Playing Dystopia

Video games today permeate our everyday existence. They immerse players in fascinating game-worlds and exciting experiences, often inviting them in various ways to reflect on the enacted events.
Gerald Farca explores the genre of dystopian video games and the player's aesthetic response to their nightmarish game-worlds. Players, he argues, will gradually come to see similarities between the virtual dystopia and their own 'offline' environment, thus learning to stay wary of social and political developments.
In his analysis, Farca draws from a variety of research fields, such as literary theory and game studies, combining them into a coherent theory of aesthetic response to dystopian games.

Gerald Farca, born in 1983, did his doctorate at the University of Augsburg (English Literature) and is a member of the Augsburg Cultural Ecology Research Group. In 2016, the digital culture and game studies scholar worked as a visiting researcher and lecturer at the Center for Computer Games Research of the IT University in Copenhagen.