I am a PhD student in English at the Department of Languages at Linnaeus University, Sweden. My doctoral project, tentatively titled Environmental Melancholy and the Transmediation of Ecological Crisis Conditions in Narrative Video Games, is part of the MID-world graduate school (Multimodality and Intermediality: Humanist Research in a Digital World) and is affiliated with the Green Research Cluster at the Center for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies at Linnaeus University.
In my doctoral project, I explore the ecological agency of environmental melancholy in narrative video games. In particular, I investigate the ways in which video games have the capacity to transmediate (adopt and transform) the conditions of the ecological crisis through idiosyncratic employment of narrative strategies. In so doing, they, as I argue, evoke the stable and pervasive mood of environmental melancholy, which fosters for the player emotional and more than emotional (interpretative, evaluative, and reflective) engagement with ecocritical concerns. To more precisely account for how the mood of environmental melancholy is evoked in narrative video games, the frameworks of intermediality and postclassical (experiential) narrative studies will be employed. The corpus includes two case studies: Disco Elysium (ZA/UM, 2019) and Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer, 2020), both of which are critically acclaimed and award-winning video games.
