands to the controller, however, the game will continue to run its Western procedures, but doesn’t yet allow its systems to affect the character.

To illustrate: during one play session, I sat to observe what the game would do without a player. It was nighttime, and Arthur sat crouched observing a flower. In previous play sessions, my actions as Arthur caused him to incur a bounty; though I hadn’t interacted with the game yet, its world kept moving and eventually bounty hunters arrived to gun Arthur down and collect their reward. Three men on horseback arrived and began to open fire. The game’s logic is designed with the intention of creating dynamic Western moments which feel unscripted and natural. Ideally, such bounty hunters would catch the player unawares, recreating the thrill of suddenly having to deal with a gunfight against a Western backdrop. But, up until the point that the player makes their first controller input (for example, making Arthur walk forward) their avatar is invincible. As a result, the men proceeded to fire endless amounts of ammunition into Arthur’s person for twenty minutes as I watched and took screenshots to capture the passage of time. When the sun rose, I decided that enough time had passed, and as I pressed the left stick to begin walking, the game spurred Arthur to “life” and began to process the damage of each shot—the Western shootout finally bearing its intended weight and consequence with a player at the helm.

In the scene which I’ve described, a threshold between what the game is attempting to accomplish in its creation of a Western world and what it is actually able to accomplish without the player’s participation is revealed. While the systems and procedures of the game may call upon events, scenarios, and iconographies which invoke the Western genre and give the illusion of a self-sustaining Western simulation, there is a limit to the game’s expressive potential in the absence of the player’s actions and reactions within the generic Western setting and scenarios. As games scholar Clara Fernández-Vara states regarding the player’s performing role within games, “The game designer does not have direct control over the experience of the player, particularly because the game needs the input of the player to become a performance” (Fernández-Vara 6). Until the player is present to participate in the world, the systems of the game (in this case the dynamics which construct the Western iconography in Red Dead Redemption 2) have little payoff and don’t invoke the full implications of the actions and consequences associated with the game’s thematic genre. As such, the game’s themes and systems are unable to come to their full generic fruition.

            The player is not only necessary to the game’s generic functions, but also to the direction that the game’s generic expressions take. While some have called Red Dead Redemption 2 a gamification of the revisionist Western, the game employs generic elements of various Western subgenres including the frontier Western, the cowboy Western, the outlaw Western, etc. This is true not only in the game’s worldbuilding, but also in the variety of gameplay activities and opportunities afforded to the player within the open-world framework. Within this generically broad structure, the player is the able to choose what sets of iconographies they will be interacting with during their play session. Whether the player has bounties to capture, cards to play, cattle to herd, fish to catch, or a train to rob, they can decide at a moment’s notice what sub-genre of Western they will be performing through their interactions. As a result, the overall generic expression of the Western as gamified in Red Dead Redemption 2 is difficult to track as it oscillates, sometimes jarringly, between various generic modes as the players engages with, enacts, and performs different versions of the Western.

            To conclude, tracing the application of well-established genres into video games requires additional considerations beyond the adaptation of iconographies, tropes, and themes. As players are central to the performance and expression of genre in interactive play, one must examine how the game’s systems function to create generic meaning, what role the player fills in the enactment of those meanings, and how the player is able to ultimately shift and manipulate the intended generic expression through modes of play. If Red Dead Redemption 2 can teach us anything about studying genre in video games, it’s that genre can be difficult to wrangle.

Works Cited

Fernández-Vara, Clara. “Play’s the Thing: A Framework to Study Videogames as Performance.” Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts, 2009.

Red Dead Redemption 2. PS4 version, Rockstar Games, 2018.

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The level layout alone gives us some insight into the effectiveness of the game’s opening. If you’ve never had the chance to play the game before, can you guess where Mario starts? Can you guess which direction he will be facing and where he’s supposed to go? After you have an idea, go ahead and watch the opening moment here (end at about 2:10).

By way of review, let’s break down how this reflects the aspects of interesting introductions I’ve discussed so far:

• An interesting introduction sounds good.

The sounds are really what make this opening moment so memorable to me. I’m not talking about the music either, although it is a fitting fanfare to bring players into this 3D world. The sounds that I remember most are actually the ones you hear after the music has ended: intermittent birdsong, the tap of Mario’s shoes, and the exuberant sounds as he leaps into the air. This gives the space and the characters in it another audio dimension to go along with the added spatial dimension, showcasing the power of the new hardware and the depth of this new world.

• An interesting introduction circumscribes, rather than describes, its subject.

The flythrough of the castle grounds could be considered a literal circumscription of the subject — we get to see the space which Mario will be exploring momentarily. But there is a second layer of circumscription in the use of the camera-wielding Lakitu. Lakitu is not the most iconic of Mario characters, usually coming up as an enemy in the later levels of the earlier games, so seeing him here (in what turns out to be a helpful role) may be a surprise for players. This not only builds up the suspense to see Mario in his polygonal glory, but allows players to see the space they will eventually begin exploring.

• An interesting introduction makes its audience start to think.

The flythrough does more than show off the castle — it gets players thinking about the possibilities of exploring a 3D space (which, again, was a novel concept in 1996). Lakitu’s flight under the castle’s drawbridge and over the green hills encourages players to think about how the space is connected and where they might traverse. Players with a keen eye might even notice an enticing secret: when Lakitu pulls back before going under the wooden bridge (at about 1:43 in the video), there is a door visible submerged beneath the castle’s moat.

The first time I noticed it, I immediately tried to swim down and check it out. Though it turns out to be nothing you can get to yet, its existence is enough to get players searching for secrets — a tactic the game rewards players for later.

• An interesting introduction recognizes its audience.

In general, games tend to address their audiences more directly than other media do, mainly by describing how the non-diegetic mechanics and systems work. Lakitu’s existence, however, takes this to another level. The audible click and perspective shift right before Mario comes out of the pipe establishes that the audience is viewing this world through a moveable virtual camera. As this was probably the first game with 3D graphics players would have experienced, and establishing this visual metaphor is crucial for the rest of gameplay. The connection to the “Lakitu Bros reporting live” bit is later made explicit in this introductory sequence in order to reinforce this point.

What is remarkable about this scene with Lakitu is how it represents one of the few non-optional tutorials players get in these opening moments. As soon as players are able to take control of Mario, they are presented with these directions:

Ciao! You’ve reached Princess Toadstool’s castle via a warp pipe. Using the controller is a piece of cake. Press A to jump and B to attack. Press B to read signs, too. Use the Control Stick in the center of the controller to move Mario around. Now, head for the castle.

In a mere 51 words, the game has told new players all they need to know about movement. The signs scattered around the castle and the game’s multiple levels give players more tips, but I don’t remember ever needing to read them in order to figure out the game. Pretty much everything you need to know is given here or via Lakitu’s talk about the camera (which occurs after you have a chance to mess around with the controls). This leads to the final takeaway of interesting introductions:

• An interesting introduction leans forward

Although players are free to explore Super Mario 64’s opening space, such a space is designed to push players forward. If the fact that Mario’s position at the bottom of a hill directly faces an enticing castle didn’t make it clear enough, the game tells the player three separate times (in Peach’s letter, the opening tutorial, and Lakitu’s discussion about camera movement) to go to the castle. No one stops to remind Mario if he’s fooling around for too long in the garden, but these original instructions do encourage forward movement. There are also more subtle techniques for this as well: players who fall into the moat soon discover that there is a slight current that leads them directly to a beach at the right of the screen, which is an easy walk back on land and towards the castle.

This is what I mean by leaning forward rather than forcing someone forward. Each of the introductions I have discussed so far — the descriptions of holes in The Hobbit, the slow zoom into a TV in Us, or Super Mario 64’s castle exterior — are wonderful places to linger, but are designed so that one doesn’t linger too long. After all, beginnings only function if they have a text that follows; otherwise, they’d just seem incomplete.

… and it is in that spirit that I really ought to get back to writing my dissertation. I hope that this look back on some of my favorite opening moments has been as fun for you reading it as it has been for me to write it! For now, it’s time to lean ever more forward and (hopefully) get a text worth a great introduction.

John Sanders is a PhD Candidate in the Syracuse University English Department where he studies film, new media, and adaptation. He is currently working on a dissertation about digital and analog games based on literary works, and hopes that no one recalls his library books.

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CW: Nazism, Neo-Nazism, Swastikas

I’m currently writing this blog post from a hotel room in Durham, N.C. I’m here over Spring Break to do some archival research at the Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The Abraham Joshua Heschel Papers live here, and it is an overwhelming and expansive collection. The collection guide here shows a preview of the breadth and depth of the papers in the archive.

This is my first time doing archival research. It is amazing.

It is hard for me to put into words why I like it so much, but I want to share an experience I had while here at the archive.

(I am still learning about archival research, and I know that all the unpublished material in the collection is under the copyright of Dr. Susannah Heschel, Abraham Joshua Heschel’s daughter. So I won’t be sharing anything too specific here, and of course won’t be sharing any photographs or scans of my work.)

I am looking at Folder 3 of Box 19, described on the finding guide as containing

Officials documents including a Polish citizenship document tracking movement between Germany and Poland; Anmelde-Buch (enrollment book) which lists several of Heschel’s professors at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentems zu Berlin including Leo Baeck , Ismar Elbogen, and Julius Güttman; Arbeitsbuch, which lists Heschel’s professional training in Frankfurt am Main; Heschel’s Ausweiskarte (identification card) at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentems; and a certificate (Zeugnis) for the Deutches Institut für Ausländer an der Universität Berlin which attests to Heschel’s satisfactory completion of requirement at Realgymnasium in Vilna.[1]

I have earbuds in my ears and am half-listening to a podcast episode I’ve listened to about a hundred times before as I carefully, and nervously, flip through the materials. I feel a bit like an imposter. I wonder if everyone else here has done plenty of archival research before. They probably have lots of articles published in peer-reviewed journals, and may even have jobs. They are probably almost done with their dissertations, and even their first books.

I smile as I look through the materials surrounding Heschel’s early academic education in Berlin. I feel almost proud of Heschel for these early academic achievements, as if I knew him personally. I continue flipping through these materials. I flip another page over and look down and – freeze.

There is a small book, it looks about the size of a passport, staring up at me. It is an official document. Arbeitsbuch, it reads. In the center of it is a crest, an eagle perched atop a swastika.

***

I knew that Heschel fled Nazi Germany. I knew this. I suppose if I had been asked if Heschel had any official documentation from the Reich, I would have shrugged and said, “Well, probably.” But seeing this document – and seeing it nestled in a folder amongst more cheerful documents about Jewish Studies in Berlin made my stomach turn.

When I gingerly touched this document I thought to myself that this was the first “authentic swastika” I had ever touched. The first swastika was on a document made by The Third Reich.

***

In the days leading up to my trip to Durham, I restarted playing the video game Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. In it, the Nazis won WWII. You play a supersoldier with an artificially engineered body trying to start a revolution in the United States, which now operate as a colony of the Reich.

Image found at https://www.gamespot.com/wolfenstein-ii-the-new-colossus/images/

My husband was originally interested in the game after it generated some Internet buzz. Apparently, some White Nationalists were disturbed about a game centering on killing Nazis. Adi Robertson, writing for The Verge, published an article entitled “Watching internet Nazis get mad at Wolfenstein II is sadder than the game’s actual dystopia.”

Robertston writes:

“The saddest thing about Wolfenstein’s YouTube comments isn’t the offended white supremacists. It’s the fact that in 2017 you can write “I can’t wait to kill some Nazis in a video game” as though that’s a meaningful political stance — which is exactly what a lot of the most popular comments are about. The second saddest thing is that you’ll be proven right by someone named “Pepe Von Europa.”[2]

And it’s true that the game is very overt with its message that killing Nazis in order to overthrow their regime is moral. As Kallie Plagge writes in her review of the game:

“Above all else, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus takes a very hard stance on the righteousness of killing Nazis. It never falters, not once asking whether violent resistance is the wrong way to fight back against oppression – and the game is stronger for it.”[3]

And so, while playing the video game, I “killed” Nazis. A lot of them. And I saw a lot of swastikas. Some were on people I “killed,” others were on buildings I “crept” by, and still others were on “official” materials I “found” and “examined” in the game. Occasionally the swastikas even seem to shout out to you: all bold and startling against a bright white or black backdrop.

This swastika is different than the other swastikas in that game, I thought to myself when I saw the swastika on Heschel’s Arbeitsbuch. It’s more… subdued. The lines are thinner. It looks… ordinary. And it was ordinary, in a horrifying way. It was a piece of official documentation, and even though it had a swastika on it, it still looked like something bureaucratic, ordinary, and everyday.

And in all its ordinariness, in all its slight bizarre delicateness, it was terrifying. Much more terrifying and startling, somewhat paradoxically, that the swastikas that seem to bombard you as you play Wolfenstein II.

After I saw it, I needed to step out of the reading room and get a drink of water.

[1] Description of File 3, Box 19. Guide to the Abraham Joshua Heschel Papers, 1880, 1919-1998 and undated. https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/findingaids/heschelabraham/#aspace_ref478_be8

[2] Robertson, Adi. “Watching internet Nazis get mad at Wolfenstein II is sadder than the game’s actual dystopia.” The Verge. June 12, 2017. Accessed March 14 2018. https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/12/15780596/wolfenstein-2-the-new-colossus-alt-right-nazi-outrage.

[3] Plagge, Kallie. “Rise: Review of Wolfenstein II: The New Collossus.” Gamespot. October 26, 2017. Accessed March 14, 2018. https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wolfenstein-2-the-new-colossus-review/1900-6416796/.

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In this month’s posts on Metathesis, I have discussed the metaphorical uses of contagious disease and examined the figure of the zombie in some popular late twentieth and twenty-first-century texts. In my final post of the month, I would like to turn to a unique sub-genre of the zombie narrative that unsettles the survivor-centered perspective of zombie outbreaks: the eco- zombie.

Zombies present an interesting study in the metaphor of contagion because they embody contradictions and create questions that disturb our sense of self and communal identity. The most obvious of these contradictions, of course, is that zombies are the “living dead”: two oft-mutually exclusive terms in the human experience. One is generally alive or dead, but not both simultaneously. The biological science of how zombies actually work is often left somewhat fuzzy in zombie science-fiction, which tends to give more emphasis to the latter portion of the hyphenated genre, rather than the former. These complex biological questions are typically subsumed by the drama and urgency of the survival story. One stunning example of this is in the 2105 film World War Z, when the viewer is introduced to a brilliant young epidemiologist who only minutes later slips unceremoniously in the rain and accidentally blows his own head off.

In terms of popular story-telling, this emphasis makes sense: the redemption narrative of survivors makes for a more emotionally engaging and compelling drama with which readers, viewers, and players can identify. Part of the power of the survivor’s narrative is that we can imagine ourselves in their shoes. This perspective aligns with the zombie’s function to horrify and disgust the reader, viewer, or player in an act of dis-identification with the dead. In short, the horror of the zombie is centered upon the fact that nobody wants to become one! In fact, it is impossible to even imagine what it is like to be a zombie, given the way zombies embody a complete lack of supposedly distinct human capacities – including a sense of individuality, empathy, personality, and sociality. This narrative dynamic makes thinking outside of the standard human vs zombie conflict relationship difficult.

However, two recent zombie narratives have given us a new spin on the zombie narrative by taking inspiration from biology, and imagining the dead living in symbiosis with the natural world. In both The Last of Us (2013), a highly-cinematic survivor horror videogame from developer Naughty Dog, and The Girl With All the Gifts (2016), a novel and feature-length film developed from M.R. Carey’s short story “Iphigenia In Aulis,” a rampant fungal infection of Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis infests the human population. Known colloquially as the “Zombie Fungus,” Cordyceps is a true-to-life fungus that consumes and takes control over the bodies of ants and wasps. It manipulates genetically determined behavioral patterns of the ants it infects, compelling them to climb high above the forest floor, where they then clamp their jaws on a leaf, and remain as the fungus grotesquely protrudes from their body.

A “zombie ant” infested with Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis

Joel battles an “infected” human from The Last of Us

The Cordyceps-infected humans in these stories aren’t specifically identified as “zombies” in either text – they are referred to as the “infected” in The Last of Us and as “hungries” in Carey’s story and its film adaptation – but they can be easily identified as such by their appearance and behavior, especially their cannibalistic rage. Because the “zombie ants” that host the Cordyceps fungus in real life are, if anything, less violent than their healthy counterparts, the violence of the human Cordyceps victims in these texts can be interpreted as making reference to “genetically determined behavioral patterns” recognizable in the aggressive human species.

Melanie and a group of “hungries” in The Girl With all the Gifts

A very zombie-like “Infected” human from The Last of Us

In both texts, the symbiotic relationship between the infected humans and the Cordyceps fungus allows the infected to maintain a scientifically stable relationship to the natural world. This relationship is also markedly distinct from the fuzzy biological uncertainty of most zombie films. Cordyceps really exists, and it only takes a small logical leap to envision humans under the organism’s control. Rather than being presented as monstrous doubles of humanity, these versions of Cordyceps zombies represent an ecological and biological world which is rebounding against human civilization and industrialization. In both The Last of Us and the film adaptation of Carey’s story, visuals which depict the overgrowth of nature into formerly urban spaces play an important role in signifying how the viewer and player should interpret their monsters.

Overgrown London in The Girl With All the Gifts

Overgrown Salt Lake City in The Last of Us

The encroaching vegetation in these scenes infests the urban landscape and reclaims the landscape for nature, turning the city into a space both uncanny and sublime. The vegetation subsuming the metropolis transforms it into a dilapidated, ivy-embossed maze filled with ghostly relics. Similarly, the Cordyceps infection presents itself on the human body through grotesque, bubbly growths, signifying a biological excess overtaking both the human body and society. The overgrowth of nature on the infrastructure of the city and the Cordyceps fungus on the human body call attention to the material excesses of human cities and urban life. By reclaiming the city and the human body for the natural world, these infestation suggest that humanity has also overgrown, and as a result disrupted biological homeostasis and ecological balance.

Melanie and survivors navigate overgrown London in The Girl With All the Gifts

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

Interestingly, in both The Last of Us and The Girl With All the Gifts, the Cordyceps infestation creates a scenario in which a young woman with a unique resistance to the infection presents an opportunity for a “cure.” However, in order to process the cure, she must be sacrificed. In both texts, characters must weigh the life of the innocent individual against eradication of the human species. In the dramatic conclusion of the narrative arc in The Last of Us, the player must decide if they will save Ellie, the young girl that they have spent hours of gameplay guiding and protecting through a maze of zombies, with the knowledge that her survival means the end of the world. In The Girl With All the Gifts, Melanie makes this choice herself, choosing to transform the whole world with Cordyceps and found a new zombie society based on the teachings of Miss Justinaeu, the only person who treated her sympathetically.

A doctor attempts to convince Joel (the player) to sacrifice Ellie for the greater good of mankind in The Last of Us

By using biological science to reimagine the biological impact of the fungus among us, these texts break the mold of the standard zombie narrative. The Last of Us and The Girl with All the Gifts imagine zombies through a perspective of biological symbiosis and ecological balance, rather than racialized contagion or scientific terrorism. In doing so, these texts reshape how the metaphor of the zombie can be interpreted in an age when an excess of humanity and human impact threatens to push the ecosystem out of balance.

Zombies are harbingers of an inverted natural order and the embodiment of the redistribution of power. While this disruption of the order of life and death is violently disturbing for survivors, there are signs in many zombie narratives that the collapse of human society might actually be to the benefit of nature and the organic world that zombies inhabit. If we begin to reimagine zombies not as a gross corruption of humanity, but as organisms that are a balancing force of an interconnected biological world moving towards homeostasis, we begin to get a different picture of zombies and their relation to the metaphor of contagion. Eventually, they come to represent not a teleological progression from life to death, but a seasonal, circular, progression reflecting a desire for environmental balance, and a commitment to imagining the world through the changes and returns of life and death on a larger and longer scale.

The post The Eco-Zombie: Using Biology to Imagine Zombies Beyond the Human appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Last week I discussed the use of contagion and metaphor, and mentioned how zombies can serve as “vehicles” for the metaphor of contagious disease. This week I continue my discussion of zombies, but before diving in, I want to draw a distinction between the two major representations of zombies in popular culture: what I somewhat reductively will refer to as the “Voodoo Zombie” and the “Plague Zombie.”

Although zombies have become somewhat synonymous with the spiritual practice of Voodoo in popular culture, the spiritual practices many of us refer to indiscriminately as “voodoo” have a rich and complex historical, spiritual, and cultural background far exceeding their limited representation in much of U.S. culture. In many instances, Voodoo involves casting spells of protection rather than curses, although it would be equally inaccurate to say that curses and other violent intent do not play some part of voodoo. Voodoo has also played an important role in historical movements of political resistance and cultural revolution, which has led to its vilification by many colonizing populations. The zombie figure is intertwined with both of these components—magical and cultural—and, like other aspects of this complex spirituality, has been largely distorted by popular culture’s appropriation of it.

The cover of Wade Davis’s book.

The Voodoo zombie is, in many ways, the “original” zombie. This incarnation of the zombie emerges out of the traditions and spiritual practices of Haitian voodoo. It represents a person who has died, or was near death, and has been resurrected by a “bokor” or sorcerer. One of the most famous (or infamous) modern Voodoo practitioners was the late Max Beauvoir, known as the “Voodoo Pope,” who claimed to know Voodoo priests who had resurrected the dead. Before his death in 2015, Beauvoir introduced anthropologist, ethnobotanist, and Harvard professor Wade Davis to a man who claimed to have been dead in 1962, but was resurrected to work as a slave on a sugar plantation. Davis’s The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985) chronicles his search to understand the botanical recipe of the “zombie powder” used to intoxicate and control alleged victims of zombification. In 1988, this book was adapted into a Wes Craven horror film of the same name.

The poster for its 1988 film adaptation by famed horror director Wes Craven.

The Voodoo zombie is tied to specific cultural practices and geographies (for example, Haitian Voodoo), and so the contextual “meaning” of the zombie is specific and discrete. Unlike their contagious cousins, which began to appear in popular culture late into the twentieth century, Voodoo zombies are not aimless, shambling corpses; they are people transformed into purposeful creatures. Voodoo practitioners like those described by Beauvoir and Davis resurrect the dead for specific reasons, including but not limited to slave labor, control, or revenge. Voodoo zombies are personal, medicinal, and spiritual; they do not appear in hordes, their state is not contagious, and their place between life in death is mediated and maintained by the sorcerer who controls them. They can even recover from their state of zombification, and may return to their justifiably surprised and horrified friends and family.

Anthropological works such as Davis’s and popular films such as George A. Romero’s 1968 horror classic Night of the Living Dead are in part responsible for introducing the zombie figure to popular culture. However, the zombie as we know it now has undergone radical mutation from its origins in the Voodoo zombie figure, becoming what I’ll refer to as the “plague zombie.”

This type of zombie emerged from, but radically alters the trajectory of the original zombie myth, and became an increasingly powerful feature of contemporary horror texts in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. While the Voodoo zombie’s cultural specificity and its conjuror’s intentions for it make for a rather rigid metaphorical reading, the metaphorical and interpretative pliability of the plague zombie has made it an adaptive and increasingly popular trope of the new millennium. Recalling last week’s discussion of I.A. Richard’s “tenor-vehicle” model as a way of understanding metaphor, a zombie operates as a “vehicle” allowing us to form connections between what the living dead are (the reanimated corpses of strangers, friends, and neighbors) and what they represent (hunger, contagion, mindless consumption, loss of control, and a disruption of the natural process of life and death).

The cover of Capcom’s Resident Evil (1996)

The popularity of the plague zombie began to rise in the 1980s and ‘90s in the wake of the devastating HIV pandemic, and the emergence of deadly new viruses such as Ebola, Marburg, SARS, and MERS; it reached a fever pitch in the late ‘90s and first decade of the 2000s. One of the most popular and enduring depictions of the “plague zombie” was the third-person horror videogame Resident Evil (1996), a franchise that has spawned twenty-nine video games across multiple platforms, six feature films, four animated films, seven novels, and a comic book series. In the Resident Evil franchise, the central narrative conflict is the Umbrella Corporation’s creation and not-so-accidental release of the “T-Virus.” Players, viewers, and readers must unpack the bureaucratic and capitalistic functions of Umbrella Corp to understand why they released the virus, who helped them, and how to cure or mitigate the impending viral apocalypse. As with many plague zombie narratives, the central conflict of Resident Evil isn’t that the dead are rising from their graves to stalk the living, but that there are arcane political, medical, and economic forces that would permit (or encourage) the advent of a zombie epidemic.

An in-game promotional advertisement for the fictional Umbrella Corporation. The tag line “Quality Medical Care You Can Trust Since 1968” is not only a sarcastic jab at the advertising style of pharmaceutical corporations, but also an allusion to George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, which was released in 1968.

The threat to social stability that zombies nearly always embody is the “tenor” of their metaphor. The contagion or plague zombies carry and transmit connects the tenor and vehicle of the metaphor together, connecting the abject horror of living dead to issues of social cohesion, security, and medical ethics among the living. In plague zombie narratives, how the ever-present survivors of the zombie epidemic respond to their situation is always as important, if not more so, than the existence of the zombies themselves. Next week I will be discussing one particular trope of the plague zombie narrative: the wall. Walls separate survivors of zombie epidemics from the living dead that stalk them, but they also separate survivors from each other and create material and metaphorical divisions in post-apocalyptic society. Tune in next week for a discussion of how the walls we build to protect us can become the cages that entrap us.

The post Know Your Zombie: Understanding the Living Dead appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

There’s a guy I can hear out by the bar. He sounds like he knows everyone here, but I’ve never seen him.

I haven’t written anything new in a couple hours. I’ve watched some car reviews instead. I ate my sandwich. I’ve had two beers which, because of my fast, feel like four. Maybe I’ve overshot it.

The loud guy sees my local sports team apparel. He initiates local sports team chant at point blank. There is no one around to help me, it’s just me alone, and this man needs a response. I want to oblige. I repeat local sports team chant but am quiet about it. He tries again. I am again quiet about it. Another time; I laugh mumble something about being worn out. He punches my arm and says “I didn’t know they made introverts in Buffalo” before taking a seat with some people who said they would be leaving in four, not five minutes.

The guy making my beef and cheddar says, “You hiding upstairs?”

“Yeah.”

“WiFi?”

“Mostly Word.”

“Work?”

“Yeah.”

“Cheers.”

I have watched four different car reviews: Honda S2000. Ford Focus ST. 1991 Honda CRX Si. Corvette C7. There’s a whole YouTube channel of these things that takes each of these cars as a case study in American masculinity. I cannot tell if any of this ironic. I am pretty sure it is, but I think if it isn’t, I probably still like these videos. I wonder what the loud guy drives.

My Word document reads:

“My project will argue

The Questions my project will answer are”

~ ~ ~ ~

In a year’s time the local beer place will have closed already, suddenly. I’ll be there on its final night sitting with colleagues and friends, new puppy getting passed around the table like a peace pipe. We’ll be sitting outside on some crappy metal chairs that will soon be sold off at a discount to pay the bar’s debts. The weather will still be warm and nobody will have that overworked look yet.

There are conflicting reports about the reason for the bar’s closure. The owner is getting too old for the restaurant game, the renovation of our downtown theater hasn’t driven as much traffic as expected, the space is too big, downtown parking is a pain in the ass, constant construction put a dent in their summer clientele, etc. I get the feeling, drinking a beer there outside, that this place just got tired. Thought it had gotten in shape after a long hiatus, went for the comeback, and found that our city had moved on. The mixed signals are unfortunate – it seemed like everyone was excited for the grand opening, buzz was solid, and the pickled eggs were good. I go in to order another drink; there are only a few taps left alive. A little ways down the bar from me a couple middle aged guys talk over their wives about how this all makes sense even though it’s a shame. They confess to the bartender that they didn’t get down here often enough. He shrugs, starts talking about a six-pack of craft beer from Vermont he recently got a hold of and talks about moving somewhere else. A different guy hands me my beer, puts it on my tab and I head back outside.

There have been a string of new restaurant openings here in the past year. Leihs downtown, a place called the Evergreen, Aster, The York; each one starts up with the energy of a gauntlet thrown, daring our city to let another establishment die off. Their menus are complicated and sporadically local. Utica greens and chicken riggies. None of them have wi-fi and a quiet corner to watch a YouTube man crack dirty jokes about Nathaniel Hawthorne and Lee Iacocca, which makes sense. That seems like it was a bad business model all along.

I’m nursing a stout that I don’t like very much because it’s all they have left. There aren’t any more beef and cheddars, no stew, no pickled eggs. Some people show up with take out Chinese, stay for a few minutes and move on back home after petting the pup.

~ ~ ~ ~

For now though, this place is open. My Word document currently says things like:

“Methodologically, I intend to approach this dissertation with feet firmly planted in that most traditional of literary practices, close reading.”

and

“I wonder, briefly, if Lara has misgivings about her short shorts.”

and

“Video games are the textual lingua franca of a networked society.”

I am throwing half cooked spaghetti at the wall and hoping it sticks. Loud local sports guy has left, it’s almost midnight. Some dudebros downstairs are arguing about how they would rank the Star Wars films in terms of quality. I suggest that The Force Awakens was way less fan servicey than the most recent Star Trek films and for that should be commended. They don’t agree and I go get a third drink before packing in my computer for the night.

The best thing about this local beer place is its ring toss game. In the dining room there are two brass hooks mounted to two different posts. A heavy metal ring hangs from a bit of string above the hooks. The goal here is to swing the ring in such a way that it settles into place on the hook instead of glancing off with a clang. It’s the perfect drunk game. There’s a sweet spot you have to feel out as the night goes on where you’re just tipsy enough to really feel the weight of that ring in your hand, but not so drunk that you can’t line up your shot. After the third beer I check to see where I am. First shot, miss, second shot miss, move to the other post, hole-in-one.

I feel good. Think, the fact of this place proves this city isn’t all bad. Think, as long as this place stay open there’s a chance I’ll finish this degree. It’s cold outside, it’s January. The temperature gives me hiccups as soon as I step outside. The tables have been put away because who wants to sit outside on a night like this?

Jordan Wood is a Ph.D. candidate at Syracuse University where he writes about video games and other things.

The post Clark’s appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Pabu has lived in a hidden away corner of the world called Stardew Valley, just outside the small fishing village of Pelican Town for almost a year. Fall is winding down, and despite his recent arrival, his spread of crops, jams, and gems from the mine took second place at the Harvest Festival, just behind Pierre the local shop owner who struggles to stay afloat in the face of a new mega-chain grocery in town. Not long ago Pabu worked a futureless office job, cliched in its anonymity and deadening effect on the soul. Desperate for an out Pabu reached for envelope from his grandfather, like a lapsed Baptist reaching for a disused Bible, and found therein the deed to a dilapidated farm. Feeling himself sinking in the malaise of American corporate rhythms, Pabu took hold of his grandfather’s lifeline and departed for the old, out of shape farm that was his birthright.

Pabu is a character in Stardew Valley, a video game made by a single developer that released almost exactly a year ago. More to the point, Pabu is a character in my game of Stardew Valley, no one else’s. I chose his swoopy hair, gave him and his dog, Naga, names from my favorite TV show, and dressed him in suspenders that he never, ever takes off. Details on Pabu are sketchy. At the outset of the game I knew nothing about him other than his dissatisfaction with life in the big city and his relative inexperience with agrarian work. Like many, many other games character customization helped forge a slim bond between myself and Pabu, but the rich inner life that I have come to know in Pabu comes from sharing in his pastoral rhythms for dozens of hours. These rhythms are mundane and restrictive and yet evoke a broad sense of possibility with each new sunrise. Stardew Valley transforms restriction into freedom, such that despite its limited scope – there are no cataclysms to stop, no world ending villains to defeat – it can feel daunting in its openness.

This is because the only hard limits Stardew Valley puts on you, the player, are in the form of time and exertion. While you can play Stardew Valley forever, continuing to develop your farm and your relationships to the people of Pelican Town for decades, each day lasts only a certain amount of time. No matter what, Pabu always wakes up at 6 am. The latest Pabu can go to bed is 2 am at which point if I haven’t gotten him back to bed he’ll simply pass out where he stands. Ideally, I try to get Pabu to bed between 11 and midnight so he has enough sleep to get him through the next day. This sleep schedule means that each day only has a limited number of hours with which to work. Alongside those limited hours Pabu is further constrained by his own limited reserves of energy. Almost every action in Stardew Valley uses up your character’s energy, such that no matter how quickly I move from place to place, there is a hard limit on how much Pabu can accomplish. Sleep replenishes that energy, but it only fills back up if enough sleep has been had. If Pabu works too hard, he’ll collapse of exhaustion and wake up sheepishly in his own bed the next morning with a letter of admonishment from a kind passerby who got him home.

These hard limitations are part of what gives Stardew Valley its profound sense of rhythm. The passage of time and the depletion of energy operationalize in clear, unambiguous terms our own limits as people, laborers, and friends. If I push Pabu too hard the game simply says “stop.” Because of this I know Pabu’s limits exactly. I know when it is ok to dig down just one more level in the mine and when to call it a day and head to the saloon. Stardew Valley trains you to be attentive to the needs of your character, to remember their humanity, and to filter your own relationship to the farm and Pelican Town through your character’s capacities instead of your own. Simple though they may be, the daily structure and limited energy of Stardew Valley are profoundly humane game mechanics that force us to recognize the people for whom farms, food, and labor are for. What, after all, is the point of abandoning the coprorate world if the pastoral is unable to bring any peace?

Self-care has become a somewhat contentious buzzword in the year that Stardew Valley has been available. Self-care is a way to talk about how to make sure that in the midst of your work, your relationships, and your politics you do not forget the borders of your own body. Some have argued that self-care is nothing more than the indulgent entitlement of millennials who don’t want to work as hard as their forbears. Stardew Valley teaches us otherwise. When Pabu wakes up in the morning after a fresh seven hours, energy meter replenished, watering can in hand, the day stretches before us in all its rich possibility. I know that though we can’t do everything today, we can do some things, and those things will be good and worthwhile. They are worthy because I have chosen to do them. Among many other options I have chosen to fish, or to talk, or to wander and forage instead of something else. Knowing Pabu’s limitations as I do means that every choice is consciously made. Even the decision to do not much, to, for instance on a rainy day, simply pay Leah a visit and maybe give her a flower from Pabu’s garden, is an attentive one. And if the day slides by without any tangible production, Stardew Valley refuses to punish you. It simply says, “go to sleep, and see what the new day brings.” For Pabu, there is always work to be done, but none of the work exhausts because it is all work that he knows he can do, he knows he has time for, and he knows he has chosen for himself.

For sure, parts of Stardew Valley are escapist in their nostalgia. At first glance it seems to long for a bygone nowhere of rural America and its retro pixel art aesthetic evokes an innocent time for video games when we were children yelling at each other for a turn on the controller, not doxxing feminists on Twitter. But Stardew Valley is careful to puncture those nostalgic tableaus. Not all is well here. Penny must bear with her verbally abusive alcoholic mother, living conspicuously in the only trailer in town. Harvey, the town doctor, worries constantly about his own job security and his inability to integrate socially with his peers. Clint the blacksmith sometimes stays in the Saloon until 1 am, sitting by himself, because he both cannot bear to talk to Emily who he loves and cannot bear to not talk. Pastoral though it may be, Stardew Valley refuses to offer the farm life as the panacea to postmodern ennui, and instead points to carefully cultivated, humane attention to the needs of people, whatever they may be. This is what self-care means, and this is why, I suspect, Stardew Valley has been so well received in a year where everyone has found themselves exhausted and exasperated by their world. The rhythms of Stardew Valley are not really about crops or livestock. They are about staging a “revolt against the homilies of this world.”[1] They are about breathing, listening, and what it means to live another day.

[1] “Paul’s Case” by Willa Cather

The post The Rhythms of Limitation: Learning about Self-Care in “Stardew Valley” appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

This censoring isn’t just for undergrads, either. I have found very few opportunities in academic writing where you are free to wear your love on your sleeve. I understand the usefulness of the genre, but it’s refreshing to have a forum where we can get more emotionally expressive. This renewed interest in personal within academia (one way to think of the so-called “affective turn”) is part of the impetus behind the virtual space that is this blog, after all: it gives us a chance to feel as well as think, and reach our communities as well as our peers.

All this is a roundabout way of introducing the fact that I haven’t been okay recently. There have been days where I have found myself in negative mental spaces without a clear path out, and there are nights where my dreams have taken me back to places haunted by bad memories. I could point out a number of reasons why this might be – the grad student workload, lack of good sleep, anxieties about the future, homesickness – but a diagnosis only goes so far when most of those things are unavoidable at this point in my life. Other contributors to this blog have taken on mental health before, so I think I’ll leave the specifics aside for now. Instead, I would like to spend this post doing one of the things I like best – taking a walk with someone I care about. I want to show you a place that I go when I’m feeling down: a little virtual island called Proteus.

Proteus is a short game created by independent designers Ed Key and David Kanaga in 2011. To call it a “game” is a bit of a misnomer. There are no rules, there are no enemies, there are no apparent goals. The only controls are the arrow keys to move, the mouse to look around, and the space bar (which makes your avatar appear to sit down). The game is pure spatiality: all the player is encouraged to do is explore and experience.

You emerge from the main menu and find yourself floating above a tranquil sea, with only the soft sound of the waves below you. As you look across the shimmering water, you might be able to see the faint outline of land beckoning you closer. Recognizable shapes begin to emerge from the fog as you approach: a blocky beach, a few twisted pixelated trees crowned in pink or green, maybe even the swell of a mountain to vary the landscape. As soon as you make landfall, the island erupts into the simulated sounds of spring: the warbles, tweets, and crooning of synthetic birdsong; the rustling static and base-toned murmuring of unseen electronic creatures; and through it all soft strings and the tinkling of a chiptune keyboard invoking the sound of a pleasant breeze and gently falling cherry blossoms. Despite being technologically generated, the sounds that engulf you are the sounds of life, and they ebb and flow as you wander around the island.

What you’ll actually see as you meander among the trees is unclear. Like Minecraft, Proteus is procedurally generated; the island’s topography, flora, and fauna are completely dependent upon algorithms over which you have no control. But though you will never see the same island twice, certain landmarks remain constant through multiple playthroughs. There is always a cabin nestled in the trees, there is always a circle of mysterious totems, there is always a lonely headstone at the top of the highest peak. What this creates for the player is a familiarity which retains the mystic wonder of discovery. I can feel intimately close to this virtual space, but I can never own it; I can know what to expect, but it will always surprise me. Few places, virtual or otherwise, are truly like that in the way Proteus is.

When night falls, something magical starts to happen. The stars – the only rounded figures in the pixelated world – start to float down to earth, swirling around a particular spot on the island. The curious explorer who approaches the circle of stardust is wrapped up in a flurry of motion and sound as time accelerates. The sun rises and sets, rainclouds race across the sky, wind whips through the leaves on the trees. Standing in the center of the circle brings all this chaos to a crescendo, and after your vision fades to white you find yourself no longer in spring, but in summer.

Every season brings a change in the island’s landscape and soundscape – summer brings its blooming flowers and buzzing flies, autumn its orange leaves and somber tones, winter its stark silent white – changing the tone of your exploration from joyful wonder to thoughtful reflection as you come to know the lay of the land. As the days get quieter and more familiar, the nights become increasingly fantastic with fireflies, shooting stars, and even the aurora borealis – a sight that even in its polygonal form fills me with the joy of home.

Though you can spend all your time exploring these little wonders (I never went past summer the first time I played), the game does have an ending. I won’t say what happens on that final winter’s night, but it never ceases to move me. For all its joy and wonder, Proteus teaches you that all things that change, even a sense of place, must come to an end. When you close your eyes on that first island, you will never see it again. All that will remain are the echoes of your emotional experience. That impermanence, for me, is beautiful.

The description I’ve given here hardly does it justice – Proteus really needs to be experienced to be understood. But I also find it’s best when experienced together. If you’re around where I happen to be, go ahead and ask. I’d love to play it with you, if only to see the look on your face when you first set foot on land. If you happen to get it and I’m not around, well…go up to the totem circle on the first night of autumn and just wait for the moon to rise. Maybe it’ll make you think of me. In any case, I think it’s a place worth sharing.

John Sanders is a second year PhD student in the Syracuse University English department where he studies games and new media. He considers himself an extroverted optimist, which can make mornings difficult for his roommates.

The post Sharing Space: “Proteus” and the Personal appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

In the course of teaching, I have occasionally had parents voice the concern that their child has been “spending too much time on Minecraft” and ask me for some advice on how to change that. Now, those sort of parental decisions are above my paygrade at this point in my life, and how one ought to approach limitations on computer activity depends too much on parenting styles and a child’s personality for me to say anything useful in that regard. But the way they phrased the question points to a bit of a misunderstanding of what the game really is: kids are not on Minecraft, they are in Minecraft.

Like many contemporary games, Minecraft is as much of a space as it is a system of rules. Each time they make a new world, players are dropped into the middle of a sprawling landscape which is constantly generated based on a set of algorithms (an operation known as procedural generation, in game terms). Grasslands and deserts, mountains and jungles, cave systems and mushroom-filled islands, even villages and abandoned temples have a chance of appearing every time a player reaches the edge of the known map. And this process never ends: the world only gets bigger and bigger as the player explores. With no mini-map to aid them initially, players are forced to make meaning out of the environment – taking note of landmarks, following the curve of riverbeds, getting to higher ground – as they seek out shelter before nightfall.

Besides being infinitely vast, the worlds of Minecraft are also infinitely transformable. Players can harvest, collect, or mine just about every type of block in the game and use them for their own creations, whether that’s smelting iron to make a sword or placing wooden planks down for the walls of a house. In this way, players are constantly leaving their mark on the environment and making it their own. Every hastily-made shelter, every empty mine shaft, every scar in the mountain or crater in the earth becomes imbued with meaning as sites of the player’s failures and accomplishments. But these structures and stories do not remain confined to the game world: they are shared by players across every medium available to them, whether through screenshots, videos, or merely word of mouth. Every voxel has a ballad, and every player becomes a bard, expanding the space of the virtual world even further into the material one.

That may have gone a bit too far into the poetic, but there is a sort of magic to a game space that (for many people) doesn’t make the transition to the real world. This is especially true for kids in my hometown of Anchorage, a city which has long winters, not insignificant criminal and animal dangers, and long distances between destinations – not to mention the general lack of a safe “third place” for youth to gather and play of their own accord. Yet Minecraft is a place that is infinitely traversable, a place children can exercise their agency and reveal their intelligence, a place that they can make their own without the help of adults and where they can play with their friends on top of it all. Is it any wonder why this is the place kids decide to spend their days?

I understand the danger in gaming compulsion – it is very addicting to find such a place of empowerment. I also understand the necessity of getting outside – you can’t grow up in Alaska without getting at least some taste of that lesson! – but there is so much more to Minecraft and similar games than sitting in front of a TV or killing time with YouTube videos. The only way to truly understand that fact is to take the game for what it is: a place of empowerment as well as play.

My reaction to the parents who are skeptical about the value of games or who think their child is playing too much is to first ask them much they know about Minecraft. Some have watched their children play the game or even have an account themselves, but more often than not they have only heard their child speak about it ad nauseum while having very little familiarity beyond the confusing jumble of jargon and technical language that is frankly hard to keep straight unless you have seen it in action.

And that is exactly my piece of advice to these parents: let your child show you their space. Treat the experience as if you were a tourist trying to get an understanding of a different country. Ask questions, try out the language, pick up the controls and let your guide coach you if need be, but give them a chance to show you what this virtual space means to them. Only after understanding what it means to exist in this space can you truly understand what it would mean for them to lose it. Perhaps you can show them what they love about the space can be found elsewhere as well.

The same advice can really be said of almost any game and almost any social relationship: if you want to know someone’s feelings, let them show you the places they like to go. In the spirit of that mindset, I want to show you a place I like to go when things are not particularly bright. But that is a task for next week.

John Sanders is a second year PhD student in the Syracuse University English department where he studies games and new media. He considers himself an extroverted optimist, which can make mornings difficult for his roommates.

The post Appreciating Space: “Minecraft” and Empowerment appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Media culture has its share of weak literary adaptations, some that distort or ignore the world of their origination, and some that are so geeked-out with hidden references and inside jokes that they become inaccessible to casual fans. Shadow of Mordor is unique in that it strikes a perfect balance between Tolkien’s literary world and the game’s player-focused digital narrative.  While one might expect a game based on books as popular as Tolkien’s to rely heavily on a teleological and novelistic plot, Shadow of Mordor’s open-world design allows the player to explore freely while choosing their own path through the loose narrative framework of the game. In a review for Kotaku, Yannick LeJacq writes “Mordor wants to be great game more than a satisfying bit of fan-service,” adding that “the game gracefully manages to keep the fiction of its own universe at arm’s length throughout” (Kotaku). While at first it appears that the rich history of Tolkien’s world—a deep fantasy universe that is founded on generations of unique internal histories—has been vacated in favor of a favorable playing experience, taking a closer look at the mechanics of the game reveals the fascinating and ghostly presence of Tolkien’s literary texts. Interestingly, Tolkien’s literary influence shows primarily through the game’s design and play-mechanics rather than through the narrative, and it is through these aspects of play that Shadow of Mordor is able to contribute to, rather than appropriate, Tolkien’s fantasy world.

The avatar through which players navigate the game is Talion, a ranger character invented specifically for the game.  The game begins with Talion witnessing his family’s ritual sacrifice by the evil minions of Sauron (the antagonist of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy) before being killed himself. After his death, Talion enters the spirit world and confronts the ghost of Celebrimbor, an elven ring-maker whom Sauron had also murdered long ago. Fans of Tolkien’s novels might know that Celebrimbor is an essential, if somewhat peripheral, character. As the most talented ring-maker of the Second Age, it is Celebrimbor that forges the magical ring from which Sauron derives his power over others. This makes Celebrimbor a small, but key component to the development of Tolkien’s universe, which revolves around the struggle to destroy the ring of power and arrest Sauron’s dark influence. In Shadow of Mordor, it is through Celebrimbor’s presence that Tolkien’s literary universe interacts with the game-world inhabited by the player.  (picture 2: player avatar Talion (left) and ghost-pal Celebrimbor (right))

Player avatar Talion (left) and ghost-pal Celebrimbor (right)

Talion, who is a human (like the player) is summarily possessed by the “wraith” of Celebrimbor, and it is this interaction with the spirit world that grants Talion and the player special powers they can use to explore the environment and history of the game-world they inhabit. Seeing through Celebrimbor’s “wraith vision” allows the player to track the footprints of enemies, locate hidden relics, and restore once great ruins to their previous glory.  It is through Celebrimbor, the ghostly remnant of Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, that the game’s material history—including its foundations in a literary past now overshadowed by a decade of film and videogame adaptations—becomes accessible to the player.  By joining the player-avatar Talion with Celebrimbor, the ludic dimension of the game-text and it’s literary history become one. And while a player may feel as if they have left the rigid history of Tolkien super-fandom behind, Celebrimbor’s ghost is always haunting the edges of the player’s experience, pointing out the undeniable link between history and the present.

Perhaps Shadow of Mordor’s most compelling aspect for gamers is its innovative Nemesis engine, a system of play that imbues the world of the game with a type of material and historical memory.

Screen capture of the Nemesis system

The Nemesis system allows Talion’s enemies to “remember” when they have been defeated and, more insidiously, when they have defeated the player. This means that when encountering a seemingly random enemy in the free-roaming world of the game, the player often comes face-to-face with an enemy that bears the scars of past battles and holds a grudge. When Talion is killed in combat, the enemy who strikes the final blow gains a powerful boost in their statistics and may even be promoted to a higher rank in the feudal system of Sauron’s army. This means that mistakes and challenging encounters, which in most games could be forgotten by re-loading a save, create a long-lasting impact on the difficulty and narrative experience of the game.

A victorious Orc is promoted to War Chief

As many reviewers have noted, the Nemesis system gives the game an entirely new dimension, turning enemies that have long been portrayed as faceless, nameless grunts of Sauron’s evil army into well-known and despised villains with unique personalities determined by their personal history with the player. Strangely, the Nemesis system—designed to create even more provoking villains—serves to “humanize” Sauron’s army in a way, providing a new perspective on the often-ignored minor antagonists of Tolkien’s world.  The Nemesis system makes the materiality of Tolkien’s world a framework for the experience of the game-world. Rather than forcing the player to re-live a pixelated version of Tolkien’s novelized history of Middle-Earth, the free-range, “sand-box” style of the game combined with the Nemesis system gives players agency in discovering, and even creating for themselves, new depths to Tolkien’s work. Even as the player experiences the freedom and pleasure of writing their own adventure in Tolkien’s world, the phantom of the text is always there beside them, guiding them through Celebrimbor’s voice or framing the materiality of Tolkien’s influence through Nemesis. In this way, Shadow of Mordor makes its most interesting contribution back to Tolkien’s literary world.

Inhabiting the ghostly margins of their new media forms, the phantoms of our favorite books are capable of transforming our understanding of literature by shaping new and immersive narrative experiences.

Max Cassity is a 2^nd year PhD student in English and Textual Studies. His studies encompass 20^thand 21^st Century American fiction, poetry, and digital media. He is currently beginning a dissertation that studies fictional representations of epidemic diseases in American and Global modern literature and digital narratives including Ebola, Cancer, and Pandemic Flu.

The post A Ghost in the Machine: The Specter of Literature in EA’s Middle-Earth: The Shadow of Mordor appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.