Videogames’ Specific Forms of Immersion into the Past, Present, and Future: Experiencing Progress in American McGee’s Alice (2000) and Alice: Madness Returns (2011)

Abstract

books, 1 they are "neo-Victorian" only in what Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss call a "soft" or "inclusive" sense (Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss 2): in contrast with "strong" definitions, long predominant in academia, "which make self-reflexivity […] a conditio sine qua non of the neo-Victorian reference to the nineteenth century" (Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss 2), neither of these games explicitly aims at challenging our conception of the past and the present by engaging us in self-reflexive and intellectually demanding representations. Rather, American McGee's Alice and Alice: Madness Returns rely on Victorian texts and tropes to create intensely "immersive" and "affective" experiences (Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss 3), likely to attract a broad audience. Thus, for instance, the two games contain a high level of gore and violence-which constituted an appealingly rare and controversial feature in 2000, and had, by the early 2010s, become an important selling point of many commercial action games. In both cases, the marketing campaigns designed by the publishing company, Electronic Arts, emphasised the games' horrific quality, promising the audience a viscerally thrilling plunge into nightmarish worlds. On the creative side, the developing teams were led by designer American McGee, who made it clear that he chose the Alice books as source material in order to exploit their Videogames' Specific Forms of Immersion into the Past, Present, and Future: E...