Digital Western Dreaming

This chapter explores John Carroll’s metaphysical sociology through an exploration of four noted video game narratives: Bioshock, The Last of Us, Red Dead Redemption and That Dragon, Cancer. The video game analyses offered here rest on two core dimensions of Carroll’s work. This first is his Nietzschean inquiry into the modern crisis of meaning. The second is his theoretical reading of culture itself. The four case studies suggest that, as an emergent narrative medium, video games are providing a new forum for retelling key modern stories that Carroll’s sociology helps illuminate.