B.A., M.A. (Waterloo), PhD (Trent)
Dissertation: Playing the End: Tensions of the Apocalypse in Digital Games
Examining Committee:
Liam Mitchell and Michael Epp (Co-Supervisors) and Paul Manning
External Examiner: Thomas Lamarre, University of Chicago
Internal Examiner: Karleen Pendleton-Jimenez
Chair: Joshua Synenko
Abstract
This research examines the digital game through the subject of the Apocalypse, both in its literal revelatory form and its colloquial disaster form. To accomplish that, it employs Louis Althusser’s concept of structural causality as a springboard for a structure-based interrogation of interlocked systems. Drawing a comparison between Ian Bogost’s definition of black-box analysis and Althusser’s concept of ideology, I suggest the apocalypse is a valuable subject matter for understanding digital games, and in turn digital games provide media-based insight on complex systems of subjectivations. These positions are accomplished in two ways. First, I focus on five different apocalyptic games - The Last of Us (2012), Tokyo Jungle (2012), Mass Effect (2008), Doki Doki Literature Club (2016), and Persona 4 Arena (2012) – and how they express radically different visions and scopes of apocalypse. More specifically, I focus on the digitality of these games and how their technical construction in light of their suggested themes reveal hidden relations between apocalypse and ideology. Second, I expand on a research-creation project focused on the production and dissemination of a game, specifically as a means of using what has been discussed in previous chapters to attempt to expand on the subject matter of ideology and apocalypse. The aim of this is to discuss the process of expressing a procedural argument following several chapters interpreting them. It is also to expand on additional tensions between human and system which are underplayed or obscured in the playing process. It concludes that apocalypse, in the process of using systems, remains an elusive topic and to produce meaningful texts as commentary on ideology requires different, difficult considerations.
Research interests: animation, ludology, eschatology, low art. He is also a video essayist of inconsistent quality.
Joe can speak six languages, all of them poorly.