The Myth of Oscar Wilde in Indie Video Games

In ‘WILDE NOW: Performance, Celebrity and Intermediality’, Pierpaolo Martino (2023, 3) has recently argued that the present-day appeal of the legendary figure of Oscar Wilde lies in the relative ease with which his life and writing appear to ‘translate into non-literary media’, especially ‘cinema, music and the visual arts’. My paper sets out to shift the focus of attention towards the video game medium, which is underexplored (to say the least) in Wilde studies, and contend that the continued Western popularity of Wilde and his oeuvre in the twenty-first century is both exploited and amplified by indie video games such as ‘Brink of Consciousness: Dorian Gray Syndrome’ (MagicIndie 2012), ‘Jennifer Wilde: Unlikely Revolutionaries’ (Outsider Games 2022), ‘The Secret Life of Dorian Pink’ (AmberLimShin 2023) and ‘OscarWildeCard’ (Up Multimedia 2023). In this twenty-minute presentation, I intend to survey the diverse ways in which these modern video games contribute to Wilde’s ongoing mythmaking as they variously appropriate and repurpose his name (‘Brink of Consciousness’; ‘Dorian Pink’) and body (‘Jennifer Wilde’; ‘OscarWildeCard’), as well as his best-known literary works, most notably the novel ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ (1891). Particular attention will be paid to the metamorphoses of the Victorian author in ‘Jennifer Wilde’, where his ghost becomes a playable character, and in ‘OscarWildeCard’, a 2D queer-themed single-player deck-building turn-based card battler where his influence as a queer icon substantially contributes to the meaning-making process because it is exercised over the interrelated audiovisual, narrative and ludic layers of the video game