Lost Worlds of Andromeda. Mass Effect: Andromeda and the Victorian adventure novel for boys

• Authors: Tomasz Z. Majkowski , Magdalena Kozyra
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The paper offers a reading of "Mass Effect: Andromeda" (BioWare 2017) vis-à-vis lost world romance (also dubbed “lost race romance”, or “imperial romance”), a late-Victorian area novelistic genre originating from H. Rider Haggard's "King Solomon's Mines" and serving as a major tool for British Empire propaganda - and as a source of the early science-fiction conventions. We claim the narrative failure of the ill-received game stems from its adherence to the rigid principles and forceful themes of the genre and the colonial and imperial imaginary informing it. Our analysis aims at highlighting the way 19th Century novelistic convention can be remediated as contemporary digital games, and to expose the link between imperial imaginary and the way open-world digital games are structured, on both narrative and gameplay levels - even when they do not directly refer to the historical colonial legacy.

Keywords

EN

imperialism; science fiction; colonialism; game studies; digital games; victorian novel; Mass Effect

• Publisher: AGH University of Science and Technology
• Journal: Studia Humanistyczne AGH
• Year: 2021
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 23-40

Dates

published

2021-03-07

received

2021-01-07

revised

2021-03-07

accepted

2021-03-07

Contributors

author

Tomasz Z. Majkowski

• Wydział Polonistyki, Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Polska

author

Magdalena Kozyra

• Wydział Polonistyki, Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Polska

Identifiers

DOI

10.7494/human.2021.20.2.23