Edgar Allan Poe Simulators
Marco Caracciolo · 2019
dgar Allan Poe is one of the few canonical literary authors to have a signifi cant presence in video games.The list of titles inspired by Poe spans three decades of graphic adventure games, from the live-action-based Phantasmagoria (Sierra On-Line, 1995) to Dark Tales: Edgar Allan Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue (ERS G-Studio, 2009), a puzzle game for mobile platforms.This success is a sign of Poe's enduring popularity within and without the United States; it refl ects the capacity of his work to speak to a broad audience.Mark Neimeyer has explained this popularity by highlighting Poe's "ambiguous position between highbrow and lowbrow culture," which makes "him especially appealing to the general public." 1 Poe himself famously remarked that "The Raven" (1845) was intended to be a poem which would "suit at once the popular and the critical taste." 2 This chapter will approach Poe's work from a different, but complementary, angle.Rather than exploring the extent of Poe's contribution to popular culture, as other scholars have done, 3 I will consider one of the reasons for his lasting appeal and suggest that Poe's short stories, and particularly his classic horror tales, are so effective because they are-to borrow Emily Troscianko's term-"cognitively realistic."4 Troscianko introduces this concept in a book-length study of Kafka's fi ction in which she argues that Kafka's major works recreate