Gaming (with) Affect and Trauma: An Introduction

Abstract

Tendencies in video game development are not immune to the perception of paradigm shifts or at least modulations in the contemporary mindset. One of these has been a slow but steady return of the subject to critical centre stage, no doubt prompted in part by an increasing sense of multidirectional threat, renewed ‘felt ultimacies’ and emerging posthumanity’s identity crisis from the mid-to-late 1990s onwards. During the 1990s and beyond, which saw the advent of some of the most innovative video game franchises, this helped redraw the arc of the hero’s conception, from earlier superman (or, more seldom, superwoman, such as the Tomb Raider series’ iconic Lara Croft) saving the world or at least capable of incredible feats, to a more vulnerable, humble protagonist bent on saving themselves and, increasingly, to a responsible citizen aware of their situatedness in the world trying to empathise with the endangered planet.