This chapter ties the zombie's African spirituality to the existential crisis that the living dead often embodies in contemporary narratives. In the process, it is also a rethinking story versus game debate as well as other key issues in game studies such as time, agency, involvement and textuality in video game-narratives. Video Games and Storytelling aims to readdress this gap and to bring video games to mainstream humanities research and teaching. Despite the rapid rise in research and academic recognition, video game studies has seldom attempted to connect with older media and to locate itself within broader substantive discourses of the earlier and more established disciplines, especially those in the humanities. After weathering many controversies with regards to their cultural status, video games are now widely accepted as a new textual form that requires its own media-specific analysis. The problem is one of classification, in the first instance: 'is it a story, is it a game, or is it a machine?' Consequently, it also becomes a problem of methodology - which traditional discipline, if any, should lay claim to video game studies becoming the moot question. Most of its players and critics commend its storytelling experience however, when it comes to academic analysis, mainstream humanities research seems confused about what to do with such a phenomena. Grand Theft Auto IV saw more copies being sold than the latest superhero blockbusters or the last Harry Potter novel.
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