Fern‡ndez-Vara
Clara Fern‡ndez-Vara
telmah@mit.edu
VAMPIRES ACROSS THE MEDIA: FROM DRACULA TO CASTLEVANIA
Some affirm that videogame characters lack the depth and complexity of literature or film. However, there is certainly what we may call 'character construction' in videogames, though the guidelines are different from those of pre-existent media. I have chosen the figure of the vampire to exemplify this process, by observing its evolution from the page to the computer screen. My case study is based on the Castlevania saga, where we find that the villain in every installment is Dracula himself, the old-stock aristocratic vampire. In two of the
games (Castlevania III and Symphony of the Night) the player can control his son Alucard, the glamorous vampire. The paper starts analysing how both models of vampire were constructed in literature and how they relate to each other, with special regard to their main referents in their original novels (Dracula and The Vampire Lestat). The core of the discussion is based on how they have become videogame characters in the Castlevania series. Some would argue that videogame vampires are a shallow imitation of their models, but there is
evidence that the complexity of their character construction does not only tie in with these previous models, but actually transcends the computer screen. On the one hand, we see how the iconic image of the vampire brings a series of connotations that the player is already familiar with (e.g. drinking blood, ritual death with a stake). On the other, the superhuman powers traditionally associated with vampires become part of the gameplay, as power-ups and actions that the player can perform, thus enhancing his agency. Therefore, the player takes part
in the construction of the figure of the vampire, in a way that readers or spectators could not perform in other media, by controlling the character and wielding his powers.
Clara Fern‡ndez-Vara is a graduate student in Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, having previously taken doctoral courses in English Literature at the Universidad Aut—noma de Madrid, Spain. Her studies are characterized by interdisciplinarity, from literature to cinema, and digital technologies, in a search for mechanics of trans-media adaptations, and transformation of narrative and semiotic models across the media. Within this framework, she finds videogames particularly challenging, and bases her research on the ways in which they transform and incorporate structures and contents from traditional storytelling into videogame narrative.
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