Felix Schröter

Today, everyone’s favorite academic publisher Routledge revealed that a new book is hitting shelves: The volume Embodied Metaphors in Film, Television, and Video Games – which is edited by my colleague and supervisor Kathrin Fahlenbrach – applies cognitive metaphor theory (CMT) to film, television, and video games in order to analyze the embodied aesthetics and meanings of those media.

The book is packed to the brim with exciting contributions by leading scholars in cognitive theory, like Charles Forceville (“Visual and Multimodal Metaphor in Film: Charting the Field”), Patrick Colm Hogan (“Metaphor in Cinematic Simulation”), and Torben Grodal (“Film, Metaphor, and Qualia Salience”). As this is definitely good company to keep when publishing one’s own ideas about metaphors and video games, I am happy to be included as co-author of the chapter “Embodied Avatars in Video Games: Audiovisual Metaphors in the Interactive Design of Player-Characters” (with Kathrin Fahlenbrach). Here, we discuss the general possibilities of video games to create interactive metaphorical displays by considering the design of player-controlled characters. We argue that audiovisual metaphors can be put to use as an analytical concept that merges narrative and ludic dimensions of characters as well as aspects of their symbolic meaning and experiential gestalt. Oh, and there’s case studies! Everybody loves case studies.*

What is more, the book aso assembles chapters by some esteemed friends and colleagues of mine, which are totally worth a read: Maike Sarah Reinerth on “Metaphors of the Mind in Film: A Cognitive-Cultural Perspective”, Sebastian Armbrust on “Coincidence and Causality: Image-Schematic Plotting Principles in Serial Television Drama”, and Sebastian Möring‘s “What is a Metaphoric Artgame? A Critical Analysis of Metaphor in the Art Game Discourse and in Artgames”.

You can buy the book over at Routledge for the, erm, reasonable price of £90,00 or save some money by asking your friendly librarian to order this book for the university library of your choice.

*In this case: Batman: Arkham City (2011) and InFamous (2009). Great games. Awesome case studies.