Cowboys, Outlaws, Ghouls and Spacefarers: The American Frontier within and without the United States

This paper examines how the American Frontier, understood as an ideologically charged trope, shapes the construction of national and non-national identities in video games. Its central thesis is that games set in the historical American Far West, in post-apocalyptic Earth, and in outer space share a common logic of understanding space, power, expansion, and personal worth, inherited from frontier mythology. The author argues that this logic is repurposed across time periods and settings, so that wastelands, alien worlds, and historical landscapes all reproduce similar discourses of conquest and moral agency.

The analysis draws on a selection of games, including The Oregon Trail, the Red Dead Redemption series, Wasteland 1 and 2, Fallout 3 and New Vegas, and The Outer Worlds. These titles are read alongside critical scholarship on the Western and frontier mythology, drawing on established works in American studies, science fiction criticism, and game studies. The study is framed as ongoing research, to be completed during a three-month postdoctoral stay at the University of Utah from February to May 2020. The approach is primarily qualitative and textual, based on critical reading of the games and the secondary literature rather than on survey or statistical data.

The paper's contribution lies in tracing how specific features of the Western, such as its narratives of civilization against savagery and its valorization of individual agency, migrate into the mechanics and storytelling of digital games. It also identifies features specific to the medium, such as player-driven exploration and morality systems, that transform these inherited tropes. The resulting account positions the video game as a site where historical and ideological frontier narratives are continually revised and redeployed across past, present, and imagined futures.