Darkness and Madness: Psychoanalytic Approach to the Video Game “Alice: Madness Returns” in The Context of Digital Culture

Abstract

One of the most important cultural products in the digital age is video games. These plays, which are fed by various literary products such as novels, stories, epics, myths, and fairy tales, show the quality of literary products in terms of their fiction. For this reason, plays, like literary texts, are products suitable for analysis with various theories and methods. Today, the necessity of examining video games has been realized, various scientific studies have been carried out in this direction, and video games have turned into an interdisciplinary subject. The video game “Alice: Madness Returns” discussed in this study is also fed by Lewis Carroll's stories “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass”. This study, it is aimed to analyze the video game named “Alice: Madness Returns” published in 2011 by the game maker named American McGee with a psychoanalytic approach. In the study, information was given about the subjects such as the fiction, heroes, gameplay, positive and negative sides of the game that was mentioned in the first place. Then, the conflicts of the heroes within themselves and with other heroes are discussed from a psychoanalytic point of view. Afterward, various narratives, symbols, symbols and spaces in the play were evaluated in a psychoanalytic context.