Dialogic Tension and Meaning
Screen shot from the game traier for Fallout 3.
Tom Bissell on the Dialogical Tension in the Style of the Videogame Fallout 3
Chronologically speaking, the world this Sino-American war destroyed was of late-twenty-first-century vintage, and yet its ruins are those of the gee-whiz futurism popular during the Cold War. fallout 3's Slinky-armed sentry Protectrons, for instance, are knowing plagiarisms of Forbidden Planet's Robby the Robot, and the game's many specimens of faded prewar advertising mimic tye vascent slickness of 1950s-era graphic design. Fallout 3 bravely takes as its aesthetic fundation a future that is both six decades old and one of the least convincing ever conceptualized. The result is a fascinating past-future never-never-land weirdness that infects the game's every corner: George Jetson Beyond Thunderdome. (7)
-- Bissell, Tom. Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. New York: Pantheon, 2010.
Illumination of One Language by Means of Another
[T]he novelistic hybrid is an artistically organized system for bringing different languages into contact with one another, a system having as its goal the illumination of one language by means of another, the carving-out of a living image of another language" (361)
-- Bahktin, Mikhail. "Discourse in the Novel." The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas, 1981.
See Also:The Wizard of Oz and Dialgocial Meaning (Salman Rushdie)
