In this article, I investigate the video game BioShock for its political and cultural work and argue that it offers a popular platform to discuss the politically charged question of choice, both inside and outside the realm of video games. In a first section, I introduce the game’s basic plot and setting, propose a way to study how video games operate narratively, and briefly discuss the ‘political’ dimension of games in general. Afterwards, I look at how BioShock is influenced by Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism, a philosophy that emphasizes the importance of individual choice and self-interest, and I trace this influence specifically in the game’s main antagonist, Andrew Ryan, and its setting, the underwater city of Rapture. With these elements as a basis, I analyze how BioShock engages with the politics of choice, focusing on a major twist scene in the game to demonstrate how BioShock deals with the question of choice on a metatextual level. Reading this scene in the context of the game’s overall narrative, specifically of moral choices in the game that lead to different endings, I argue that the game metatextually connects the political question of choice inherent in objectivism to the narrative and the playing of the game, pointing to the ambivalences inherent in questions of choice, agency, and free will.

Die Repräsentation queerer Menschen in den Medien nimmt zu. Dennoch ist noch viel Luft nach oben, wie die Statistiken zeigen. Aber was denken queere Menschen eigentlich über ihre eigene Darstellung im Mainstream? Im Zentrum dieser Rezeptionsstudie stehen 14 junge queere Frauen – also Menschen, die sich als Frauen fühlen, und sich dem queeren Spektrum zu ordnen. Wie schaut diese Gruppe Filme und Serien? Wie erzählen sie ihre Rezeptionserfahrungen? Wie bewerten sie ihre eigene Darstellung und was wünschen sie sich von zukünftigen Darstellungen? Mit Hilfe der Narrationsanalyse von Einzelgesprächen und Gruppeninterviews im Rahmen von selbstorganisierten Filmabenden macht die Arbeit eine besondere Art des Sehens dieser mehrfach marginalisierten Gruppe aus: nämlich den queer female gaze. / The representation of queer people in the media is increasing. Nevertheless, there is still a lot of potential, as the statistics show. But what do queer people actually think about their own representation in the mainstream? At the centre of this reception study are 14 young queer women - people who feel like women, and identify with the queer spectrum. How does this group watch films and series? How do they tell their reception experiences? How do they evaluate their own representation and what do they want from future representations? With the help of narrative analyses of individual and group interviews in the context of self-organised film screenings, the work identifies a particular way of seeing this multiple marginalised group: namely the queer female gaze.

In this article, I investigate the video game BioShock for its political and cultural work and argue that it offers a popular platform to discuss the politically charged question of choice, both inside and outside the realm of video games. In a first section, I introduce the game’s basic plot and setting, propose a way to study how video games operate narratively, and briefly discuss the ‘political’ dimension of games in general. Afterwards, I look at how BioShock is influenced by Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism, a philosophy that emphasizes the importance of individual choice and self-interest, and I trace this influence specifically in the game’s main antagonist, Andrew Ryan, and its setting, the underwater city of Rapture. With these elements as a basis, I analyze how BioShock engages with the politics of choice, focusing on a major twist scene in the game to demonstrate how BioShock deals with the question of choice on a metatextual level. Reading this scene in the context of the game’s overall narrative, specifically of moral choices in the game that lead to different endings, I argue that the game metatextually connects the political question of choice inherent in objectivism to the narrative and the playing of the game, pointing to the ambivalences inherent in questions of choice, agency, and free will.

Stephan Groetzner is a contemporary German writer whose book So ist das is said to be mysterious— the novel surprises with its conciseness as well as the mix of an unusual, almost poetic form and a simple syntax. It thus opens the doors to various interpretations. The thesis deals with the question if the brief and concise language in So ist das influences the development of the narrative elements time and space. Furthermore, it canvasses the consequences its influence might have when it comes to genre attribution. The essential theories for the discussion are Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's Narrative Fiction, Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics as well as Nicole Mahne's Transmediale Erzähltheorie, with a narratological perspective on time and space. Moreover, literary-historical works like Andrew Thacker's The Imagist Poets, Yoshinobu Hakutani's Haiku and Modernist Poetics, Bertram Müller's Absurde Literatur in Rußland as well as Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus play a decisive role in the analysis. The goal of this thesis is to bring the unique style of a rather unknown contemporary writer from Germany into the context of other art forms like comics, haiku, imagism and absurdism, and to discuss what kind of outcomes the conciseness might have, regarding its influence on the narrative elements time and space as well as on the genre attribution.

The following text is an excerpt from the book Narrative Instability: Destabilizing Identities, Realities, and Textualities in Contemporary American Popular Culture, which was originally published in 2019 with Universitätsverlag Winter as part of the series American Studies – A Monograph Series. The book introduces the concept of ‘narrative instability’ in order to make visible a new trend in contemporary US popular culture, to analyze this trend’s poetics, and to scrutinize its textual politics. It identifies those texts as narratively unstable that consciously frustrate and obfuscate the process of narrative understanding and comprehension, challenging their audiences to reconstruct what happened in a text’s plot, who its characters are, which of its diegetic worlds are real, or how narrative information is communicated in the first place. Despite—or rather, exactly because of—their confusing and destabilizing tendencies, such texts have attained mainstream commercial popularity in recent years across a variety of media, most prominently in films, video games, and television series. Focusing on three clusters of instability that form around identities, realities, and textualities, the book argues that narratively unstable texts encourage their audiences to engage with the narrative constructedness of their universes, that narrative instability embodies a new facet of popular culture, that it takes place and can only be understood transmedially, and that its textual politics particularly speak to white male middle-class Americans.

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