The Visual Toolkit for Fantasy: Assets and Worldbuilding Strategies in Video Game Trailers

Sammanfattning

This thesis explores the visual and cultural representation of worldbuilding in fantasy genre video game trailers. The focus is to find out to what extent video game trailers in the fantasy genre utilise visual tropes and cultural representations to establish an identity as fantasy video games. It is well established that game developers look for inspiration in the real world when creating new ones. However, this thesis prioritises the intertextual relationship between video games which is highlighted through a comparative analysis approach in addition to a semiotic reading of the game worlds as seen in the video game trailers. The empirical material is drawn from a selection of ten video game trailers. These build the foundation of the study through the lens of visual rhetoric and social semiotics. By contextualising and comparing the visual elements of video game trailers, the most common strategies of the fantasy genre become visible. The thesis demonstrates how the medium of video game trailers reflects real cultural representations through the fantasy genre’s visual material. Furthermore, it concludes that while the visual vocabulary of the fantasy genre has remained highly stable over a 25-year period, the underlying rhetorical strategies have shifted from slower world-exposure to rapid pacing.