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Nina Freeman’s 2015 videogame Cibele recounts its creator’s experience of falling in love with a fellow player of an online game. An interactive autobiography about a young woman sharing her life online, Cibele explores the terms on which new media enable users to narrate their experiences, represent themselves and forge identities. This article lo...
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... Interface games have been recognized by many developers and scholars as uniquely suited to represent the experiences of people of marginalized and oppressed identities (Gallagher, 2019a(Gallagher, , 2019bKubiński, 2021). For this reason, in the discussion of the use of interface games in the representation of the experiences of refugees, Víctor Navarro-Remesal and Beatriz Pérez Zapata (2019) replace the concept of empathy, which has been deemed problematic by several game scholars (see: Ruberg, 2020;Schrier & Farber, 2021) and instead write about compassionate play (or "games for compassion"). ...
... However, in this section, I want to discuss another game. A Normal Lost Phone (Accidental Queens, 2017) is one of the best-known interface games, which gained substantial interest and critique from both game journalists and scholars (Gallagher, 2019a;Navarro-Remesal & Zapata, 2019;Kubiński, 2021). While, admittedly, selfieuse in the game is very limited, it arguably causes one of the more controversial and therefore interesting examples of the use of the dialectical approach of the selfie. ...
This paper discusses the use of selfies in narrative-driven interface games, that is games that place the narrative within fictionalized interfaces resembling those of computers or smartphones, as methods of creating intimacy between the characters and the player, while simultaneously maintaining the player’s separateness as a witness of personal stories, rather than their active actor. The article analyses how inter-character and player–character intimacy and emotional distance can be negotiated through the implementation of selfies into the narrative within interface games. The inherent intimacy of such games, which often tell personal stories of people of marginalized identities, is juxtaposed with the constrictions on the player’s agency—both in the overall gameplay and in their inability to take the selfies themselves. Three games are discussed according to three frameworks used to discuss selfies as noted by Gabriel Faimau (2020): a dramaturgic lens (the selfie as self-presentation), a sociosemiotic approach (the selfie as an art of communication), and a dialectical framework (selfie as a social critique).
... Given the extent to which orthodox humanism and classical autobiography alike are underpinned by cisheteropatriarchal values and assumptions (Braidotti, 2019: 36;Smith and Watson, 2001: 114-115), it is perhaps no surprise that queer, trans and feminist designers have been at the forefront of demonstrating how videogames can challenge 'traditional notions of autobiography' (Ruberg, 2020: 172-173). From miniature roleplaying games and confessional 'desktop simulators' to experimental 'walking simulators', designers like Mattie Brice, Nina Freeman and Tabitha Nikolai have used a range of forms to articulate personal perspectives on gender, sex, identity and subjectivity, vividly portraying modes of experience that have gone underrepresented within (where they have not been actively erased from) the biographical archive (Gallagher, 2017(Gallagher, , 2019(Gallagher, , 2020. ...
For many commentators autobiographical videogames represent a step towards a more human vision of digital play, promising to transform a medium still widely associated with mindless and dehumanising virtual violence into a vector for self-expression, empathy and understanding. Viewed through the lens of life-writing theory, however, the situation looks somewhat different. As scholar in this fieldhave shown, works of auto/biography and life-writing have been instrumental in propagating ideas about agency, politics and the human that remain both pervasive and pernicious. Their work suggests that if we are to talk about ‘humanising’ videogames we must first address how understandings of the human are constituted and who they have historically excluded. Here developments in life-writing theory align with recent scholarship on how videogames undercut the liberal humanist conception of the autonomous agential subject by implicating players in complex assemblages of human and non-human actors. This work holds out another way of reading the encounter between gaming and auto/biography: as a catalyst for new forms of posthumanist life-writing, in which the autobiographical mode co-exists with what this article dubs the ludobiographical mode. If games are autobiographical to the extent that they involve creators giving an account of episodes from their own life, they are ludobiographical to the extent that they foreground the challenges videogames pose to humanism’s vision of autonomous individuals in possession of their own bodies, stories and identities. This idea is elaborated through an analysis of That Dragon, Cancer ( Numinous Games, 2016 ). Created by Ryan and Amy Green, the game documents the death of their developmentally disabled son Joel and their consequent crisis of faith. Controversial and widely discussed, it constitutes a rich case study in how autobiographical videogames raise irreducibly political questions about agency, identity and the (post)human.
