Anglica Wratislaviensia

Editorial: American Culture in Games and Game Studies

Agata Zarzycka — 2024-01-18

Last Remnants of the French Wild West: Remembering “Colorado” (1990)

Jakub Majewski — 2024-01-18

Few settings are as quintessentially American as the Wild West. In games, the myth of the American frontier is the myth of American expansion. This myth explores, sometimes with enthusiasm, at other times with a tinge of regret, the conquest of the “wilderness” with its Native inhabitants and wildlife, and its replacement by “civilization” represented by settlers and railroads. Yet, European expansion on the frontier is not exclusively an Anglo-American story. It was the French explorers, traders, and trappers that first set out westward (and southward) along the rivers from Canada and the Great Lakes. The French experience of the frontier was radically different: for them, with the limited resources of their soon-to-be-sold colonial empire, the wilderness was effectively untameable, its Native inhabitants unconquerable: it was thus a place of permanent danger, where one might, with equal probability, eke out a living, earn a fortune, or simply perish. Only once has the French West appeared in a digital game, in Silmarils’s Colorado (1990). This paper examines Colorado as an artefact of French game development in the 16-bit era, as a unique depiction of the forgotten French West, and, finally, as a 2D predecessor of today’s sprawling 3D open-world games.

Are Dwarves Protestant? American Religion and “Dungeons & Dragons”

Leonid Moyzhes — 2024-01-18

I analyze the ideology of representation of religion in the tabletop role-playing game (TRPG) Dungeons & Dragons. I approach TRPGs as a type of protostory, an interactive set of stories governed by rules which provides affordances to create different stories. Whether a specific story is relatively hard or easy to instantiate from the protostory indicates if this particular instantiation serves as a preferred, negotiated, or oppositional reading of the TRPG rules. Based on an analysis of the dimensions of religion proposed by Ninian Smart, contrasted with Harold Bloom’s idea of American religion, as well as the concept of intrinsic and extrinsic religious orientation, I discuss the similarity between the way Dungeons & Dragons simulates religion, and the traditional understanding of religion in American culture.

Consumerist Environmentalism in “The Sims 4: Eco Lifestyle”

Eleonora Imbierowicz — 2024-01-18

In 2021, the United States was the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases globally (after China, whose population was then over four times larger). The scale and urgency of the problem has been broadcasted for years, but the necessity and methods of dealing with it on a national and individual level seem to be quite obscure. Recycling is not the norm, oil and meat consumption is high, and excess spending is common. Consumption is still seen and presented as the means of satisfying most of one’s needs as well as a necessary condition for achieving a high social status. Dealing with climate change, as much as materially possible, involves dealing with the specificity of American geopolitics and culture: among other factors, its post-Protestant views on money and poverty, imperial position, and extreme individualism.

The expansion pack The Sims 4: Eco Lifestyle, produced by California-based Electronic Arts, fits into the consumerist approach to climate change popular in the United States. Eco Lifestyle introduces air pollution, recycling, living off -grid, and local politics, as well as the styles and activities related to pro-environmental attitudes. However, these activities are stripped of their material sense, as the actions depicted in the game are not what limits emissions and carbon footprint in the real world. This seems to be more a strategy than an error; and yet, it is hard not to regret a missed opportunity of creating a playable and ecologically sound Sims expansion for the lovers of the gameworld—and the world.

Turnt, Trippy, and Tipsy: Video Games, Drugs, and Allo-Ludic Play

Mike Piero — 2024-01-18

This article offers a flexible method for analyzing drug representations in video games as they map onto lived social realities outside the game with a particular focus on US cultures. While drugs have received ample attention in popular culture studies—especially in film and television studies—game studies has been slow to produce systematic analyses of these important cultural artefacts expressed through the video game medium. Drawing upon Donna Haraway’s cyborg politics and Steven Conway’s ludic framework (with the addition of allo-ludic play), this essay offers game studies scholars a flexible—perhaps even a “turnt”—taxonomy for analyzing the imbrication of virtual drugs inside the game and oppressive, discriminatory, and inequitable conditions of life in America outside the game. Through a brief analysis of stimulants, depressants, and psychedelics in Triple-A and indie games, the essay argues for the importance of studying drugs in video games to understand the complex, intersecting histories of the rise of the video game medium alongside the changeful histories of US drug policies, laws, and enforcement.

Focalization, Subjectivity, and Magic(al) Realism in “Night in the Woods”

Aleksandra Mochocka — 2024-01-18

The main aim of our analysis is to consider the use and function of focalization in Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall, 2017) and the resulting magic(al) realism subjectivity of perception and fluidity of the gameworld in the framework of post-classical narratology. Our suggestion is that the specific ludonarrative features and functions of the game and its playable protagonist, Mae Borowski, pose questions pertaining to the ontological status of the gameworld, making it an in-between, undetermined magic(al) realism space. Taking into account the conventional formulas and themes utilized in the game, it has already been discussed as an American story following the tradition of the so-called Rust Belt Gothic. This approach, albeit highly accurate, fails to exhaust the possibility that the events presented in the game, specifically in the fourth act, are only subjectively perceived by the protagonist/focalizer, Mae Borowski. In our text, we discuss the potential markers of subjectivity present in the game, with a focus on the game music and soundscape.

“A Flight from History”? Nadine Gordimer’s Congo Journey

Marek Pawlicki — 2024-01-18

The aim of this article is to shed light on Nadine Gordimer’s political convictions in the context of the decolonization processes in the Belgian Congo (later the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in the years 1960–61. The article begins with a brief overview of Gordimer’s political views. It is argued that while Gordimer’s stance in the early 1950s had been that of liberal humanism (an influence that came to her also from the reading of E. M. Forster), by the end of this decade she began to question its relevance in South Africa. As a result, she decided to redefine both her political and artistic views, trying to forge a vision that would be more attuned to her position as a white writer in postcolonial Africa. This attempt is visible in her essay “The Congo River” (1961), at whose centre lies an ambivalence: while Gordimer welcomes the political transformation in Congo with cautious optimism, she also demonstrates a tendency to de-emphasize the country’s colonial history by focusing on the natural habitat and describing it as an ahistorical space. This notion of nature is, to a large extent, a repetition of the colonial vision of the natural environment, which Gordimer unwittingly perpetuated, creating her own example of the socioecological unconscious.