Playing the Intercorporeal: Frankenstein’s Legacy for Games

Abstract

With many videogames falling into the generic categories of Science Fiction (SF) and Horror, you’d expect at least one or two direct adaptations of Shelley’s Frankenstein. While there are legions of vampires and zombies, the legacy of Frankenstein for games is manifest far more subtly than with other monsters. The chapter examines the debt that games owe to Shelley’s novel in terms of the way that they figure monsters, the post-human and the virtual body. I argue that games also share Frankenstein’s refusal of the inevitability of death but significantly that they rarely configure death as a source of tragedy. I show that Frankenstein’s legacy can therefore only be implicitly present in games where death is figured as a game mechanic.