Hauntological Form: Where We Might Find the New in Contemporary Videogames

Abstract

This paper will examine a means by which contemporary videogames can recover a Lost Future. Central to this is expanding upon Mark Fisher’s (2022a, 2022b) and Simon Reynolds’ (2012) insights provided around hauntology in the context of popular music. Hauntology begins to provide an answer to the question surrounding the viability of the future, in that nostalgia is instead a symptom of hauntology. A byproduct of media’s increasing unwillingness to escape its past compounded by an inability to imagine a different future. This is where my concept of “Hauntological Form” is significant. It serves two core purposes, the first is to acknowledge contemporary videogames increasing dependence on past form and secondly that this can offer a solution to provide a version of newness, albeit at the cost of novelty. A distinction between newness and novelty is crucial in understanding the extent to which contemporary videogames are beholden to the past as well as what is available to provide something different enough to products that have come before.