(Ü/PS) An Adventurer Like You: Video Games, Language and Literature(s)

Video games have been dismissed as trivial, childish, or nerdy and regarded as a marginal form of entertainment. Yet such dismissals are increasingly untenable. As of 2024, video games constitute one of the fastest-growing global entertainment markets, drawing not only substantial financial investment but also significant amounts of players. Far from peripheral, games now shape cultural life in ways comparable to film, television, and literature.
Despite this growing cultural weight, video games remain comparatively underexamined within academic research. This seminar seeks to redress that imbalance. Together, we will approach video games in an academic context, asking what kinds of questions literature and linguistics in particular can bring to the study of games.
Our work will be structured around two primary perspectives. First, we will approach games as texts, not only in terms of how they tell stories, but also in relation to their underlying structures and modes of interaction. Second, we will consider the broader cultural negotiations that games stage: questions of identity, gender, sexuality, memory, history, and the shaping of cultural spaces and practices.
Alongside literary and cultural approaches, we will also attend to the linguistic dimensions of video games. They generate new forms of digital discourse, draw on and reshape narrative conventions, and foster interactive communication between players and game worlds as well as among player communities. Thus, video games open up fertile ground for linguistic inquiry – inviting us to consider how language both reflects and produces meaning in digital spaces.