ABSTRACT
Rather than focusing exclusively on metareference in videogames, this chapter concludes the present volume by expanding its theoretical and analytical scope toward what is here conceptualized as the postdigital aesthetics of videogames in general and indie games in particular. To this end, the chapter begins by exploring the concept of the postdigital, heuristically distinguishing four domains of postdigital aesthetics that can be specified as the aesthetic intensification of the digital, the aesthetic transfer from the digital to the nondigital, the aesthetic intensification of the nondigital, and the aesthetic transfer from the nondigital to the digital. This is followed by an explication of what the "aesthetics" in "postdigital aesthetics" refers to, with a particular focus on those medial representations that foreground their own mediality, materiality, and aesthetic form as opposed to their representational content and thus follow the logic of hypermediacy rather than the logic of immediacy. The article then turns toward the area of videogames, and more specifically indie games, analyzing different instantiations of the aesthetic intensification of the digital and the aesthetic transfer from the nondigital to the digital in the (highly canonical) indie games Proteus (2013), Pony Island (2016), Cuphead (2017), and What Remains of Edith Finch (2017).
