Chthonic Poetics: Project Introduction
Download project poster or project handout.
My work examines chthonic spaces to identify the poetics of underworld and understand how they function, placing special focus on spatial construction of meaning, narrative, liminality, and embodiment. Chthonic poetics has applications for other media, although I focus primarily on video games and digital environments.
Underworlds exist as "real" but imaginary places, whose landscapes, denizens and conventions are created and sustained through community consensus and history as well as invention by individuals. As spiritual spaces, they stand in contrast to the material world, but connect to it through interfaces, including the biological (such as shamen, or practitioners in ecstatic states) and the topographic (through an explicit relationship with caves, for instance). Underworlds are virtual environments that predate digital technology.
The concept of "underworld" runs through many cultures. These mythic places often share several key characteristics, despite their varied and separate traditions: a distinct spatial geography, fostering narratives of embodied journey and challenge, that is bound by logic and rules peculiar to that place. From these characteristics we can derive a poetics of underworld.
Video games exhibit significant underworld themes, values and references in their narratives, worlds, and representation. These chthonic elements have appeared in games across genres, settings, platforms, and target audiences over the course of video game history. I argue that the remarkable prevalence reflects a formal relationship between the underworld and video games; specific elements in mythic underworlds comprise a chthonic poetics that resonates with video game worlds and affordances. Video games uniquely support the spatial, thematic, and narrative elements that characterize underworlds and the philosophical questions they engage.
Embodiment binds these elements together; they are unintelligible without this core perspective. The body sits at the axis of experience and interpretation in mythic underworlds like the one described by Dante in the Divine Comedy - and in game worlds like the one in World of Warcraft. It provides the medium through which we can experience these simulations as worlds rather than mere information structures.
- Katie Fletcher
Thesis Committee
Dr. Michael Nitsche, Chair
LCC, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Celia Pearce
LCC, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Eugene Thacker
LCC, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Hugh Crawford
LCC, Georgia Institute of Technology
Associated Research Groups
EGL - Experimental Game Lab
LCC, Georgia Institute of Technology
DWIG - Digital World and Image Group
Dr. Michael Nitsche, Director
LCC, Georgia Institute of Technology
EGG - Emergent Game Group
Dr. Celia Pearce, Director
LCC, Georgia Institute of Technology
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