Throguel Online: videogame, literature, community, and precarious life in a Chilean intermedial novel of the digital age

Abstract

This article proposes an approach to the novel Throguel Online (2020), by Chilean writer Nicolás Meneses, from an intermedial perspective. We will analyze the book´s place between literature, videogame, and internet, considering various elements in the mixture of real and virtual layers it is performing, and which is turning it into a symptomatic and exemplary work for the digital and cybercapitalist era. On the one hand, the novel displays, on an aesthetic, material y thematic level, different textualities and configurations of videogames that invade and transform the materialities and languages of the text. On the other hand, it shows both the difficulties of precarious life in Latin America (Chile), and the possibilities of creating new virtual communities through digital networks.