Using Literary Theory to Read Games: Power, Ideology, and Repression in Atlus' Growlanser: Heritage of War

This article argues that literary theory can be productively applied to video games, using Michel Foucault's and Louis Althusser's concepts of power, ideology, and repression to analyze Atlus' 2007 role-playing game Growlanser: Heritage of War. The author contends that existing game scholarship either treats games as mere examples of general concepts or focuses on ludological and mechanical features, leaving the narrative and ideological content of individual games largely unexamined. The paper positions itself as a close reading of one specific title, centered on the game's fictional institution, the Peace Maintenance Brigade (PMB).

The central claim is that Growlanser's PMB, which enforces peace through the threat of an enormous floating weapon called the Admonisher, functions simultaneously as a repressive and ideological state apparatus, and that the game's structure encourages players to accept and advance this carceral order. The analysis notes that the game's ostensibly hopeful conclusion is undercut by the persistence of standing armies and the absence of any real disarmament, leading the author to read the game's implicit message as the idea that lasting peace must be imposed by force. The argument further examines how the player's identification with PMB founders and commanders, and the sacrifice of expendable soldiers over primary characters, reinforce the institution's legitimacy.

The paper's methodology is interpretive and qualitative, relying on a detailed plot and mechanics description of the game and theoretical reading of the narrative, rather than surveys or quantitative data. Its scope is a single game, a single institution within it, and a set of theoretical texts, with the author acknowledging that the approach yields a different kind of insight than ludological analysis. The conclusion asserts that literary theory offers a distinct means of uncovering the ideas a game communicates.