Victorians and Videogames will examine how games interact with 19th Century genres, aesthetics, and literary themes as a means of engaging, critiquing, or challenging their original contexts.
Victorians and Videogames will examine how games interact with 19th Century genres, aesthetics, and literary themes as a means of engaging, critiquing, or challenging their original contexts. In essence, this collection will consider the ways in which embodied, user-driven storytelling can impact new and challenging engagements with the 19th Century in the contemporary world. The book contains four categories that summarize major trends in 19th Century-oriented games. The first section, “Ludic and Narrative Intertextuality,” examines games that directly adapt 19th Century texts, considering how ludic and literary elements work together to produce new commentary on the original texts. Second, “Genre and Character (re)Creation,” will examine games that are more thematically engaged with the 19th Century. Third, “Navigation, Colonization and Exploration” examines the ways in which players move and interact with game environments, and how game design itself can often evoke social systems, or the politics of imperialist conquest. Finally, “Science, Systems and Technology” will examine how contemporary games engage with 19th Century innovations (both good and bad) in science and technology. In this way, the sections begin with more explicit 19th Century engagements and build to more theoretical and subtextual ones.
Victorians and Videogames: Literary and Thematic Representations of the
Nineteenth Century in Virtual Play
PART 1: Ludic and Narrative Intertextuality
1 Powerful Innocence: George MacDonalds Legacy in The Legend of Zelda:
Ocarina of Time
Heather L.N. Hess
2 Silence by (Game) Design: Shapeshifting and Assimilation in "The Little
Mermaid" and the Wolf Among Us
Lin Young
3 Futurity and the Death Drive in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and
Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014)
Ian M. Clark And Jesse Gauthier
4 Race, Gender, and Reparative Revisions in Lauren Woolbright and Marie
Jarrells Videogame Sequel Blood of the Vampire (2018)
Felipe Espinoza Garrido
PART 2: Genre and Character (re)Creation
5 "Her Beauty Was Blinding": Amnesia: Justine as Sensation Fiction
Zoe Antoinette Eddy
6 DoItYourself Arcadia: The Pastoral, William Morris, and Stardew Valley
Shannon Payne
7 London Detective Mysteria: A Case Study on the Limitations and Potentials
of the Otome Detective in Japanese NeoVictorian Video Games
Mimi Okabe
8 Queering the NeoVictorian Video Game: Intrigues at the Boarding School
Rachel M. Friars
PART 3: Navigation, Colonization, Exploration
9 80 Days, 80 Plays: Curious Failure as Antidote to Empire in Verne and inkle
Studios 80 Days
Holly Wiegand
10 "A Hunger Draws the Desperate Here": The Virtual Return of Franklins Lost
Expedition
Travis Hay
11 Autistic Masking in Wuthering Heights and Little Nightmares II
Brooke Cameron
12 "I Caught a Frog! or Its a New Neighbor . . . and I Have Some Apologizing
To Do": Victorian Species in Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Kelsey G. Quinn
PART 4: Science, Systems, Technologies
13 Fragments of Time, Technological Ghosts, and Gothic Narratives in Horizon
Zero Dawn
David A. Smith
14 Blood and Blackness in FromSoftwares Bloodborne: Toward a Theory of
Racial Recursivity
Austin Anderson
15 Dangerous Collection: The Decolonization of Victorian Botany in Strange
Horticulture
Jennifer Minnen And Melissa Kagen
16 Lies of P: Victorian Posthuman and Metamorphic Bodies
Francesca Arnavas And Mattia Bellini
Lin Young is currently Assistant Professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta. Publications include articles in Womens Writing, Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, and book chapters in the Eisner-winning LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader (2022) and The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2024).
Brooke Cameron is Associate Professor of English at Queens University, Canada. She is the author of Critical Alliances: Economics and Feminism in English Womens Writing, 18801914 (2020) and co-editor of The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century Literature 2022, with Lara Karpenko) and of the special issue on Vampires: Consuming Monsters/Monstrous Consumption, for Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural (2023, with Ian Clark and Suyin Olguin).
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