Victorians and Videogames

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.