April Bayer. “Seeking New Horizons: Animal Crossing and Digital Community Formation in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic”
Following Nintendo’s release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch in late March 2020 at the global onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the game’s popularity skyrocketed, and it became a cultural phenomenon. This paper explores how elements of gameplay created an environment of digital community formation, utopian escapism, and narrative control that functioned as an ideal coping mechanism in response to the shared trauma of a global crisis. Utilizing Anderson’s (2018) concept of extraludic narratives as applied to game narrative theory and McPhillips’ (2017) psychoanalytic model of collective responses to cultural trauma, this paper examines how the game’s open world concept and narrative structure contributed to a comforting illusion of control in what was, for many, a time of perceived helplessness. Furthermore, it explores the ways in which various elements of gameplay, including the music, dialogue, pacing, characters, graphics, and virtual currency created a utopian environment ideal for the formation of communal narrative and nonnarrative experiences through digital communities on social, economic, and artistic levels, both within the game and across social media platforms, promoting communication and connection in a time of isolation. As such, this paper argues that the unique intersection of Animal Crossing: New Horizons and the mass trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrate that video games, while offering the benefit of psychological escapism, can be further utilized to facilitate local and global connections, economic activity, and artistic expression across communities.
Shamma Alkhoori. “Pandemic Postmemory: Trauma after Medical Disasters in Contemporary Fiction”
In my presentation, I analyze the psychological impact of pandemics as represented in contemporary fiction. I am particularly interested in three recent novels: Lawrence Wright’s The End of October (2020), Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), and Stewart O’Nan’s Prayer for the Dying (2009). I focus on the psychological impact of pandemics on the various characters in the novels as they experience a “new normal” in an altered psychological state. All three texts present fictional pandemics that showcase characters in distress in a transformed world. They deal with paranoia, mental instability, and psychological frailty. As more and more people die due to the pandemic, the survivors need to come to terms with issues of fear and guilt. The novels present different mechanism of coping with such a medical disaster. I am especially interested in the transformation of the mind as I examine the various ways in which the characters try to negotiate their future and the survival of humanity in these texts. I adapt Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory from its original usage in the context of the Holocaust to the context of pandemics. Arguing that “memory can be transferred to those who were not actually there to live an event” (The Generation of Postmemory, p. 3), Hirsch calls this postmemory a “consequence of traumatic recall … at a generational remove” (The Generation of Postmemory, p. 6). In my analysis, I argue that the novels present psychological challenges during a health emergency as a societal problem rather than an individual choice. I show how the post-pandemic generations in the novels experience transformative traumatic events that they might not have lived themselves.
Allen M Loomis. “The Home: Building, Dismantling, and Rebuilding during London’s Great Plague and Fire”
This paper focuses on the home of 1665 and 1666. During this time, London experienced two crippling catastrophic events: The Great Plague and the Great Fire. The plague killed about fifteen to twenty percent of the population, and the fire burned roughly a quarter of the city. These two disasters left more than 68,000 dead, and around thirteen thousand homes destroyed in less than two years.
My project explores what it would be like to sit at home with family, friends, and belongings all clustered together in the shared space of the home during these tragedies. Within this context, I explore questions concerning whether or not the home remains a safe place. Has the space altered? Has it become a sort of prison? A site of inevitable destruction? Or even a place that can kill? This paper will, directly and indirectly, interrogate these questions hoping that light can be shed upon the entwined relationship between the dweller and their home during catastrophe. To accomplish this task, I will use the Diary of Samuel Pepys to reconstruct the relationship between dweller and home during the Great Plague and Fire.
Additionally, this project brings together scholarship across three key areas: theoretical approaches on what it means to dwell and the materiality of the home (Bennett, Heidegger, Hamling, Richardson), studies regarding the Great Plague and Fire (Hines, Newman), and research on the life of Samuel Pepys (Knighton, Willes). While these areas are typically studied separately, this paper presents a novel attempt to bring them together to articulate the complexity of the home/dweller relationship across periods of building before, dismantling during, and rebuilding after catastrophe. In doing so, I will argue that Pepys builds his home and, in turn, his home builds him and that through catastrophe, this recursive relationship is most vividly uncovered.
