Portals drömvärld : en transmedial studie av det psykologiska rummet

Sammanfattning:

The field of video game studies has through later years shown a growing interest in game's spatialfeatures, along with their narrative implications. By introducing earlier findings of spatialmanifestations of dreams and psychological content in narrative works, with regards to their medialrepresentation into this discussion, I hope to conjoin video game research (better known asludology) with a line of psychoanalytic inquiry, which hitherto seems to have been left unexploredwithin media research.

   While establishing a viewpoint through the interdisciplinary field of media research andpsychoanalysis, my intention is to broach a discussion on the possibilities of expanding itsviewpoints and theoretical frameworks unto the video game medium. In the present thesis I will forthis purpose center the discussion on the dreamlike Portal games, developed by Valve Corporation,which manages to enact a psychologically interesting narrative content largely through its spatialfeatures, as well as their game mechanics.

   The psychoanalytic approach I intend to adopt for this study will, apart from taking mediaspecifications into account, also necessarily, following Gilles Deleuzes and Félix Guattaris focus onthe historical-political situation in their critique of earlier psychoanalytic inquiry, be directedtowards a societal context while addressing the individual works. I will thus, while analyzingspatial-psychological implications of works in different media, be regarding contemporary topics ofcultural phenomena and theories on human psychology as important factors for the forms ofexpression and thematic content, which contemporary cultural artifacts may take.

   The term transmediality, which below will be discussed in appliance to psychoanalytic inquiry,refers in this thesis to the definition outlined by the literary scholar Irina Rajewsky, who situates itsemergence in an ongoing development in the field of the interconnected narratology and intermedialstudy, in which I hope to engage and contribute.