Broadening Horizon: Essays on Environment, Culture, Identity and Myth the Game Franchise in Bloomington, MN

Increasingly, digital games center their narratives during or after the apocalypse. In 2017, the action role-playing game
Horizon Zero Dawn
offered a new take on society after the end of the world.
Horizon
has since become a multimedia franchise, with a second video game released in 2022, in addition to comic books, a board game, and other adaptations in development.
This collection analyzes the
franchise and its presentation of the apocalypse, ecology, gender, history and more. Game story and game mechanics are fundamental to each essay and contributors offer a close reading—or close playing—of the games from perspectives as diverse as hauntology, postcolonialism, contemporary feminism, and historiography. This first collection on the
franchise argues that we now live in an Apocalyptic period in the same way previous periods were known as Romantic, Modernist or Realist Periods, and makes the case that
belongs at the crest of this new Apocalyptic Period and at the center of contemporary gaming and of game studies.