Zombies in Western Culture

"Why has the zombie become such a pervasive figure in twenty-first-century popular culture? John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic seek to answer this question by arguing that particular aspects of the zombie, common to a variety of media forms, reflect a crisis in modern Western culture. The authors examine the essential features of the zombie, including mindlessness, ugliness and homelessness, and argue that these reflect the outlook of the contemporary West and its attendant zeitgeists of anxiety, alienation, disconnection and disenfranchisement. They trace the relationship between zombies and the theme of secular apocalypse, demonstrating that the zombie draws its power from being a perversion of the Christian mythos of death and resurrection. Symbolic of a lost Christian worldview, the zombie represents a world that can no longer explain itself, nor provide us with instructions for how to live within it. The concept of 'domicide' or the destruction of home is developed to describe the modern crisis of meaning that the zombie both represents and reflects. This is illustrated using case studies including the relocation of the Anishinaabe of the Grassy Narrows First Nation, and the upheaval of population displacement in the Hellenistic period. Finally, the authors invoke and reformulate symbols of the four horseman of the apocalypse as rhetorical analogues to frame those aspects of contemporary collapse that elucidate the horror of the zombie. Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis is required reading for anyone interested in the phenomenon of zombies in contemporary culture. It will also be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience including students and scholars of culture studies, semiotics, philosophy, religious studies, eschatology, anthropology, Jungian studies, and sociology.

Exploding Empire: Post/Apocalyptic Representations 1979- 2016.

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2017

Make-Believe in Gameful and Playful Design

Gameful and playful design aspire to make existing activities and systems more engaging by infusing them with the engaging qualities of games and toys. One such quality is make-believe, the constitution of fictional “as ifs”. While frequently evoked, actual work on make-believe in gameful and playful design has remained quite scarce and scattered. This chapter therefore draws on neighbouring fields to break out five major design aspects of make-believe: theming; storification; scripting, ruling, and framing; role-play; and their integration in unified experiences. For each, the chapter presents explanatory theories; psychological and behavioural effects; design elements and strategies used to evoke said effects; and existing empirical studies. The chapter closes in summarizing how and why playful make-believe design differs from current gamification in form (often artistic one-offs) and technology (often audio); and what limitations future research should try to overcome

American Cities in Post- Apocalyptic Science Fiction

Visions of the American city in post-apocalyptic ruin permeate literary and popular fiction, across print, visual, audio and digital media. American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction explores the prevalence of these representations in American culture, drawing from a wide range of primary and critical works from the early-twentieth century to today. Beginning with science fiction in literary magazines, before taking in radio dramas, film, video games and expansive transmedia franchises, Robert Yeates argues that post-apocalyptic representations of the American city are uniquely suited for explorations of contemporary urban issues. Examining how the post-apocalyptic American city has been repeatedly adapted and repurposed to new and developing media over the last century, this book reveals that the content and form of such texts work together to create vivid and immersive fictional spaces in ways that would otherwise not be possible. Chapters present media-specific analyses of these texts, situating them within their historical contexts and the broader history of representations of urban ruins in American fiction. Original in its scope and cross-media approach, American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction both illuminates little-studied texts and provides provocative new readings of familiar works such as Blade Runner and The Walking Dead, placing them within the larger historical context of imaginings of the American city in ruins

American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction

Visions of the American city in post-apocalyptic ruin permeate literary and popular fiction, across print, visual, audio and digital media. American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction explores the prevalence of these representations in American culture, drawing from a wide range of primary and critical works from the early-twentieth century to today. Beginning with science fiction in literary magazines, before taking in radio dramas, film, video games and expansive transmedia franchises, Robert Yeates argues that post-apocalyptic representations of the American city are uniquely suited for explorations of contemporary urban issues. Examining how the post-apocalyptic American city has been repeatedly adapted and repurposed to new and developing media over the last century, this book reveals that the content and form of such texts work together to create vivid and immersive fictional spaces in ways that would otherwise not be possible. Chapters present media-specific analyses of these texts, situating them within their historical contexts and the broader history of representations of urban ruins in American fiction. Original in its scope and cross-media approach, American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction both illuminates little-studied texts and provides provocative new readings of familiar works such as Blade Runner and The Walking Dead, placing them within the larger historical context of imaginings of the American city in ruins

SEEING BEYOND PLAY: THE IMMERSIVE WITNESS IN VIDEO GAMES

Ian Bogost\u27s 2011 book How to Do Things with Video Games seeks to reveal a small portion of the many uses of video games and how together they make the medium broader, richer, and more relevant (p. 7). I aspire to join Bogost\u27s conversation by offering another use for video games--the video game as a site of immersive witnessing. To showcase how witnessing can be meaningfully utilized in video games, I present case studies of two vastly disparate games: commercial entertainment game Telltale\u27s The Walking Dead and not-for-profit game Half the Sky Movement: The Game. My method of analysis traces rhetorical and design forms (including narrative, duration, immersion, choice, and reflection) that contribute to my conception of an immersive witnessing experience. Achieved through games\u27 immersive and agentic properties, witnessing through games involves different emotional and thought processes than other media. This model not only potentially appeals to new audiences but also engages those audiences in a distinctly different way from media of the past

The Post-Apocalyptic Turn: a Study of Contemporary Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Narrative

Few periods have witnessed so strong a cultural fixation on apocalyptic calamity as the present. From fictions and comic books to Hollywood films, television shows, and video games, the end of the world is ubiquitous in the form of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives. Imagining world-changing catastrophes, contemporary apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives force us to face urgent socio-political questions such as danger of globalization, effect of neoliberal capitalist hegemony, ecological disasters, fragility of human civilization, and so on. J. G. Ballard\u27s final fictions, though they do not directly deal with apocalyptic events but evoke apocalyptic mood, portray the bleak landscape of post-political, post-historical, late capitalist society, where extreme boredom generates mindless violence. Unlike Ballard, Margaret Atwood\u27s satirical MaddAddam trilogy not only envisions the real possibility of apocalypse under the current neoliberal tendency but also presents a utopian desire in the form of a religious group that actively resists the hegemony of neoliberalism. James Howard Kunstler\u27s post-apocalyptic fiction focuses on a post-petroleum age, where people lead simple and quotidian lives due to the scarcity of oil. By bringing the sense of scarcity to the fore, Kunstler\u27s novel also formulates one version of realist worldview, in which the scarcity of resources inevitably calls for the strict rule of law. As an ultimate social allegory of anxiety and fear in our times, the global zombie apocalypse envisages the total destruction of civilization, examining the rising necessity of realist attitude that fundamentally negates the traditional belief of progress. Although the scope of contemporary apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives is wide and varied, they share one thing in common: the bold desire to imagine a totally different world by questioning the current order of things

The Legacy, October 29, 2013

Student Newspaper of Lindenwood Universityhttps://digitalcommons.lindenwood.edu/legacy/1109/thumbnail.jp