Digital Dirges: Video Games, Elegy, and the Rhetoric of Loss
Organization: McFarland, Studies in Gaming series
Digital Dirges: Video Games, Elegy, and the Rhetoric of Loss
(McFarland, Studies in Gaming series)
Editors:
Marc A. Ouellette, Old Dominion University (mouellet@odu.edu)
David Metzger, Old Dominion University (dmetzger@odu.edu)
Project Overview:
Video games are more likely to have a loss than a win condition. This means that players frequently confront a form that includes recursion, redemption, and repetition through a mode of elegiac literature. Thus, my panel will explore the interactive elegy offered by video games, both as a hermeneutic and a heuristic, which will be of use to literature scholars, creative writing instructors, and game designers alike. The current collection, then, explores the formal and thematic connections between the classical tradition of elegy—the discourse of mourning, loss, and remembrance—and the interactive medium of video games. Moving beyond traditional literary contexts, this volume argues that digital play actively constructs, mediates, and performs acts of mourning, remembrance (anamnesis), and fateful discovery (anagnorisis) essential to the elegy.
Indeed, the classic arcade game, Missile Command, makes the player choose between protecting cities and defending missile bases. Its apocalyptic theme remains a common one as games have developed in terms of technologies and telling tales. Video games are, in fact, more likely to feature a loss than a win condition, meaning players frequently confront a form that includes recursion, redemption, and repetition through a distinctive mode of elegiac literature. As Classics scholar Michael Zimm (2019) argues, video games are now worthy of study based on their ability to produce compelling analogues of Greek literary forms. Indeed, in producing a literary narrative based on the reconciliation of mourning, masochism, and melancholia, video games comprise a previously unexplored area of elegiac literature.
Beyond writing the lyrics of lament and loss, the player simultaneously interacts with and witnesses the dual literary processes of apotheosis (the attribution of divine or Christlike attributes, including releasing the divine through sacrifice) and anagnorisis (the literal “unignorancing” or moment of revelation of the means of dealing with the loss). Tellingly, video games, from Bioshock Infinite to Elder Scrolls to Red Dead Redemption, Gears of War, and Spec Ops games, to name just a few influential series, have taken up the traditional form of ritualized sacrifice and mourning. The act of losing, which is central to game design, is also a hallmark of elegiac prose (Regan 2017; Vickery 2009). The American elegy is a distinctive variant because of its emphasis on the one(s) left behind (Cavitch 2007), a precise entry point for games like The Last of Us, Dear Esther, and The Binding of Isaac. In games with strong allegories, like Dark Souls and Assassin's Creed, literal and figurative resurrection allows the game to combine quick apotheosis with the extended rhetorical work of anagnorisis, yielding a hybrid literary form.
Thus, it remains to map and to theorize this emerging literary form. The peer-reviewed collection, Digital Dirges will explore the creation of the interactive elegy, both as hermeneutic and heuristic, since the player also participates in the literary process through an on-screen surrogate, adding yet another, unexplored, layer to the theorizing of an important literary form and its distinctive American literary variant. While the volume will contribute to Game Studies, it also offers a moment for the study of games to contribute to the understanding of established modes and forms. This exploration of the interactive elegy will be of use to literature scholars, creative writing instructors, and game designers alike.
Topics may include but are not limited to
- discourses of gender in contexts of loss and the performance of mourning
- what games can teach us about narratives of mourning, and loss
- games, grief, melancholia, masochism and mourning
- the contradictory pleasures of losing
- individual, communal and national loss
- games as prose, poetic or hybrid elegy
- games, loss and apotheosis
- the loss of childhood and/or innocence in games
- being the one left behind and the “redemption arc”
- resurrection and recursion
- games and the American elegy
- the elegiac mode in specific games and series
- digital writing and/or rhetoric and elegy
- psychoanalysis and elegy
- environmental design as a tombstone,
- how non-player characters (NPCs) function as mourners
- the effects of proximity to or complicity in acts of loss.
- teaching the elegy with games
We invite scholars from multiple disciplines to submit abstracts (300-500 words by 16 Oct. 2026 with completed papers due 15 March 2027. Please send abstracts and inquiries to the editors.
Marc A. Ouellette