En quête d’une épopée vidéoludique

Abstract

Enclosed within the Aristotelian tradition, epic was deemed incompatible with modernity, within which it has survived only as a register in other literary genres and media supports, such as adventure video games (Dionnet, 2020). However, it has been rethought by current research: comparative studies have identified its enunciative, textual and functional properties (Derive, 2002), used to define a new epic (Neiva, 2014). If a long narrative that decenters the civilizational crises of its time to enable the society that enunciates it to “think them without concept” is epic (Goyet, 2006), this article aims to question the specificities of a videogame variation of the universal and transcultural epic by determining the way in which post-apocalyptic AAA adventure video games would operate an “epic process” (Goyet, 2006) on our present.

Keywords

• epic
• video game
• apocalypse
• videogame industry
• analysis
• epic process