Victorian Studies Meets Game Studies: Gaming Late Victorian Literature

Game developers have regularly turned to the Victorian age for inspiration. This is apparent not only in those video games for which Victorian Britain provides the historical setting, but also in a significant number of titles which appropriate and adapt Victorian literature. And yet, existing examinations of such interactive texts reveal that fruitful cross-pollinations of ideas and methods from Victorian studies and game studies are still rare. My paper, which intends to join a few other recent attempts to bridge the interdisciplinary gap between the two fields, will focus on a selection of video games adapted from literary works written by late Victorian authors such as Oscar Wilde and Rudyard Kipling, with a view to exploring the challenges posed by the analysis of such book-to-game adaptations. In addition to making the case for including the critical investigation of these and similar literary-inspired interactive texts under the remit of Victorian studies, I will call for the addition of productive hybridisations of methodological insights from literary and game criticism to the agenda of Victorianists concerned with these interactive instances of the contemporary afterlives of Victorian literary texts