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 project, I seek to explore the capacity of video games to induce environmental melancholy as part of the narrative experience they offer. This, in turn, has the potential to foster both emotional and more than emotional interpretative engagement with ecocritical concerns for the player. To support my analysis, I aim to employ the frameworks of postclassical narratology and intermediality to more precisely account for how video games create a narrative experience and transmediate (adopt and transform) the conditions of the ongoing ecological crisis.
At present, my corpus includes the so-called "independent" video games such as Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer, 2019) and Disco Elysium (ZA/UM, 2020). However, it will later be expanded to include high-budget video games (also known as AAA games) with a wider audience reach.
