Fan labor, speculative fiction, and video game lore in the "Bloodborne" community

Abstract

This essay engages fans of the PlayStation 4 video game Bloodborne (FromSoftware, 2015), focusing on the ways in which fans of the game craft its abstract lore into new threads of narrative via online texts and videos, and a related controversy pertaining to the originality and authorship of those media texts that fans share as records of their lore hunts.

Keywords

• Fan community
• FromSoftware
• Lore hunt
• Paratext
• PlayStation 4
• PS4