Victorians and Videogames

Victorians and Videogames will examine how games interact with nineteenth-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 nineteenth century in the contemporary world. This book contains four categories that summarize major trends in nineteenth-century-oriented games. The first section, "e;Ludic and Narrative Intertextuality,"e; examines games that directly adapt nineteenth-century texts, considering how ludic and literary elements work together to produce new commentary on the original texts. Second, "e;Genre and Character (re)Creation,"e; will examine games that are more thematically engaged with the nineteenth century. Third, "e;Navigation, Colonization, and Exploration"e; 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, "e;Science, Systems, and Technologies"e; will examine how contemporary games engage with nineteenth-century innovations (both good and bad) in science and technology. In this way, the sections begin with more explicit nineteenth-century engagements and build to more theoretical and subtextual ones.