Weird Ecologies in Literature and Video Game Narrative

Abstract

Cultural representations of climate futures are often split between gloom-and-doom scenarios and techno-utopian hopes. A number of scholars in the environmental humanities have argued for the importance of going beyond this binary of despair and techno-optimism. The complex affects of weird fiction might be one way of doing so. As a mode of representation combining science fiction, horror, and a foregrounding of atmospheric instability, the weird might be well suited to representing the scale and ramifications of the climate crisis. While that has been argued by scholars working on contemporary writers such as Jeff VanderMeer, my talk explores the continuing presence of weird literature in the video game medium. Contextualizing my examples (Dredge and Pacific Drive) vis-à-vis a larger set of "ecogames," I will show how weird affects and atmospheres can be translated into the interactive context of gameplay, and how the resulting experiences speak to an unsettling – but also potentially transformative – breakdown of human-nonhuman distinctions. 

Bio

Marco Caracciolo is Associate Professor of English at Ghent University in Belgium. Drawing inspiration from cognitive science, the philosophy of mind, and the environmental humanities, his work explores the forms of experience afforded by narrative in literary fiction and other media (especially video games). He is the author of several books, including most recently Contemporary Narrative and the Spectrum of Materiality (De Gruyter, 2023) and On Soulsring Worlds: Narrative Complexity, Digital Communities, and Interpretation in Dark Souls and Elden Ring (Routledge, 2024).