The 'Lamb of Comstock’: dystopia and religion in video games

In the article ‘‘The Lamb of Comstock’. Dystopia and Religion in Video Games’ I will introduce four high quality, commercially successful videogames: Bioshock, Bioshock Infinite, Dishonored and Brink. All these four games present a dystopian scenery as a background for an intelligent plot to critici...

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Détails bibliographiques
Auteur principal: Bosman, Frank 1978- (Auteur)
Type de support: Électronique Article
Langue:Anglais
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Publié: Heidelberg University Publishing 2014
Dans: Online - Heidelberg journal of religions on the internet
Année: 2014, Volume: 5, Pages: 162-182
Sujets non-standardisés:B Brink
B BioShock
B cultural theology
B Dishonored
B Dystopia
B Utopia
B Videogames
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Description
Résumé:In the article ‘‘The Lamb of Comstock’. Dystopia and Religion in Video Games’ I will introduce four high quality, commercially successful videogames: Bioshock, Bioshock Infinite, Dishonored and Brink. All these four games present a dystopian scenery as a background for an intelligent plot to criticizes distinct modern political, philosophical and economical theories and practices: respectively the ‘hyper-capitalism’ of the Russian-American philosopher Ayn Rand, the idea of religion based American Exceptionalism, idealized industrialization and rationalism, and an ecological Apocalypse. Within these four games, religion - primarily different branches of Christianity - plays an important but often implicit role in the game narrative, sometimes supporting the dystopian scenery of the game, sometimes opposing it. In this article I will give a definition of the difficult term ‘dystopia’, introduce the four dystopian video games and demonstrate the importance of religion within the four game narratives.
ISSN:1861-5813
Contient:In: Online - Heidelberg journal of religions on the internet
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.11588/rel.2014.0.12163
URN: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-rel-121632