Playing <i>Moby-Dick</i> : Agency, Disempowerment, and Adaptation in <i>Nantucket</i>

Abstract Picaresque Games’ 2018 video game Nantucket acts as something of a spiritual successor to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Nantucket provides an Oregon Trail -like simulation of nineteenth-century American whaling with the themes and characters of Moby-Dick . In tackling the real history of American whaling and Melville’s fiction, Nantucket provides an opportunity for players to expand and explore themes of agency, choice, and disempowerment. This essay asks how the medium of video games alters, enhances, and diminishes Moby-Dick and what potential insights video games can provide in adapting classic American narratives. Nantucket is uniquely suited to exploring the themes of agency, freedom, and power present in Moby-Dick because of its nature as a video game. Both Moby-Dick and Nantucket center their narratives on a character’s inability to fully comprehend or reckon with the truth and power of what they pursue. By exploring the narrative and themes of Nantucket and how they relate to Moby-Dick , I argue that a video game can engage one of the great American narratives not only through traditional methods of text and visuals, but also by combining these traditional methods with game systems.