Call Me Corvo: Reading Kinship in Dishonored Through the Lens of Moby-Dick
First author: FaucherYear: 2024
Abstract
This chapter reads Dishonored (Arkane Studios. 2012) through the environmental ethics explored by Ishmael in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Ishmael’s kinship ethic informs a rich engagement with Dishonored, in which opportunities for the player to consider their own moral positionality, and the game’s connections between the objectification of animals and sociopolitical corruption, offer a relevant perspective on our current climate crisis and kinship failures. Dishonored’s totalitarian city setting, Dunwall, fundamentally fails at kinship with non-human animals, despite a player’s best efforts; though Ishmael’s kinship ethic is compatible with the conditions of Dishonored’s “good” ending, it cannot be fully integrated into Dunwall as it exists within the game. The persistent incompatibility of the kinship ethic developed in Moby-Dick with Dunwall’s state of affairs indicates a critique of the societal failure to recognize interdependence between humans and non-human animals. The game’s large-scale societal consequences of kinship failure have implications for our approaches to kinship today; a close textual analysis of Dishonored reveals the crisis of relationship between humans and non-human animals, particularly the need for humans to recognize kinship with non-human animals and the consequences of failing to do so. By examining the commodification of non-human animals in each text alongside game environment responses to player activity, this chapter considers the “environmental” impact of human corruption and suggests philosophical animism as a potential solution.Details
Language: EnglishCountry of affiliation: Canada
Published in: Video Games and Environmental Humanities: Playing to Save The World
Publication type: Book chapter
Source: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-67980-3_14
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