Gaming literature: how digital games have changed literary fiction and performance

Beginning with a brief history of the video game, this dissertation explores the ways digital games structure the form and content of science fiction and immersive theater productions. Since the 1970s, media scholars have considered how previous media including literature, film, television, and theater have influenced game development. But few have asked: how have older media forms become more game-like, and what are the implications for authorship and readership? By adapting an interdisciplinary approach from game studies, media studies, and literary criticism, this work argues that “ludic” literatures rely on the user’s familiarity with games and their associated cultures as a form of intertextuality based on the implied procedures of computer-mediated experiences. In doing so, I revise critical conceptions of media-specificity and the limits of methodologies engineered for studying cultural forms. By attending to the audience’s roles as reader, spectator, and player, I also question game design that regards greater levels of user agency as always empowering. My research contributes to the fields of literary, game, media, and performance studies by asking critics to reexamine the conditions of twenty-first century cultural production and consumption with interdisciplinary approaches that can better attend to the ways in which media forms give structure and meaning to one another. As our media landscape becomes increasingly fluid, referential, and adaptive, my work demonstrates how we can account for the discursive nature of cultural texts and the messy networks of individuals, communities, and industries they interact with.