Forschungskolloquium Detail

Speaker:
Prof. Dr. Marco Caracciolo (University of Gent)

Moderation:
Dr. Leila Vaziri

Zoom-Link
Meeting-ID: 915 3170 7702

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 generated by weird fiction might be one way of doing so. As a mode of representation combining science fiction, horror, and a bodily feeling of atmospheric instability, the weird is well suited to convey the scale and ramifications of the climate crisis. While that idea has been put forward by scholars working on contemporary writers such as Jeff VanderMeer, my talk explores the presence of weird literature in the video game medium. Contextualizing my examples (Control [Remedy Entertainment 2019] and Dredge [Black Salt Games 2023]) vis-à-vis a larger set of "ecogames", I will show how weird affects and atmosphere 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.

Contact: zkf@uni-konstanz.de