Guest Seminar: Towards the idea of video game ethos: Maybe, or the atomic music in Fallout
- Mar 5
- 1 min read
Guest seminar by Dr. Nieves Rosendo Sánchez.
Friday, 6 March 2026
This lecture examines how this distinctive, playful, and aesthetic element of Fallout has been successfully adapted in the eponymous television series (Amazon Prime, 2024-). Through a mixed quantitative and qualitative analysis of the musical repertoire used in the series, it explores how the selection and staging of the songs preserve the playful and ironic character of the original work. The objective is to demonstrate how the music contributes to articulating what we can establish as the ethos of the Fallout Universe: a combination of dark humor, intertextuality, and social critique that permeates the different media in which it is presented within the Fallout Universe's fictional and transmedia world.
However, this successful process of adaptation leads us to a more profound reflection that constitutes the core of the second part of this lecture: ontologically speaking, the ethos can’t be only the aesthetic layer of the video game; it has to be part of its mechanics.
So, what is a video game ethos, then? How can it be designed for non-interactive media? Are some ethos so tied to the interactive nature of the medium that their transmedialization proves impossible, inevitably leading to a superficial representation of their key features? The adaptation of Fallout thus stands as an interesting case study for interrogating the limits and possibilities of video games' very identity in the age of media convergence.
About the Speaker:
Nieves Rosendo Sánchez is an Assistant Professor at the University of Granada, where she teaches and researches in the fields of transmedial narratives, adaptation studies, and digital culture, at the Department of Literary Theory.