ABSTRACT
Based upon Bernhard Waldenfels notion of Heimwelt and Fremdwelt, the paper It’s Never About Zombies – Post-apocalyptic World-building, Interactive Storytelling, and The Walking Dead ponders on the nature and limitations of the zombie-centered narratives in video games. The exemplification covers critically acclaimed Telltale’s The Walking Dead story-driven game that not only interweaves zombie discourse with an acute reflection on the downfall of anthropocene, but also enhances the credibility of representation by setting it in a much larger, transmedial and transfictional world. This hyperserial video game is shown, thereby, both as a well-crafted trigger for transmedial expansion and a socially conscious dystopian narrative. Utilizing both procedural rhetorics and transmedial narratology, the authors analyze Telltale’s The Walking Dead in its full spectrum, i.e. neither isolated from the franchise’s transmedial heterocosm of reference, nor reduced to a narratively-impoverished adventure survival horror or a linear interactive movie. Consequently, zombies are shown here not as a mere part of the narrative’s settings, but as speechless walkers of the intermonde that help us better relate to the otherworldliness of a postapocalyptic reality as well as to the otherness of ourselves.
