My new comic And She Slept is available in digital and print!
Set in far north Aotearoa, Dog Christina becomes embroiled in a mystery involving a missing hotel manager and a lake mummy. Memories of her father start creeping back. Has she been here before?
scratchandjesus.com/books/and-she-slept/
![bstract
In this paper I discuss the relationship between downloadable content (DLC) and base games in producing lack and fantasy, using Shadow of the Erdtree (2024) as an example of a text that retroactively marks the base game (Elden Ring [2022]) as “lacking.” Extant research on DLCs varies as to whether they are exploitative or novel expressions of transmedia storytelling. Scholars, players, and developers, however, tend to agree that DLC “extends the life” (Payne, 2018, p. 71; Genovesi, 2018, p. 1; Tyni and Sotamaa, 2011, p. 311; Lizardi, 2012, p. 34) of a text through presenting itself as a new textual horizon. This article explores how this attempt to extend life figures diegetically and experientially in the relationship between the DLC and original text. I turn to psychoanalysis, in particular Benjamin Nicoll’s (2023) writing on videogames as generators of lack. Through this I read SotE through Julia Kristeva’s (2024) poetics of melancholia to account for how lack and desire manifest in the play experience. I find that SotE attempts to staunch the play of desire by presenting itself as a textual dead end or caesura. This suggests that videogames can draw attention to players’ drive to impossible fantasy, not to absolve them of desire, but to allow them to play with the anguish of being unable to overcome it.
Keywords: Elden Ring, Shadow of the Erdtree, DLC, psychoanalysis, Kristeva, desire, melancholia](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:zrcvr7b4h6is5y3wrxhupoc4/bafkreifuae532y7jnt7wvaxvvxzg4geumg7e4bb6ib6eqvmyiqwh3o2cp4)
