ABSTRACT
Over the past forty years, fairy tales have proven to be easily adaptable to the medium of video games. Riding on the wave of new media technologies, fairy-tale video games have become marketable products worthy of critical analysis in regards to their cultural, aesthetic, and ideological affordances and limitations. While video games have largely been omitted from previous studies on fairy-tale media, this chapter recognizes fairy-tale video games as new media vessels that demand critical analysis. It identifies a current rising trend of revisionist fairy-tale video games that offer a virtual space for players to explore the darker undercurrents of the fairy tale through player interactivity and culpability. Many fairy-tale video games seek to romanticize or sensationalize the fairy tale, yet fairy-tale video games can also offer a space of catharsis, exposing the transformative power and wish-fulfillment potential that the fairy tale has to offer.
