LUDIC DISPLACEMENT OF A BIBLICAL MYTH

Text topic: THE CULTURE OF VIDEO GAMES

Text author: Јована Вујанов

The Binding of Isaac, a 2011 video game by Edmund McMillan, is a postmodern take on the biblical episode of the same name which can be characterized as a displacement, in terms of Lubomír Doležel’s Heterocosmica. It presents a radical intervention on the original narrative, one that creates a polemical anti-world transmitted through the perspective of Isaac, a boy suffering abuse from his televangelism obsessed mother. The main fabric of the game is his grotesque, gamified fantasy about encountering the delusional parent, which is filled with anxiety about his own sinfulness, with a counterweight that can be found in entities imported from popular culture, especially videogames. The game’s roguelike genre enables a procedural expression of the experience of abuse through an iterative storytelling technique, with the interplay of difference and repetition forming a cyclical narrative about the (im)possibilities of contemporary ludism to amend trauma.