HORROR VIDEO GAMES AS PROCEDURAL NARRATIVES: EXTREME COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS IN THE DIGITAL HEART OF DARKNESS

Can video games convey narrative meaning? What are the particular means employed by games to ‘tell’ stories? If video games can render narratives, how do narratives across other media inform video games and how do games relate to various discourses and ideologies? The present book is an attempt to provide an answer to these questions. The first part of this book shows how recent approaches coming from cognitive narrative theory can be used to analyse video games as storytelling media. The second part is concerned with showing how the specific rhetoric of video games entertains a dialogue with literary texts and their respective ideologies. In order to achieve this, the present book investigates four horror games, F.E.A.R., Dead Space, Alien: Isolation, and Manhunt 2, in light of their relation to colonial discourse with focus on how literary texts such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness shape the games’ storyworlds.