The EcoGothic Legacy of Doomed Voyages in Video Games with M K Pinder

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Romancing the Gothic

"Slimy things did crawl with legs, Upon the slimy sea." - The ecoGothic legacy of the doomed voyage in video games with Morgan Pinder

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The Gothic has long been preoccupied with what lurks below the surface of the water. The intense isolation of the ship at sea and the perceived threat of what lies beneath are potent manifestations of ecophobia and inextricably tied to the ecoGothic. Our anxieties about the sea extend to the hubris of our own interactions with it. Often it is humanity that creates danger, trespasses into delicate ecosystems and awakens ancient beasts. Ships and settlements in the vast openness of the sea or ocean provide human spaces to mediate player exploration. These ‘scary playgrounds’ as Perron terms playable spaces in horror games draw on a multitude of anxieties about aquatic ecology and our status as interlopers within it. These narratives are a transmedia extension of literary stories about the sea; from the 19th Century tales of ill-fated voyages, to weird fiction tales of mind control and invasion, to post world war two ghost ship myths. This paper explores three horror video games through the ecoGothic anxieties they express as well as the debt that they owe to their narrative antecedents. The goal is to present these texts as part of an ongoing discussion about ecologies mediated by transmedia ecoGothic and ecohorror storytelling. 
 
Focusing on Man of Medan, Return of the Obra Dinn and Sinking City. Other games briefly discussed include Bioshock, Resident Evil: Revelations, Subnautica and The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker. 
 
MK Pinder Bionote 
MK Pinder is a PhD candidate at Deakin University, Australia studying ecoGothic representation in videogames. She has a Master of Arts in Writing and Literature and a Master of communications in Digital Media. Her research interests are in the intersection of genre, transmedia narratives, and ecocriticism.

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The EcoGothic Legacy of Doomed Voyages in Video Games with M K Pinder

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