Spooky Doorway

Oneiric Timescapes: History and Image-Affects in Benign Land and The Séance of Blake Manor

This paper examines the use of dreams as affective devices in two recent games about Irish history: Benign Land, a walking simulator spanning eras from the Neolithic to The Troubles, and The Séance of Blake Manor, a narrative game set during the Irish Celtic Revival.

• The paper argues that historical games such as Benign Land and The Séance of Blake Manor should be analyzed as representations of a process of dreaming about history, not only as representations of the past.
• Benign Land's levels, which collate material and immaterial heritage in phantasmagorical fashion from the Neolithic to The Troubles, are read as digital emulations of image-affects drawn from Bergsonian memory theory and Deleuzian readings of dreaming.
• Benign Land's non-chronological associations are interpreted as a virtual multiplicity of the past coexisting with the present, a structure the author claims challenges the categorization criteria commonly used in historical game studies.