Cinematic Videogame Adaptation : An Ecoqueer Perspective

Offers the first comprehensive study of the first three decades of cinematic videogame adaptation.

Popular media products can be used to think about nature, global heating, sexuality and gender identity. Filmic Videogame Adaptation: An Ecoqueer Perspective condenses these topics into ecology and queerness and asks: what happens to ecology and queerness when a videogame becomes a film? The answer is given through close reading of five cinematic videogame adaptations ranging from films by trash provocateur Uwe Boll to the artistically ambitious The Last of Us streaming series. The close readings examine how adaptations can suppress ecology and queerness (a process it calls straightening) and also highlight and strengthen the themes (a process it calls ecoqueering). This book offers new ways of thinking about both the complex connections between ecology and queerness and those between videogames and cinema, presenting new conceptual tools (the gameplay gap, genre-specific erotics of gameplay) for close reading of cinematic videogame adaptation.