Pandemic Narratives. With a keynote by Dr. Markus Reitzenstein

The AG Game Studies invites all students, PhD-students and post-docs to a keynote on a subject of interdisciplinary relevance. Under the title of ''Pandemic Narratives'', we want to elaborate on the many representations of pandemics in literature and digital games on the interface of traditional narratology and the ludonarratological approach of game studies. The evening will start with Markus Reitzenstein's (JLU, Department of German Literature) keynote on the topic of ''Contagious narration, viral culture: Epidemics as Metaphor'' (German), which aims to give us an introduction to metaphorical modes of narration and pandemic fictions. Subsequently, we will try to apply the concepts and theories touched by the keynote to an array of well known video games with a thematic focus on illness and pandemics, such as Plague Inc.: Evolved (2012), The Last of Us (2013), Vampyr (2018) or A Plague Tale: Innocence (2019), and try to analyse the way in which the dynamics of the spreading disease are represented.