Call of Cthulhu

Nation(alism), Identity and Video Gaming

The document is a special issue of an academic journal titled Nation(alism), Identity and Video Gaming, edited by Lisa Kienzl and Kathrin Trattner and published in 2019.

• The report is a 2019 special issue of an academic journal, edited by Lisa Kienzl and Kathrin Trattner, examining how video games construct and contest national identity, cultural heritage, and ideology across multiple national and cultural contexts.
• Its central case study is Sarah Zaidan, Richard Pilbeam, and Elin Carstensdottir's analysis of From Software's 2015 action role-playing game Bloodborne, which uses Western Gothic iconography in a fictional Victorian-style city to explore Japanese concerns such as ultranationalism, xenophobia, and historical revisionism.
• The authors argue that Bloodborne deliberately sets the Gothic and the Weird, two opposing horror traditions, in tension rather than fusing them, drawing on the work of H. P. Lovecraft and China Mieville for the Weird.