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.

Autorentext

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).