Representation of Traumatic Experiences in Video Games

Abstract

My thesis explores the ways in which the digital interactive platform, such as video games capture traumatic experience, how such incomprehensible experience can be transformed into understandable concepts for players and how it is constructed. A comparison of video games and films highlights how imagination works differently in these two medium. A possible inspiration for these games are films where the motif of investigation and traumatic events of the past intertwine. Despite Fran Bow and That Dragon, Cancer's different approach to the portrayal of trauma over a lost child or parents, both prove to be authentic and universal since they transform their personal devastation into the realm of collective trauma, more involving than cinema or literature.