Broadening Horizon: Essays on Environment, Culture, Identity and Myth in the Game Franchise

Increasingly, digital games center their narratives during or immediately after the apocalypse. In 2017, Horizon Zero Dawn offered a new take on the end of the world, and Horizon is now a multi-game, multimedia franchise, with comic books, a board game and a forthcoming Netflix series.

This collection analyzes the Horizon franchise and its presentation of the apocalypse, ecology, gender, history and more. Game story and game mechanics are fundamental to each chapter, and contributors offer a close reading--or close playing--of the games from perspectives as diverse as hauntology, postcolonialism, contemporary feminism, and historiography. This first collection on the Horizon franchise argues that we now live in an Apocalyptic period in the same way previous periods were known as Romantic, Modernist or Realist Periods, and makes the case that Horizon belongs at the crest of this new Apocalyptic Period and at the center of contemporary gaming and of game studies.