Game-Comics and Comic-Games. Against the Concept of Hybrids

The concept of hybridity in the humanities is usually a decidedly political, anti-essentialist one, highlighting (in the tradition of Bhabha 2004) the essentially hybrid nature of every individual and every culture. The notion of hybrids has, however, also found use in the characterization of cultural products that bear traits of more than one “conventionally considered distinct” media (Rajewsky 2005). Cultural products at the intersection of digital games and comic books sometimes show distinct traits of both media and have consequentially been conceptualized in the definitive work on the subject (Goodbrey 2017) as a hybrid form.
In a continuation of previous work (Backe 2012), this article critiques the idea of hybridity in this context. Both digital games and comics are most commonly defined following (even if implicitly) prototype theory, i.e. assuming not necessary and sufficient criteria for definition, but relying rather on family resemblances, making these categories unusable for conceptual hybridization, which presupposes clearly defined traits. Drawing on principles of knowledge organization and an overview of complex examples, the article posits that the intersection of digital games and comics is too incongruent to be approached as a coherent cultural phenomenon, necessitating instead a medium-specific analysis (Hayles 2004) of each instance without a priori categorization as a conceptual hybrid.