„If you want to be a butterfly, you have to be butterfly soup first“

„Coming of Age“-Erzählungen im Videospiel

Abstract

For the longest time, literature has been widely known as the primary choice for portraying the trials and tribulations of growing up. While movies, music and series swiftly join in and adapt their own media-specific version of the coming-of-age genre, video games have hardly seemed to show any interest in depicting adolescent matters. Only recently journalistic publications have started to recognise the gradual rise of coming-of-age narrations in video games, especially in indie games. This rather late and sudden development appears to be quite ironic, as the medium has been commonly regarded to be particularly close to youth culture and young people. At the same time, this trend raises several questions regarding the driving factors of this development – e.g. historical, cultural, social or technical – as well as questions regarding the emerging possibilities of telling adolescent stories in an multimedia and interactive medium. Lastly, on a grander scale, it shines a light on the metaphorical adolescence of the so-called young medium, particularly in relation to its processors.