Abstract
This chapter argues that performing dark tourism through alternate history games allows us to explore the violent trajectories that our almost-histories may have taken. By contrasting the Bioshock series as a foray into our fictionalized past against the Fallout series as a foray into our fictionalized future, Milligan explores where these gaming franchises find their root in the facts between. Virtual dark tourism does not have to stop at the digital representation of what has already happened, but may venture even darker into what may have been or will be. Gaming alternate timelines through dark tourism, from Bioshock’s past to Fallout’s future, involves the player in another side of the historical: the virtually historical.
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Notes
- 1.
Astrid Ensslin, Literary Gaming (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014), 2.
- 2.
Ibid., 38.
- 3.
Clint Hocking, “Ludonarrative Dissonance in BioShock,” Click Nothing, last modified October 7, 2007, http://clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2007/10/ludonarrative-d.html (accessed September 1, 2016).
- 4.
Michael S. Bowman and Phaedra C. Pezzulo, “What’s so ‘Dark’ about ‘Dark Tourism’?: Death, Tours, and Performance,” Tourist Studies 9, no. 3 (2010): 193.
- 5.
Alexander R Galloway, “Social Realism in Gaming,” Game Studies 4, no. 1 (2004), http://www.gamestudies.org/0401/galloway/ (accessed September 1, 2016).
- 6.
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1968), 255.
- 7.
Lutz Kaelber, “A Memorial as Virtual Traumascape: Darkest Tourism in 3D and Cyber-Space to the Gas Chambers of Auschwitz,” e-Review of Tourism Research 5, no. 2 (2007), http://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/research/eRTRLutzKaelber.pdf (accessed September 1, 2016), 25.
- 8.
Kaelber, “A Memorial as Virtual Traumascape,” 27.
- 9.
Bowman and Pezzulo, “What’s so ‘Dark’ about ‘Dark Tourism’?” 189.
- 10.
Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations 69 (2000): 128.
- 11.
Ibid., 129.
- 12.
Ibid., 138.
- 13.
Susannah Radstone, “Trauma Theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics,” Paragraph 30, no. 1 (2007): 20.
- 14.
Ibid., 20.
- 15.
Sarah Clift, Committing the Future to Memory: History, Experience, Trauma (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 3.
- 16.
Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (Brooklyn: Verso, 2013), 298.
- 17.
Galloway, “Social Realism in Gaming.”
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
Ibid.
- 20.
Ibid.
- 21.
Sara Mosberg Iversen, “In the Double Grip of the Game: Challenge and Fallout 3,” Game Studies 12, no. 2 (2012), http://www.gamestudies.org/1202/articles/in_the_double_grip_of_the_game (accessed September 1, 2016).
- 22.
Jerremie Clyde, Howard Hopkins, and Glenn Wilkinson, “Beyond the ‘Historical’ Simulation: Using Theories of History to Inform Scholarly Game Design,” Loading … The Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association 6, no. 9 (2012): 10.
- 23.
Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 28–29.
- 24.
J. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism (Boston: Cengage Learning EMEA, 2000).
- 25.
Bogost, Persuasive Games, 9–10.
- 26.
Clyde, Hopkins, and Wilkinson, “Beyond the ‘Historical’ Simulation,” 11.
- 27.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 4–5.
- 28.
Ibid., 4.
- 29.
Ibid., 29.
- 30.
Ibid., 31.
- 31.
Jessica Aldred and Brian Greenspan, “A Man Chooses, A Slave Obeys: BioShock and the Dystopian Logic of Convergence,” Games and Culture 6, no. 5 (2011): 482.
- 32.
Jeremy Hsu, “How Scientific Racism at the Chicago World’s Fair Shaped BioShock Infinite,” Motherboard, last modified April 19, 2013, http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/how-scientific-racism-at-the-chicagos-worlds-fair-shaped-bioshock-infinite (accessed September 1, 2016).
- 33.
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 118.
- 34.
Bowman and Pezzulo, “What’s so ‘Dark’ about ‘Dark Tourism’?” 193.
- 35.
Aldred and Greenspan, “A Man Chooses, A Slave Obeys,” 484.
- 36.
Emma Willis, Theatricality, Dark Tourism and Ethical Spectatorship: Absent Others (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 17.
- 37.
Matthew Jason Weise, “BioShock: A Critical Historical Perspective,” Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 2, no. 1 (2008): 153.
- 38.
Martin Pichlmair, “Assembling a Mosaic of the Future: The Post-Nuclear World of Fallout 3,” Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 3, no. 1 (2009): 110.
- 39.
Robert Yeates, “Video Games, New Media and the City,” Post-Apocalyptic Cities, last modified June 5, 2013, https://postapocalypticcities.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/video-games-and-the-city/ (accessed September 1, 2016).
- 40.
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin, 2003), 124.
- 41.
Freud, The Uncanny, 144.
- 42.
Pichlmair, “Assembling a Mosaic of the Future,” 110.
- 43.
Ibid., 111.
- 44.
Willis , Theatricality, Dark Tourism and Ethical Spectatorship, 13.
- 45.
Pichlmair, “Assembling a Mosaic of the Future,” 111.
- 46.
Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” 135.
- 47.
Aldred and Greenspan, “A Man Chooses, A Slave Obeys,” 487.
- 48.
Weise, “BioShock: A Critical Historical Perspective,” 154.
- 49.
Willis , Theatricality, Dark Tourism and Ethical Spectatorship, 13.
- 50.
Aldred and Greenspan, “A Man Chooses, A Slave Obeys,” 488–489.
- 51.
Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 256.
- 52.
Bowman and Pezzulo, “What’s so ‘Dark’ about ‘Dark Tourism’?” 199.
- 53.
Aldred and Greenspan, “A Man Chooses, A Slave Obeys,” 489.
- 54.
Ibid., 490.
- 55.
Trevor Owens, “The Presence of the Past in Fallout 3,” Play the Past, last modified December 13, 2010, http://www.playthepast.org/?p=459 (accessed September 1, 2016).
- 56.
Sarah Grey, “Dissonance and Dystopia: Fallout 3 and Philosophy Amidst the Ashes,” Online Proceedings for the Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, Oslo 2009, http://www.hf.uio.no/ifikk/english/research/projects/thirdplace/Conferences/proceedings/Grey%20Sarah%202009%20-%20Dissonance%20and%20Dystopia%20Fallout%203%20and%20Philosophy%20Amidst%20the%20Ashes.pdf (accessed September 1, 2016).
- 57.
Ibid.
- 58.
Ibid.
- 59.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Vintage, 1982), 139–140.
- 60.
Bowman and Pezzulo, “What’s so ‘Dark’ about ‘Dark Tourism’?” 193.
- 61.
Ryan Lizardi, “BioShock: Complex and Alternate Histories,” Game Studies 14, no. 1 (2014), http://gamestudies.org/1401/articles/lizardi (accessed September 1, 2016).
- 62.
Ibid.
- 63.
Willis , Theatricality, Dark Tourism and Ethical Spectatorship, 29.
- 64.
Bowman and Pezzulo, “What’s so ‘Dark’ about ‘Dark Tourism’?” 192.
- 65.
Marcus Schulzke, “Moral Decision Making in Fallout,” Game Studies 9, no. 2 (2009), http://gamestudies.org/0902/articles/schulzke (accessed September 1, 2016).
- 66.
Hocking, “Ludonarrative Dissonance in BioShock.”
- 67.
Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 257.
- 68.
Kaelber, “A Memorial as Virtual Traumascape,” 26.
- 69.
Hsu, “How Scientific Racism at the Chicago World’s Fair Shaped BioShock Infinite.”
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Milligan, C.A. (2018). Virtually Historical: Performing Dark Tourism Through Alternate History Games. In: McDaniel, K.N. (eds) Virtual Dark Tourism. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74687-6_13
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