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Goth Gaming, Part Three: A New Question
I began this series by asking whether video games can be Gothic, specifically action RPGs. My next two posts discussed the Gothic elements of Dragon Age: Origins and then NieR Replicant to answer that initial question. It’s been fun, but I’ve come to realize that everything I’ve written so far has depended on the assumption…
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Goth Gaming, Part Two: Ruining the Human
My last post on the Darkspawn and the return of the repressed was just a blood-and-guts-filled appetizer, a look at one small Gothic trope; now that we’re moving on to the main course, I’m going to go beyond that one trope to instead talk about Gothic as a whole. This means I’m about to get…
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Goth Gaming, Part One: Back Again
Yup, this one’s a game I never shut up about—but this time, it wasn’t my idea, I swear! You see, I took the Gothic literautre course I talked about in the introduction with my friend Lam, whose experience with gaming and narrative theory dwarfs my own. After one of our classes, Lam messaged me asking…
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Goth Gaming, Introduction: Can a Video Game be Gothic?
If there’s one thing I learned in the Gothic literature course I took last term, it’s that Gothic is almost impossible to define as a genre (if it’s even a genre at all). In that course, we studied everything from “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allen Poe to “The Bloody Chamber”…
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My Guide to Creating the World
I’ll start this post with a confession: worldbuilding scares the shit out of me. Creating a whole new world out of small details and not dull exposition dumps feels like building an entire castle out of grains of sand, and that’s just my experience as someone who tells stories in print. Things are even more…
The Third Medium 