“The Plague swept through here”:

The Negotiation of Victorian Anxieties about Contagion and Class in The Order: 1886 (2015) and Dishonored (2012)

Abstract

This article explores the depiction of contagious diseases in two neo-Victorian video games. In both Ready at Dawn’s The Order: 1886 (2015) and Arkane Studios’ Dishonored (2012), disease is used to comment on Victorian anxieties about class. The antagonist of Dishonored lets loose plague-carrying rats in the working-class districts of the capital as part of his “Poverty Eradication Plan”, which then affects the entire population. In The Order: 1886, the aristocratic player-character Grayson is tasked with ridding London of so-called Half-Breeds, creatures like werewolves or vampires, which seem to have taken over Whitechapel. At first glance, both games establish a rather clear-cut and decidedly classist distinction between ‘good/rich/healthy’ and ‘evil/poor/diseased’. Yet, in both cases, this illusion soon vanishes as the player uncovers a conspiracy of social control and engineering originating from the aristocracy. Both video games represent a metropolis in crisis and renegotiate Victorian anxieties about urban public space, and thus about poverty, contagion, and middle-class desire for spatial and ideological separation from the poor.