Chapter 1: Constructing the dystopian in digital realms

Notions of the dystopian are often used in reference to narratives containing post-apocalyptic settings and concomitant breakdowns in social, cultural and political structures. The dystopian is thus a form of socio-cultural and socio-political critique that became quite prevalent in modern and postmodern literature and is predicated on narratives of a society that has experienced some form of cataclysmic breakdown of order, social cohesion and stability. Instances of the dystopian in contemporary digital media realms – such as those in interactive video games – show a heightened interest in the built environments that these stories take place in, foregrounding their role as more salient than being dramatised backdrop settings in the narrative. Consequently, digital realms and their built environments –especially those in video games such as Dark Souls: Remastered (2018), Horizon Zero Dawn (2017) and Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) – arguably use spatial design and architectural features quite strongly to create layers of narrative meaning that are signalled via formal components of their spatial composition. This interdisciplinary study explores how spatial–architectural features visually construct and narrate digital realms characterised by dystopian attributes of human corruption, suffering and survival in video games. To understand how space and architecture are prominent means of communicating socio-cultural concerns in digital instances of the dystopian, this chapter examines characteristics of dystopian storyworlds that construct spatial–architectural features as narrative meaning-making devices such metaphors, tropes, allegories and motifs. These are devices that lead to their consideration as a narrative construct with embedded and embodied diegetic meanings.