Manchester University Press
17 The graveyard level
Abstract
In the form of an environment within video games, the graveyard behaves as a treacherous landscape populated by malevolent supernatural creatures. These associations originate in horror-themed arcade games in the 1980s with medieval settings featuring graveyards that more closely resemble those of eighteenth-century Europe. Such graveyards invert their typical role as a resting place by inflicting constant resurrections upon their monstrous inhabitants as well as players themselves. Notoriously difficult games such as Castlevania (1988) and Ghosts ’n Goblins (1985) place players in or near graveyards from the start, fostering a nightmarish recursion where player death results in rebirth within the arena of the dead. As Japanese game designers conflated disparate aesthetics from Western European history, they unintentionally created an enduring association between medieval imagery, modern graveyards and monstrosity, which persisted as video games grew progressively complex. This motif would resurface as intentional narratives in the Dark Souls series (2011–16) and internationally developed games such as L'Abbaye des Morts (2010), Grave Chase (2017), Graveyard Keeper (2018) and Odallus: The Dark Call (2015), all of which focus on anachronistic graveyards wherein distinctions between life and death blur. As a culmination of Japanese and English-language collaboration, Elden Ring (2022) centralises its entire narrative around the inability to die, using tombstones as a consistent visual reminder of the story's thanatological gravity. Consequently, a close assessment of graveyard imagery explicates video games’ unique capacity to develop a global postmodern expression of the Gothic, whose existence depends on anachronism and international semiosis.
Abstract
In the form of an environment within video games, the graveyard behaves as a treacherous landscape populated by malevolent supernatural creatures. These associations originate in horror-themed arcade games in the 1980s with medieval settings featuring graveyards that more closely resemble those of eighteenth-century Europe. Such graveyards invert their typical role as a resting place by inflicting constant resurrections upon their monstrous inhabitants as well as players themselves. Notoriously difficult games such as Castlevania (1988) and Ghosts ’n Goblins (1985) place players in or near graveyards from the start, fostering a nightmarish recursion where player death results in rebirth within the arena of the dead. As Japanese game designers conflated disparate aesthetics from Western European history, they unintentionally created an enduring association between medieval imagery, modern graveyards and monstrosity, which persisted as video games grew progressively complex. This motif would resurface as intentional narratives in the Dark Souls series (2011–16) and internationally developed games such as L'Abbaye des Morts (2010), Grave Chase (2017), Graveyard Keeper (2018) and Odallus: The Dark Call (2015), all of which focus on anachronistic graveyards wherein distinctions between life and death blur. As a culmination of Japanese and English-language collaboration, Elden Ring (2022) centralises its entire narrative around the inability to die, using tombstones as a consistent visual reminder of the story's thanatological gravity. Consequently, a close assessment of graveyard imagery explicates video games’ unique capacity to develop a global postmodern expression of the Gothic, whose existence depends on anachronism and international semiosis.
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Dedication v
- Contents vii
- List of figures ix
- List of contributors xi
- Acknowledgements xv
- Introduction 1
- 1 The Gothic churchyard in graveyard poetry 18
- 2 Graveyard pleasures 32
- 3 The last days of the urban burial ground 47
- 4 De-Gothicising the Victorian Gothic graveyard 61
- 5 Relics and ruins, photographs and fellowship 77
- 6 The colonial Australian Gothic and the grave 96
- 7 Weirding the Gothic graveyard 111
- 8 Graveyards in Western Gothic cinema 125
- 9 The ventriloquised corpse and the silent dead 140
- 10 Home among the headstones 155
- 11 The graveyard in neo-Edwardian fiction 169
- 12 Unstable coordinates 183
- 13 Conversations with spectres 196
- 14 Monsters of history 208
- 15 Indian burial grounds in American fiction and film 223
- 16 Adolescent existence and resistance 238
- 17 The graveyard level 252
- Coda 268
- Index 279
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Dedication v
- Contents vii
- List of figures ix
- List of contributors xi
- Acknowledgements xv
- Introduction 1
- 1 The Gothic churchyard in graveyard poetry 18
- 2 Graveyard pleasures 32
- 3 The last days of the urban burial ground 47
- 4 De-Gothicising the Victorian Gothic graveyard 61
- 5 Relics and ruins, photographs and fellowship 77
- 6 The colonial Australian Gothic and the grave 96
- 7 Weirding the Gothic graveyard 111
- 8 Graveyards in Western Gothic cinema 125
- 9 The ventriloquised corpse and the silent dead 140
- 10 Home among the headstones 155
- 11 The graveyard in neo-Edwardian fiction 169
- 12 Unstable coordinates 183
- 13 Conversations with spectres 196
- 14 Monsters of history 208
- 15 Indian burial grounds in American fiction and film 223
- 16 Adolescent existence and resistance 238
- 17 The graveyard level 252
- Coda 268
- Index 279
