Hunt a Killer: The Ludic Legacy of Aporia-Epiphany Dialectics in Jack the Ripper Media

Abstract: Over the last century, the Victorian-era mystery case of Jack the Ripper has become synonymous with the gamified trope of solving a crime. This article pivots the discussion of the Ripper and his crimes away from film, literature, and television to look instead at how the infamous case has been repurposed in digital ergodic forms such as the online database Casebook: Jack the Ripper and two video games: Dance of Death: Du Lac & Fey (2019), by Salix Games, and Jack the Ripper (2015), the downloadable expansion to Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Syndicate . These examples of ergodic media make use of differing aporia-epiphany (or problem-solution) dialectics that either allow amateur sleuths to "play" the game of identifying the killer, as the online database does, or offer players a chance to stop the Ripper in a digital Victorian space, as most Ripper video games do. Ultimately, as this article argues, Ripper video games often abandon game-like exploration into the Ripper's true, historical identity to instead focus on stopping the killer, perpetuating the mythic figure of the Ripper in the process.