Overview

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, “Ludic and Narrative Intertextuality,” 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, “Genre and Character (re)Creation,” will examine games that are more thematically engaged with the nineteenth 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 Technologies” 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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Lin Young ,  Brooke Cameron
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
Weight:   0.670kg
ISBN:  

9781032804835

ISBN 10:   1032804831
Pages:   266
Publication Date:   29 October 2025
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

Part 1: Ludic and Narrative Intertextuality. 1. Heather Hess. Powerful Innocence: George MacDonald's Legacy in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 2. Lin Young. Silence by (Game) Design: Shapeshifting and Assimilation in “The Little Mermaid” and The Wolf Among Us. 3. Jesse Gauthier & Ian Clark. Futurity and the Death Drive in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014) 4. Felipe Espinoza Garrido. Race, Gender, and Reparative Revisions in Lauren Woolbright and Marie Jarrell’s Videogame Sequel Blood of the Vampire. Part 2: Genre and Character (re)Creation. 5. Zoe Eddy. ‘Her beauty was blinding': Amnesia: Justine as Sensation Fiction. 6. Shannon Payne. The Pastoral Reimagined in Stardew Valley. 7. Mimi Okabe. London Detective Mysteria: A Case Study on the Limitations and Potentials of the Otome Detective in Japanese neo-Victorian Video Games. 8. Rachel Friars. Queering the Neo-Victorian Video Game: Intrigues at the Boarding School. Part 3: Navigation, Colonization, Exploration. 9. Holly Wiegand. 80 Days, 80 Plays: Victorian Novelty and Narrative Replayability of Inkle Studio’s 80 Days. 10. Travis Hay. The Return of Franklin’s Lost Expedition: Virtual Victorians and Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit in Three Recent Video Games. 11. Brooke Cameron. Autistic Masking in Wuthering Heights and Little Nightmares II 12. Kelsey G. Quinn. “I caught a frog! Or it’s a new neighbor…and I have some apologizing to do.”: Victorian Species in Animal Crossing: New Horizons Part 4: Science, Systems, Technologies. 13. David A. Smith. Fragments of Time, Technological Ghosts, and Gothic Narratives in Horizon: Zero Dawn. 14. Austin Anderson. Blood and Blackness in FromSoftware’s Bloodborne 15. Melissa Kagen & Jennifer Minnen. Dangerous Collecting in Strange Horticulture. 16. Mattia Belli &, Francesca Arnavas. The Post-Human, Metamorphic Body of Pinocchio: Lies of P and Its Victorian Influences.

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Author Information

Lin Young is currently Assistant Professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta. Publications include articles in Women’s 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 Queen’s University, Canada. She is the author of Critical Alliances: Economics and Feminism in English Women’s Writing, 1880–1914 (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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