2023 | 1

Browsing 2023 | 1 by Subject "ddc:700"

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  • Article
    The Devil as Doppelganger: Instinctual Faith and the Exhausted Rant of Evil in LAST DAYS IN THE DESERT (US 2015)
    Yergensen, Brent (2023) , S. 157-171
    LAST DAYS IN THE DESERT (Rodrigo García, US 2015) portrays the devil as Jesus’s doppelganger, demonstrating the rivalry between good and evil as the two compete over the efficacy of Jesus’s faith. With Jesus assessing himself as he responds to the devil, the film offers a self-reflexive evaluation of faith as it is challenged by skepticism. By analyzing the film using the idea of an evolutionary faith instinct, the article presents Jesus’s trust in God as empowerment that allows him to endure elements of nature and find signs of divinity. The devil’s eventual exhausted impatience and his loss of his wager with Jesus bolster the applicability of a faith instinct. Ultimately, the film is an opportunity for this rendition of Jesus to be articulated in terms of evolutionary discourse.
  • Review
  • Journal Issue
    Paradise Lost: Presentation of Nostalgic Longing in Digital Games
    (2023)
    Since Milton’s poem, the notion of “Paradise Lost” (1667) has found its way into popular culture in general and digital games specifcially. While digital games have been an arena to imagine the past since their early days, in the past decade, there has been a surge in retro-gaming as a kind of narratological, ludological, visual, and technological longing for the early days of gaming, prime examples being CUPHEAD, CELESTE or UNDERTALE. Linked to such a longing for the early days of gaming is an emergence of various remakes of old-school classics, like ODDWORLD: ABE’S EXODDUS as ODDWORLD: SOULSTORM. Yet other games explicitly and deliberately employ and reflect on the idea of a rupture in human history; that is, the loss of an earlier (potentially utopian) state one strongly longs for but is beyond reach, like HORIZON ZERO DAWN. Articles in this issue reflect on and discuss the various phenomena in digital gaming that play with and cater to an idealized, romanticized, and glorified past, a more innocent time in human history.