Introduction: The Other Caillois: The Many Masks of Game Studies

The legacy of the rich, stratified work of Roger Caillois, the multifaceted and complex French scholar and intellectual, seems to have almost solely impinged on game studies through his most popular work, Les Jeux et les Hommes. Translated in English as Man, Play and Games, this is the text which popularized Caillois’ ideas among those who do study and research on games and game cultures today, and which most often appears in publications that attempt to historicize and introduce to the study of games—perhaps on a par with Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens. The purpose of this article is to introduce the papers and general purposes of a collected edition that aims to shift the attention of game scholars toward a more nuanced and comprehensive view of Roger Caillois, beyond the textbook interpretations usually received in game studies over the last decade or so

Olive Face, Italian Voice: Constructing Super Mario as an Italian-American (1981–1996)

This study examines the development of Super Mario’s Italian-American character in the United States (1981-1996) to suggest looking at vocal typecasting and aural representation as overlooked signifiers of performed ethnicity in the arts. As a technological and cultural history of Italian face and voice, the study draws on emerging conceptualisations of aural blackface to discuss the more ambivalent place of Italianicity in the transnational space of ethnically charged signifiers. Framing Mario’s characterisation through the notions of olive face and olive voice, the study addresses the ambiguous place of visual and aural Italian-ness as Otherness as an in-between of whiteness and blackness. Approaching character development through voice acting by combining screen, stardom, celebrity, franchise, and digital games studies, the paper looks at the production and cultural history of two milestone video games from the Nintendo franchise, Super Mario Bros. (1985) and Super Mario 64 (1996), in relation to related artwork and character-licensed products, including the Super Mario Bros. film (Buena Vista Pictures 1993), and the animated/mixed live action Super Mario Bros. Super Show (DIC/Viacom 1989). The study thus approaches diachronically, through the lens of performance and comedy, the cross-media development of Mario’s olive voice through its domestication in the United States, leading to licensing processes and the establishment of Mario’s Italian-American features. Considering the ambivalent historical alignment of Italianicity with white privilege in the United States and globally, the paper frames Super Mario as an ambivalently “ethnic” construction, cautiously navigating global audiences by encapsulating commonplaces of Italian-ness, Mediterranean-ness, and Latin-ness

Transformations of Scylla and Charybdis: Encounters with Otherness and Ancient Greek Myth in Post-Classical Perspective

This is a study of contemporary uses of the myth of Scylla and Charybdis, often personified as female monstrosities or explained as a rock and whirlpool in Italy’s Strait of Reggio and Messina. Focusing on theoretical, methodological, and disciplinary issues of historical transmission, it addresses media appropriations of these signifiers of Greco-Roman traditions, as well as abject femininity, animality, and Otherness. Nineteenth-century European travellers visited the Strait in search of the landmarks of Homer’s Odyssey. The area attracted the travellers’ antiquarian appreciation of the myth-place and its relation with legends of marine dangers, a narrative that later reached broader audiences through twentieth-century international tourism and media. In parallel, Scylla and Charybdis were popularized as monstrous figures in the imaginaries of travel, horror, fantasy, and erotica. Drawing on deconstructive approaches to myth studies, the thesis analyses the Scylla and Charybdis motif in the broader context of ideas about antiquity in historiographical, psychoanalytic, and positivist perspectives. Looking at under- researched media, such as travel literature, role playing and video games, and pornographic iconography, the study shows how the monsters embodied imagined encounters with the abject, the marvellous, the other-than-self, and the other-than- now. Extending critiques of Greco-Roman history’s exceptionalism developed within reception and cultural studies, the thesis conceptualizes antiquity as a series of reciprocal impacts between the present and the past, and it discusses the pliability of the myth figures and the variety of purposes they served. Ethnographic research in the Strait, presented through an accompanying Documentary Film, demonstrates how the figures became local symbols of selectively philhellenic local histories