Militarizing and Colonizing Outer Space as a Video Game. Ender’s Game and Astroculture
Militarizing and Colonizing Outer Space as a Video Game. Ender’s Game and Astroculture

Summary/Abstract: The author of the article analyzes Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, focusing her attention on the re-lationship between the key motif of the novel – gaming – and the tendency to militarize and colonizeouter space highlighted by astrocultural scholars. Card’s novel follows the astrocultural pattern of set-ting future wars in space, but introduces an important novelty: games of various kinds, including videogames, become a mediating element between the characters and the real experience of space war.The theoretical framework for the analysis is provided by the insights of astrocultural scholarssuch as Alexander Geppert, Tilmann Siebeneichner and Alice Gorman. In analyzing Ender’s Gameand, to some extent, its 2013 film adaptation, the author examines the protagonists’ relationship tospace, which is shaped by the game’s setting. It is here that military and colonial themes are mostprevalent. The first part of the paper presents the main contexts of the motif of the militarization of outerspace and its close relationship with video games. These contexts provide an important backgroundfor the analysis of the motifs of games and outer space in Ender’s Game. Selected reflections fromthe field of ludology are helpful in interpreting Card’s use of video games not only as a theme, butalso as a structural principle of his novel’s settings. In the last part of the paper, the author considersthe transformation of the militant motif taking place in the novel’s finale into a narrative focused onthe colonization of outer space, as well as the transformation of this narrative that occurred in GavinHood’s film adaptation. The goal of such an interpretation is to show the story created by OrsonScott Card as entangled in a dynamic relationship with the video game medium that was developingat the time of its creation and with the changing trends of astroculture.

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