Stafrænar skemmtanir og stafræn menning

This paper presents the parameters and status of my ongoing research project to catalogue prominent Old Norse-Icelandic literary tropes, motifs, and references that appear in medievalist fantasy role-playing videogames in an open-access, online database. Players of such games, as consumers and producers of popular cultural discourse surrounding the perceived Middle Ages, including that informed by medievalist television series, films, literature, and other forms of pop culture, are inculcated with images, ideas, memories, and receptions of the medieval. This database will work to bridge the significant divide between scholarly and popular understandings of Old Norse culture by giving existing communities of curious gamers a readily available reference tool for learning about the medieval origins of elements of their favorite medievalist fantasy video games. Public-facing literary history of this kind is particularly pressing given the rise of right-wing, white-nationalist terrorism and its misappropriation of Old Norse culture. 

This presentation discusses DarkStone Digital’s 2022 video game The Mortuary Assistant and its use of randomized gameplay events and their resulting game-story elements in the pursuit of a more unpredictable and engaging horror experience. Built on a fear formula that largely prioritizes literary and filmic horror, survival horror models from the mid-nineties to the early noughties, linear game-story development, and canonical playthroughs with insignificant gameplay deviations, horror games have, in many ways, become stuck in a loop of recycled patterns, a familiar obstacle for the genre in general. As horror hunts its next “extreme” endeavor, The Mortuary Assistant promises that “[n]o two runs are the same,” implementing randomized scares that not only must be temporarily tolerated but tackled and employed for in-game survival. From staples such as jump scares and suspenseful settings to less common components like extensive procedural generation and a choice-based game-story, The Mortuary Assistant both dissects and disrupts the standard cycle present in most modern horror games, highlighting the features worth saving and certain trademarks that might be better left buried. Furthermore, successfully utilizing procedural-based content as a notable part of gameplay, The Mortuary Assistant progresses fictional fear, profitably, popularly, and most importantly, palpably.

The aim of this paper is to explore the applicability and limitations of allegory as intent in Japanese video games. Currently, there are multiple examples of the concept of allegory being applied to Japanese video games, by fan theorists and scholars alike, but the limits and implications of allegory have received less attention, leaving such statements at least partially unqualified—especially in regard to questions of authorial intent. With this in mind, the paper hopes to critically examine the concept of allegory as it has been applied to the study of Japanese video games in order to clarify in what way allegory as a concept may benefit the study of such games.

Menningarvettvangurinn er stafrænn á nýrri öld og knúinn áfram af tæknibyltingum umliðinna áratuga og einokun tröllslegra fyrirtækja. Stafræna byltingin olli verufræðilegu rofi í kvikmyndasögunni og í kjölfarið hefur fræðimönnum verið tíðrætt um „dauða kvikmyndarinnar“. Jafnvel þótt þar kunni að vera of hátt reitt til höggs er eðlilegt að spyrjast fyrir um stöðu kvikmyndarinnar á tímum streymisveitunnar, tölvuleikja og Tik Tok. Í erindinu verður rýnt í hvernig framleiðsla, merkingarvirkni og viðtökur kvikmynda hafa breyst í skugga áðurnefndra samfélagshræringa á nýju árþúsundi.