The analysis that follows takes three approaches to the intersection of science fiction and game studies: genre theory, cultural studies and historical contextualization, and a materialism that emphasizes the ways that digital games enable players to access and imagine the historical present. This chapter explores the relationship between American science fiction and digital games - an umbrella term that will include video, computer, mobile, and transmedia games while excluding card, board, and tabletop games. Its history can be seen as a collection of moments when a clear semantic renewal of the word occurred.
Utopia, as a neologism, is an interesting case: it began its life as a lexical neologism, but over the centuries, after the process of deneologization, its meaning changed many times, and it has been adopted by authors and researchers from different fields of study, with divergent interests and conflicting aims. There are basically three kinds of neologisms: they may be new words created to name new concepts or to synthesize pre-existing ones (lexical neologisms) they may be pre-existing words used in a new cultural context (semantic neologisms) or they may be variations of other words (derivation neologisms). By revealing the changes that the shared values of a given group undergo, the study of neologisms provides us not only with a dynamic portrait of a particular society over the ages but also with a representation of that society in a given period. Neologisms correspond to the need to name what is new. It must be remembered that in 1516 the word utopia was a neologism. However, a careful consideration of the circumstances in which the word was generated can lead us to a better understanding of what More meant by the word as well as of the new meanings it has acquired since then. The study of the concept of utopia can certainly not be reduced to the history of the word coined by Thomas More in 1516 to baptize the island described in his book. It resensitises players to the beauty of the natural world, while granting them a different point of view on ecosystems and ecological issues that plague their contemporary surroundings. The experience of play-in the interaction between (eco)game, player, and world (culture)-is thus a regenerative one on an affective and subsequent aesthetic level. The players’ affective responses then culminate in the tumultuous emotion of astonishment and in the aesthetic response of the sublime. These oscillate between positive and negative ones-such as curiosity and fear, excitement and distress, startle and anger, pleasure and terror-and are outlined by the game’s structural peculiarities (its implied player) in different ways, depending on the region of the gameworld. By sending players on the journey of a hero to restore order in a polluted but majestic world, the game evokes a bewildering variety of affects in them.
As a nature parable, THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: BREATH OF THE WILD involves players in a dreamlike gameworld in which their unconscious desires for an ecological sustainable Utopia and a romantic imagery of nature are evoked, exposed to distress, and eventually saturated.
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