End-Game
Description
Video games are a global phenomenon, international in their scope and democratic in their appeal. This is the first volume dedicated to the subject of apocalyptic video games. Its two dozen papers engage the subject comprehensively, from game design to player experience, and from the perspectives of content, theme, sound, ludic textures, and social function. The volume offers scholars, students, and general readers a thorough overview of this unique expression of the apocalyptic imagination in popular culture, and novel insights into an important facet of contemporary digital society.
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Persons
L. DiTommaso , University Montreal; J. Crossley , MF Oslo; A. Lockhart , University of Cambridge; R. Wagner , Ithaca College.
Content
- Intro
- Preface
- Contents
- Contributors and Editors
- Overture
- Video Games and the Contemporary Apocalyptic Imagination
- Essays
- Frostpunk, the Apocalypse, and the "Enduring Temptation" of Ecofascism
- The Missing Middle Class in The Outer Worlds
- Masculine Apocalypses: Navigating Masculinity, Male Spaces, and Violence in Days Gone (2019) and The Last of Us Part II (2020)
- Cities of the (Digital) Apocalypse - The Meeting of Video Games, Ruins, and Urban Studies
- My Ruined Town: Fallout 4 Modding and Digital Storytelling
- "I Am Making Everything New": Animal Crossing as Postmillennial Apocalyptic Progress During the Covid Pandemic
- "All Sound Will Be Muted. All Life Will Scream": Music and Sound as Existential Resistance in Disco Elysium (2019)
- The Two Broken Messiahs of Far Cry 5
- "There Will be a Reckoning": Galactic Apocalypse as Endgame in Stellaris
- A Playlist for the Apocalypse: Popular Music in Death Stranding
- Horizon Zero Dawn as Genre-Medium Coevolution
- End Game: Determinism and Human Instrumentality in Apocalyptic Video Games
- Anthroponyms, Apocalyptic Dualism, and Identity Formation in Post-Apocalyptic Video Games
- Death Stranding, Connections, Timefall, and Our Interactive Past
- Undead Ecosystems: Death Stranding and the Contemporary Video-Game Zombie
- "Everyone in This Story Is Already Dead": Death Matters in Disco Elysium's Apocalypse
- The Haunted Environment: Ellie's Engagement through Retrospection
- The End of Everything
- "Pick Your Plasmid and Evolve!": Individualization, Genetics, and Choice in BioShock
- The Dystopia Industry: Video Games and the Commodification of Cultural Collapse
- Video-Game Religion beyond the Anthropocene
- Giving Pandemic a Face: Ecophobia in A Plague Tale: Innocence
- Medieval Fantasy in Video Games and Apocalypse in Digital Culture
- Coda
- Apocalypticism Today
- Bibliography
- A Bibliography of Critical Scholarship on Post/Apocalyptic Video Games
- Index
