critical project: Are queer identities effectively expressed through environmental storytelling in video games?

Introduction

This dissertation will examine the use of environmental storytelling to express narratives that focus on queer characters in video games. It will argue that environmental storytelling is a notably effective avenue to express narratives involving queer characters as it allows for a non-linear approach to the presentation of identity. It will also argue that the study and deconstruction of a character’s active environment is a more effective avenue to express queer identity as it allows the player to view the character from multiple perspectives. This avenue of communication can also be considered a more queered mode of communication, as it allows for an unspoken means of transference. Chapter 1 will discuss The Fullbright Company’s Gone Home, released in 2013. It will analyse the way in which the text utilises the lack of physically present characters to allow the player to instead view them through alternate means. The personalities of characters in the game are expressed through spaces they inhabit. It will also discuss the way this method allows characters to be viewed from multiple different perspectives. It will discuss the ‘archival’ of artefacts, a process in which items are collected and recorded in some form of log. I will explore how this process is used as an effective avenue for highlighting queer experiences. In the analysis I will consider the way the text is able to express concepts that would be impossible to do through conventional communicative methods, like dialogue or body language. I will do this specifically regarding the conflict that characters within the narrative feel about their queer identity, and the impact the heteronormative environments they inhabit can have on them. I find this text especially potent in regard to my argument as it uses its environment as the main means of expressing a narrative focused entirely on the development of a queer relationship between two female characters.

Chapter 2 will discuss the way in which trans developer Kitty HorrorShow’s 2016 game Anatomy uses environmental storytelling to express trans experiences, specifically the way glitches and software errors are used within the environment. I will discuss the imagery of the suburban house as a reflection of the societally conventional, heteronormative individual. I’ll focus on how the glitches present in Anatomy disrupt this imagery, and how this disruption can be read as reflective of the trans experience. I’ll also compare the gameplay structure in Anatomy to the one in Gone Home, exploring how the use of game mechanics like ‘gating’ can go against queer narratives, instead forcing players to follow a set, ‘straightened’ path. The chapter will also address the use of glitches as a tool for ‘queering’ heteronormative spaces. I think this text is especially relevant to my argument as it utilises the environment (the house you navigate) as a reflection of the self, utilising imagery of the house as a human body to express what could be read as a narrative about the trans experience.

Chapter 3 will explore the use of environmental storytelling in The Last of Us: Left Behind, an expansion released for Naughty Dog’s 2013 game The Last of Us. Specifically, it will explore the way in which the characters in the narrative use their environment to express affection for each other. I’ll call into question if an object can be considered an extension of a character through its utilisation, and if this can be considered as ‘environmental storytelling’. It will include comparisons between The Last of Us television adaptation, which features an episode that focuses on Left Behind. The goal of this comparison will be to highlight that games as a medium can provide a queerer mode of communication when focusing on the environment. I’ll also be tracking the different objects utilised by the characters throughout the expansion, and how these objects, which I will be calling ‘emotional conduits’, are used to express emotion. I felt it was important to analyse a text like The Last of Us: Left Behind as it’s narrative includes two queer characters that are actively interacting with their environment, which the previous two games did not.

Chapter 1: Gone Home

1: Environmental Storytelling

Traversable, simulated space is a cornerstone of the contemporary video game. As early as 1997, Janet Murray outlined ‘spatial’ as one of the ‘four principal properties’ of digital environments. She argued that simulated environments are characterized by “Their power to represent navigable space”. (Murray, 1997). She also contended that the distinction between games and other narrative media is the ability to freely explore simulated spaces in a non-linear fashion. Some games choose to utilise this ability to explore to express information using the digital environment, a technique that Don Carson coined as ‘Environmental Storytelling’. Using his experience designing theme park rides, he defined environmental storytelling as space that has “story element[s] infused into the physical space a guest walks or rides through”. (Carson, 2000) Environmental storytelling has a multitude of uses; it can be used to demonstrate gameplay functions, like the way sawblades found stuck in dead zombies in Half-Life 2 (2004) act as a demonstration of the zombie-killing ability of the sawblade. It can also be used to imply and foreshadow narrative elements, like a vandalised missing poster in Life is Strange (2015) implying distain for the person missing. In ‘Game Design: Environmental Storytelling’ John Mulholland outlines a distinction between environmental storytelling, level design and world building. He argues that environmental storytelling is distinguished as ‘high-level’ storytelling in the way it “requires a level of curiosity and deductive reasoning from the player to connect the dots and add richness to the overall story” (Mulholland, 2023). To understand a narrative that uses environmental storytelling techniques, the player must look past the narrative being directly presented to them and piece together a secondary one. This ‘deductive reasoning’ is the main means of narrative consumption present in all of the texts I will be discussing. I will be applying Mulholland’s taxonomy to these texts throughout this dissertation.

1.1: The house of Gone Home & the objects within it

In this chapter, I will be focusing on The Fullbright Company’s first-person exploration game Gone Home. Specifically, I’ll be analysing the way the environment and the objects within it are intertwined with the narrative in order to express a queer story. I’ll also be analysing the utilisation of an ‘archive of feeling’ within the game’s menus as a means of highlighting queer experiences. I feel this text is extremely relevant to my argument, specifically in regard to its ability to communicate a complex queer narrative while completely omitting any physically present characters. Because of this omission, the environment is the main avenue of narrative communication.

Gone Home is a first-person exploration game, released in 2013. The game falls into the ‘walking simulator’ genre which is defined by its lack of combat or strategy, instead focusing on environmental exploration. The player takes control of Katie Greenbriar, who has returned home from an overseas trip to find her family home empty. The main goal of the game is to explore the house and discover the cause of your family’s absence. The narrative is mainly focused on Katie’s younger sister, Sam, and the development of her romantic relationship with another female character, Lonnie. The narrative is expressed exclusively through various artefacts scattered throughout the house. For example, finding a disciplinary report card would inform the player that Sam is in trouble at school. When the player picks up especially narrative-relevant objects, non-diegetic audio logs spoken by Sam will play, which will have relevance to the collected object; picking up a bottle of red hair-dye triggers an audio log describing when Sam dyed Lonnie’s hair. There are no characters physically present within the house – their identities are presented to the player exclusively through their possessions. These possessions fit into what Marc Chen describes as a “rich network of interconnected schema that together, form a picture of the souls that once inhabited this old house” (Chen, 2016). It’s clear that each artefact has been meticulously weaved into this greater network, allowing information about some to be found in others. For example, the player can find a family portrait with a hand-made plaque below it in the foyer. The handiwork on the plaque looks unprofessional, something which is explained by a piece of paper found under the bed in Sam’s room; it details that the plaque is a school project that Sam received a low grade on. This network of artefacts is a clear example of Mulholland’s definition of environmental storytelling, entrusting the player to be able to make these connections. It’s an extremely effective method at building character. It highlights the inhabitant’s imprint on the house, allowing the player to deduce subtle details like which areas characters spent the most time in and which VHS tapes belong to who, based on the handwriting on the spine.

When the game begins, one of the first things the player interacts with is a note stuck to the door, written by Sam. It’s addressed to Katie and reads “Please, please don’t go digging around trying to find out where I am. I don’t want anyone to know.” To complete the game, the player must intentionally disobey Sam’s wishes, taking part in an act of intrusion upon her privacy. In turn, this intrusion allows the player to view Sam through the lens of an outsider. The player's perspective is further severed by Katie’s lack of presence within the narrative; when she was away on her trip, her family moved into the house you explore. She’s never been here before, she has no presence within the space you navigate, nor the events that unfolded there. She also rarely interjects or offers any sort of opinion on the discoveries being made (aside from a few instances). This perspective allows the player to interact with the character of Sam in an entirely unique way; they can see the way that she presents herself to multiple different people.

Psychologist Erving Goffman’s ‘Dramaturgical model of social life’ compares social interaction to theatre, suggesting that people play different ‘roles’ depending on who they’re interacting with (Goffman, 1959). The way Gone Home uses environments to construct characters allows the player to view the multiple different ‘roles’ that each character presents. For example, Letters from Sam to Lonnie allow the player to view a different ‘role’ to the one communicated in the audio logs addressed to Katie. Expressing ‘roles’ environmentally also allows for demonstration of what individuals would prefer to conceal from others. If the narrative surrounding Sam were expressed through her directly, a perspective like this would be impossible to convey.

This method of character building is especially effective when addressing Sam’s identity as a queer character. The ability to view her from multiple ‘roles’ highlights how she feels pressure to obscure or conceal the queer aspects of her identity, which is especially evident when analysing the locker found in her room. A collage depicting various female celebrities is stuck on its exterior. This could be interpreted as the identity that Sam presents to those around her as, much like a collage, it’s ‘constructed’ of what many would consider aspirational women. The interior of the locker is littered with rebellious paraphernalia; cigarettes, stolen clothes, and explicit magazines. There’s also a polaroid of her girlfriend, Lonnie, stuck to the interior of the door. It’s a quite literal use of the environment to physically express how Sam is ‘closeted’ to her family. The fact that one of the only photos of Lonnie found in the game is hidden alongside items like cigarettes is an effective utilisation of the environment to express Sam’s feelings about their relationship. She likely feels that, due to her conservative family, her true feelings must be concealed to maintain the ‘role’ that she wishes to present to them.

I’d argue that this imagery of a locked space representing queer emotional concealment is a narrative use of ‘gating’. Gating is a game design technique that prevents players from immediately progressing through the utilisation of physical ‘gates’ within the simulated space (Bycer, 2016). A similar use of gating can be seen in A Normal Lost Phone (2017), in which the player is tasked with navigating through the menus of a lost phone with the goal of uncovering what happened to its previous owner. As the player navigates the menus, they’ll encounter ‘gating’ in the form of passwords they’ll need to access certain apps. One instance of gating is a locked secret calculator app, which looks to be a normal calculator but unlocks a hidden storage area when the correct sequence of numbers is entered. It’s in this hidden storage area that the player finds that the previous owner of the phone was a closeted trans woman. Both Gone Home and A Normal Lost Phone use this ‘emotional gating’ technique to communicate queer characters need to conceal their identity from the people around them using nothing but the spaces they once inhabited. A technique like this could not be executed in any other medium but simulated, interactive space. It requires direct player interaction to be effective.

Alongside the locker, parallels from the environment to Sam’s conflicting feelings on her queer identity can be seen elsewhere; most notably in the layout of the house itself. As the player explores, they’ll gradually uncover various hidden compartments and passageways presumably installed by the previous tenant, Oscar (Sam’s great-uncle). It’s in these passageways that most artefacts referencing Sam and Lonnie’s relationship can be found. When discussing the heteronormative ideologies associated with the concept of home, Elsa Dore acknowledges that behaviour “not considered the ‘norm’ [can] be branded as ‘deviant’ behaviour. As a result, many become spatially excluded” (Dore, 2017). This spatial exclusion is what Sam and Lonnie are suffering from when they spend their time in the hidden passageways of the house. It’s clear they feel they cannot exist as themselves within the common rooms, and instead find it more comfortable to occupy these dimly lit, hidden spaces.

One of the few notable examples of their presence being environmentally visible outside of the hidden rooms is in the living room, where a pillow fort has been constructed. The fort highlights a need to ‘construct’ a new space, separate from the house, as “LGBTQ youths that lack financial independence are more likely to have their privacy encroached by sharing their space with others” (Dore, 2017). To circumvent unwanted heteronormative surveillance, a new, private space must be constructed. Despite the undesirable mise-en-scene of the hidden rooms they commonly occupy, it’s likely the only place the two feel they can express their true feelings freely.

A similar utilisation of an undesirable space being used as a reflection of queer repression can be seen in DREAMFEEL’s If Found… (2020), in which queer characters living in a small village take refuge together in an abandoned house. The divide between conventional/unconventional spaces within the house of Gone Home is a highly effective utilisation of the environment to express the discrimination and exclusion against queer individuals in society. The image of the suburban house is conventionally heteronormative; associated with the nuclear family. If the house is to be interpreted as an allegory for common society, objects like the straight-coded board game ‘Got Your Number’ found in Sam’s closet demonstrate the assumed heterosexual identity being forced onto her. The game tasks the presumed female players of ‘calling’ fictional boys on a pretend telephone. On Gone Home’s developer commentary, environment artist Kate Craig details how “[The board game] doesn’t really suit Sam’s personality, I was thinking it was probably given to her by a well-intentioned relative” (Craig, 2014). When discussing the construction of the home as a space, Dore acknowledges that “everyday use of objects subtly reminds and reaffirms that we live in a heteronormative society and consequently, home can become an isolating space where one’s sexual identity remains closeted, or in certain cases, modified” (Dore, 2017). The house of Gone Home is constructed of these hetero-affirming objects, which is what prompts Sam and Lonnie to carve out a hidden space of their own. ‘Got Your Number’ and the portrait depicting the family as a heteronormative unit alongside various other objects found throughout the house outline a clear repression and erasure of queer identity.

This repression is further reinforced later in the narrative when Sam is confronted by her parents regarding her relationship with Lonnie. The audio log ‘A Very Long Phase’ is triggered when the player inspects a disciplinary referral from Sam’s school. It describes Sam’s experience coming out and how Sam was “prepared for them to be mad, or disappointed, or start crying or something. But they were just in denial”. Instead of accepting Sam’s identity, her parents instead choose to actively deny her feelings altogether. The audio log highlights a lack of respect for Sam and her true feelings. They argue that she “just [hasn’t] met the right boy”, an attempt to convince her into conforming to the typical heterosexual ‘role’ they perceive her as; one that was constructed as a result of their homophobia. Instead of rejecting her family entirely, Sam sees her only option to be accepting this falsified role, joking that her parents should be prepared for “a very long phase”.

This same conformity prompted by a perceived ‘role’ is present in Lonnie’s character; her departure to enlist in the military looms over her relationship with Sam. The audio log ‘Ship Date’ quotes Lonnie as saying they should “Just have fun while [they] can” in reference to their relationship. In the same way that Sam is prepared to exist in her household that rejects her identity, Lonnie is prepared to enlist in a role that would do the same. On the audio log ‘Getting Lonnie’ Sam calls this into question; “she's going to join the Army and then have to... lie? About who she is? She said, ‘they don't need to know what they don't need to know.’ Like it was no big deal”. At this point in the narrative, both Sam and Lonnie feel that they must occupy their constructed ‘roles’ to continue to exist in society.

In her article “Games of Archiving Queerly: Artefact Collection and Defining Queer Romance in Gone Home and Life Is Strange”, Renee Ann Drouin argues that queer identity is effectively expressed through the ‘archival’ process the player partakes in as they play; the non-diegetic audio logs that play throughout the game are collected and archived in an in-game menu. Drouin compares Gone Home’s archive to Ann Cvetkovich’s notion of ‘an archive of feeling’, which Cvetkovich defines as a “material and immaterial” archive of “objects that might not ordinarily be considered archival” (Cvetkovich, 2003). The non-diegetic audio archives allow the player to understand the potent emotions that Sam has attached to these seemingly every-day objects regarding her queer identity. Drouin describes them as “disconnected from traditional archival expectations but are nevertheless vital for emotional resonance and understanding” (Drouin, 2018). This archive is extremely effective at furthering the player’s engagement and understanding of queer identity.

At the end of the game, the player makes their way into the attic. They discover the journal log ‘I said yes’, which explains Sam’s whereabouts. Lonnie decided to abandon the military and ask Sam to “pack up everything you can and get in your car and come find me”. Instead of accepting the homophobic structures that repress queer identities, Gone Home offers a solution; to reject these structures entirely. Both Sam and Lonnie abandon the environments they were donning falsified ‘roles’ to fit in with to be their true selves, drawing their identities out from the hidden passageways of the house into the world. To completely conclude the game, the player must discover Sam’s journal, which is made up of the non-diegetic logs the player has been hearing throughout the game. The player’s final act is discovering this book, in turn shifting the archive from existing as non-material into a physical presence within the world. Sam and Lonnie’s story no longer needs to be hidden within innocuous objects scattered around the house; the journal acts as an object of their own.

Chapter 2: The glitches in Anatomy’s walls

In this chapter I’ll be discussing Kitty Horrorshow’s horror game Anatomy (2016). Specifically, I’ll be focusing on the intentional utilisation of ‘glitches’ within the simulated space and comparing them to Jack Halberstam’s theoretical work. I’ll also analyse the reoccurring image of the house as a human body that’s seen throughout the game, and how this imagery could be read as comparable to the trans experience. I feel this text is especially relevant to my argument as it utilises the horror genre to environmentally express the horrors of queer expression in a society that repeatedly attempts to oppress it. Like Gone Home, Anatomy also completely omits any physically present characters, relying on the environment as it’s main form of narrative communication.

Justyna Janik defines glitches as being “related to procedural flow disturbances, and as resulting in minor and major system dysfunctions” (Janik, 2017). As video games are simulated worlds, glitches often occur. They’re commonly seen as annoyances; breaking the player’s immersion and sometimes halting progress. Some texts, however, choose to utilise glitches intentionally. When discussing horror-dating sim Doki Doki Literature Club (2017), Eron Rauch compares the intentional use of glitches to abstract artwork; they reveal “hidden software systems we have traditionally ignored in favor of the simulated real” (Rauch, 2018). Since their conception, the popular video game has always attempted to create a simulated space that conforms to same rules as reality, concealing the systems that construct it. Barnett Newman’s 1966 painting ‘Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue’ focuses on colour, depicting blue and yellow lines on a predominantly red canvas. It highlights the fundamental system that structures it as a painting. Games like Doki Doki Literature club utilise glitches do the same to simulated space, highlighting it’s identity as a simulation. Intentionally utilising glitches breaks the player’s immersion within the simulated world and draws forward the typically unseen. Through a queer lens, the concept of a ‘glitch’ can be interpreted as a rebellion against a text, an unexpected ‘queerness’ in an otherwise straight narrative. Jack Halberstam, in ‘Gaming, hacking and going Turbo’ reinforces this argument, stating that “Since the world as we know it was not designed for queer subjects, then queer subjects have to hack straight narratives” (Ruberg, Shaw and Halberstam, 2017). The image of a glitch represents a disruption in an otherwise ‘straightened’ simulated space. Furthermore, the glitch’s ability to ‘expose’ underlying systems allows for discussion surrounding why systems are constructed in the way they are; these same discussions can then be applied to societal structures, specifically regarding the exclusion of the queer glitch.

At first glance, trans developer Kitty HorrorShow’s Anatomy appears to be similar in premise to Gone Home. You begin in an empty, dark suburban house and are tasked with walking from room to room collecting cassette tapes, which you then listen to. Together, these tapes form a continuous monologue comparing the layout of a house to human anatomy; the stairs as the spine, the kitchen as the stomach, the bedroom as the brain. After listening to a tape, text will appear on the screen informing you where you can find the next one: “THERE IS A TAPE IN THE DINING ROOM”. The player will follow these text instructions repeatedly, walking from room to room, finding tapes. They’re eventually instructed to go to the bedroom where after collecting the tape, they’ll turn around to see that the door is missing and has been replaced with a cassette player. Playing the final cassette causes the game to crash. After this crash the player can play through the game twice more, with the layout of the house becoming gradually more distorted and glitch-infested each time. Mirrors will be clipping into the walls; tables will be phasing in and out of existence, text instructions become garbled. At the end of their third playthrough, the game will render itself unplayable, the camera laying in a fixed position on the ground indefinitely. Mulholland’s taxonomy of environmental storytelling can be applied to Anatomy’s comparison of the house to a human body; the player must use ‘deductive reasoning’ to pair each room of the space they’re navigating to what the tapes describe.

A queer reading of Anatomy is especially effective when considering the reoccurring concept of the house a reflection of the human body. If the house the player initially encounters is to be considered the heteronormative body, the glitches that occur within it as the player returns are a clear disruption of this heteronormativity. However, it’s clear when we encounter the glitch-less house that something already disrupting its heteronormative identity. Dore explains how the typical house is constructed of arranged objects that reaffirm heteronormativity; “Strategically placed photographs often depict themes of heterosexual families conveying cultural identity particularly to visitors” (Dore, 2017). The photographs on the walls in Anatomy, however, do not conform to this arrangement. They depict notably unnerving gothic imagery; one a distant manor, another a medical diagram of the human ribcage. These images are effective at assisting the creepy atmosphere of the house whilst also illustrating that there’s something quite abnormal going on. This abnormality is emphasized on further inspection of the house, revealing that there are virtually no signs of inhabitancy whatsoever. The rooms are furnished, but nothing more. There are no appliances in the kitchen, there’s no toilet paper in the bathroom. Alongside the unnerving paintings, these discrepancies highlight that the house is more of an imitation of a heteronormative space, an attempt at conforming to the societally accepted norms.

When considering the house as a body, this ‘imitation’ is reflective of the heteronormative identity a queer individual may be pressured into undertaking by society. As the glitches begin to ‘invade’, they act as a blossoming of the queerness that the heteronormative society has repressed. In ‘A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors’ Whitney Pow describes glitches as “imagery that signals to us that there is something beyond the coded boundaries of rule sets within software systems” (Pow, 2021). The glitches that begin to deconstruct the house highlight that Anatomy even as a video game is an imitation of physical space, drawing forward the underlying ‘queerness’ even further. Reading the glitches as a queer disruption of the body is an especially potent image when considering the trans experience. The glitches could be read as reflective of an individuals’ biological sex and gender identity not feeling compatible, a common symptom of gender dysphoria. Pow’s definition of a glitch is especially applicable here, as the house (as a body) could be read as the ‘coded boundaries’ of common gender ideologies, with the glitches highlighting that there is ‘something beyond’ (a trans identity). As the player returns to the house over and over again, constantly analysing and exploring its anatomy, the glitches only get worse. The architecture of the heteronormative construction begins to fall away; fleshy tendrils and vein-like branches begin encroaching into the rooms. It’s clear that the true identity underneath the construction does not fit; it’s being repressed internalised in order to maintain heteronormative expectations. Only after the anatomy of the house is called into question does this become clear, the player’s repeated return acting as a gender awakening. Anatomy is extremely effective at expressing queer identity using its environment as the possessor of that identity within the game is the environment.

Unlike Gone Home, Anatomy is a horror game. It doesn’t have an overt narrative and it doesn’t offer the player with any explanation about their identity, whereabouts, or situation; it consistently denies them of any information. In ‘Unlocked doors: the trans glitch in Kitty Horrorshow’s Anatomy’, Christine Prevas argues that “As the glitch undoes the digital architecture, the game resists reading in all its forms (…) Suspended in this space of epistemological instability, Anatomy does not try to recuperate itself. Instead, it glitches.” (Prevas, 2023). Anatomy rejects a typical narrative structure, becoming increasingly hostile towards the player each time they attempt to seek out meaning. This hostility is especially potent in the final monologue to the player, which states that "your purpose was to listen and yet (…) you have pried, you have prodded, and you have interfered.” Through a queer lens, this hostility is what Tyler Bradway describes as an ‘antinarrative.’ He states that “Antinarrativity presumes a universally antagonistic relationship between queerness and narrative: narrative always works on behalf of the normative” (Bradway, 2021). The glitches in Anatomy are the environmental embodiment of this antinarrativity; they interrupt the ‘normative’ that the player experienced on their first playthrough, actively altering the way the narrative unfolds. For example, on a second playthrough, the text instruction “THERE IS A TAPE IN THE BEDROOM” is replaced with “THERE IS A TA A A AAA A DOOrRs ARE UnNLOCKED.” This disruption is especially potent when considering the figure of the queer flaneur. The flaneur is a character archetype, popularised in 19th century French literature. They’re commonly perceived as a wanderer and observer, who “chooses the meandering path over the straight line” (Ruberg, 2019). Ruberg explores the presence of the flaneur in games in her article ‘Straight Paths Through Queer Walking Simulators’. She critiques Gone Home for its “surprisingly linear and ultimately normative” (Ruberg, 2019) expression of narrative, comparing the way the player moves through the house to a ‘rail-shooter’ as their movements are limited using gating techniques. Each playthrough will require the player to uncover the narrative in a chronological, ‘straightened’ fashion. Instead of allowing the player to indulge in flânerie, it forces them down a straight, set path. The structure of Gone Home’s gameplay conforms to a heteronormative matrix, denying the player the role of the flaneur. On the contrary, Anatomy rejects this ‘straightened’ structure entirely by opening all the doors within the house. Gone Home’s main methodology of reinforcing its rail shooter-esque systems is through doors that must be unlocked in a specific order. Players will be unable to access certain areas unless they’ve previously visited other ones and discovered the necessary key. The same gating technique is used during the player’s first playthrough of Anatomy; doors only open when the text instructions direct the player to that room. When the ‘glitch’ opens all the doors in the second playthrough, this structure is rejected. Prevas describes how “[glitches create] an opening within the rigidly structured system, an opening in which a new form of refusal or escape can be imagined” (Prevas, 2023). The opening of the doors is this ‘refusal’ of straightened navigation. Anatomy instead ‘queers’ the narrative by opening up, allowing for any means of non-chronological flânerie.

Every facet of Anatomy seems to have some form of queering applied to it. Its antinarrative elements, its flâneurial exploration and its use of the glitch render it an extremely queer-coded text. It’s an especially important text when discussing environmental storytelling and queer narratives, as it’s the environment itself that’s characterised and queer-coded. We explore the house as it’s compared to the human body, witnessing it glitch and shift as we do. It’s a potent use of environments to express a queer narrative. Prevas acknowledges the lack of typical markers of player presence in first-person games; there’s no footstep sounds, visible arms or legs or character reflections. She notes the shift of focus onto identity onto the house that this lack of player presence prompts; the “’body’ the player inhabits is being created by the house’s own architecture, rather than pre-existing it” (Prevas, 2023). The player’s perspective is merely a conduit through which they occupy the true character of Anatomy; the house itself. As the house’s environments are characterised, the player explores its internals again and again, uncovering the queerness within its walls.

Chapter 3: Emotional conduits in The Last of Us: Left Behind

In this chapter, I’ll be discussing the Left Behind (2014) expansion released for Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us (2013). Specifically, I’ll be focusing on the portions of gameplay that follow the relationship between two queer female characters, Ellie and Riley. I’ll analyse the way in which the two characters utilise the objects within the environments they navigate as ‘conduits’ to express affection for each other. I’ll analyse multiple scenes from throughout the game and determine how the use of environment contributes to effectively expressing a queer narrative. I’ll also compare the use of environment in HBO’s 2023 adaptation of The Last of Us, which features an episode that adapts the events of the Left Behind expansion. This comparison will be done in order to illustrate that interactive experiences like games as a medium are more effective at utilising environmental storytelling to express narrative information to the player.

In a 1959 issue of Caper Magazine, Dr William Neutra published ‘Cigarette Psychology’, an article discussing the different ways of holding a cigarette; specifically, what it can say about the person holding it. For example, he describes a person who holds a cigarette between their index and pinkie as “a dreamer, always off on a tangent” (Neutra, 1959). As biased as it is, I think the article is an interesting study into how a person’s environmental interaction can be indictive of their character. The same logic applied to the handling of cigarettes in Neutra’s article can be applied to any item or environment, allowing the specified part of the environment to act as a temporary extension of the character. When playing a first-person shooter, for example, the player character’s handling of weaponry would express a familiarity with firearms, or the opposite. In The Last of Us: Part 2 (2020), player character Ellie’s aiming is significantly shakier than other characters we play as, demonstrating an unfamiliarity. This information is expressed to the player using nothing but interaction with the object in the space. In this chapter, I’ll explore if environmental interaction’s ability to communicate character can be considered environmental storytelling, and how it’s utilised in queer narratives. I’d argue that Mulholland’s taxonomy would apply to the idea of ‘cigarette psychology’ as it requires the player’s intuition to connote what the environmental interaction says about the character.

The Last of Us: Left Behind is a story expansion released for Naughty Dog’s action-shooter The Last of Us. It acts as a fleshing-out of the original story, taking place both before and during the main game’s narrative. The Last of Us takes place in a post-apocalyptic United States, with zombie-like creatures known as ‘infected’ being the main threat to the player. During the majority of the main game, the player controls Joel, an able-bodied, combat experienced middle-aged man. During the DLC however, they take control of Ellie, a 14-year-old girl with little to no combat experience. To account for this, the portion of the game that takes place before the main story features no combat and instead focuses on Ellie’s relationship with another female character, Riley. This half plays similarly to a ‘walking simulator’. At the end of the expansion, Ellie and Riley share their romantic feelings for each other only to be immediately attacked by infected, leading to Riley’s death. Throughout the narrative, Riley and Ellie do not communicate their feelings for each other directly, instead utilising their environment and the objects within it as ‘emotional conduits’ to express affection. I define an ‘emotional conduit’ as an object that allows for an emotional exchange between two characters, with the object acting as the main point of emotional transference. For example, one sequence has Riley and Ellie taking photos in a photo booth, a space commonly associated with romance and intimacy. They utilise the opportunity provided by the booth to create these same feelings.

In her journal ‘Queer Objects: The Art Practice as a Tool for Shared Sensory Understanding’, Suzanne Boulet describes three art pieces she created, and how they act as what she describes as “evocative object[s]” and “conduit[s]” (Boulet, 2020). She compares the emotions evoked by her pieces to Boris Cyrulnik’s example of two characters meeting in a desert, who then begin to communicate using external objects from their environment to signify something not physically present; Cyrulnik describes the focus of this hypothetical exchange as a “missing world” (Cyrulnik, 1993). Boulet notes that “The characters may use an object accessible to them in the present moment to express one such missing world” (Boulet, 2020). I argue that the emotional conduits Ellie and Riley interact with provide a way for them to express a ‘missing world’. They’re able to utilise their environment as a way to express emotions they’re unsure how to otherwise, forging their own form of queer expression through ‘missing worlds’.

Throughout the narrative, Riley and Ellie explore a long-abandoned shopping mall. As they traverse through the space, they engage with each other through interaction with the objects they encounter. For example, when they enter a Halloween store, they both put on scary masks. Ellie chooses a wolf mask, prompting Riley to encourage her to “roar”. After Ellie does an unenthusiastic ‘roar’, Riley responds with “Ellie. Really? Fucking roar”. The player is then prompted to repeatedly press the triangle button to build up a ‘roar’. When an on-screen meter is filled, Ellie lets out an enthusiastic “Rooooaaarr!”, raising her arms in the air in the process. During this exchange, the masks are utilised by the two as an opportunity to express strong emotions. Riley’s encouragement for Ellie to have fun and express herself by roaring is done so through the inclusion of the masks in the scene, and acts as a bonding exercise for the two. The scene utilises the masks, therefore the environment, as an opportunity for two queer characters to exchange emotions with each other, expressing a queer ‘missing world’.

Throughout the sequence, a variety of different objects throughout the mall are utilised as conduits for expression. These objects vary in function and emotional purpose. One sequence has the pair competing to see who can smash the most windows on a car; the car would be the emotional conduit in this case. Another has Ellie reading jokes from a joke book; the book becoming the conduit. The emotions expressed are not exclusively romantic; they avoid reinforcing the common queer stereotype present in games that Jordyn Lukomski identifies as “present[ing] queer characters in an overtly sexual and promiscuous lens” (Lukomski, 2019). Sequences featuring objects like the car instead focus on prompting competition between the two, developing and humanising them further as characters.

All of the emotional conduits throughout the mall act as an opportunity for some form of affectionate ‘exchange’ between the characters, whether that be emotional or physical. One exchange which is more romantic takes place during a sequence inside an arcade; Ellie is upset her favourite arcade machine is broken, so Riley instructs her to close her eyes and begins describing the events of a game as Ellie hits the buttons. Neil Druckmann, creative writer and director of The Last of Us: Left Behind describes this sequence as a “really cool gift that Riley can give Ellie” (Druckmann, 2014). The arcade machine, even if dysfunctional, acts as a way for Riley and Ellie to further their emotional bond. This alternative use of the arcade machine is also an example of a form of queer ‘hacking’. The pair utilise their emotional bond to operate an otherwise unaccommodating object in a non-conventional way. This would fall into what Halberstam would define as a “Queer mode of play” as it uses concepts like engagement and conversation as a means to communicate “a queer iteration of gaming” (Halberstam, 2017, p. 188). Instead of embodying queerness through physical presence, items like the broken arcade machine instead express it through it’s function and application.

The arcade sequence requires the player to press the buttons on their controller at the same time as Ellie; this “align[s] the player with Ellie (…) you have to fill in the gaps, you play the whole thing using sound” (Druckmann, 2014). Immersing the player in the act through the use of gameplay emphasises the impact of the arcade machine as a conduit for emotion, allowing the player to also experience Riley’s “gift” to Ellie. The impact of gameplay on this scene is made more significant when comparing it to the television adaptation of The Last of Us.

Episode 7 of HBO’s The Last of Us, titled Left Behind, mainly focuses on adapting the half of the expansion that includes Ellie’s relationship with Riley. A significant number of the objects that act as emotional conduits in the game are translated to television; the joke book, the photo booth and the arcade machine are all present. There have been alterations to the presentation of these conduits however, which I would argue lessen their impact. In the scene with the arcade machine, instead of being broken, the machine is functional. Ellie and Riley then compete against each other in a round of Mortal Kombat. This recontextualization of the object shifts it from a conduit through which Riley can provide Ellie with an emotional experience she would otherwise be unable to feel to a conduit of competition, similar to the car window smashing sequence. It’s evident this change was made as an experience that Druckmann compares to a “radio drama” would be a significantly less engaging scene. The sequence in the game is able to maintain engagement and present a meaningful exchange between the two characters through its use of gameplay. The TV adaptation is also unable to express the ‘queer mode of play’ that gameplay was able to, and instead chooses to omit it entirely. I would argue that this acts as a ‘straightening’ of an originally queer narrative. A broken object that was initially used unconventionally and successfully is now repaired; fulfilling its initial, straightened, purpose.

Through a heteronormative lens, two girls going to the mall would be read as a common activity for friends spending time with each other. As society in The Last of Us has collapsed, these notions are no longer commonplace in society. Ellie and Riley were born after the infection began, and instead repurpose an activity that would typically be considered heteronormative to express feelings for each other, recontextualising the space to be their own. Like Sam and Lonnie in Gone Home, Ellie and Riley carve out the mall as their own space in society to express themselves, outside of a heteronormative lens.

The pair’s progression through the physical space of the mall mirrors the stages of a queer self-discovery. They engage with emotional conduits that provide gradually more intimate experiences, ultimately culminating in the pair sharing a kiss. They begin with the Halloween masks, which act as an emotional exchange between the two. They then move on to the car window smashing competition, which culminates with the winner being able to ask the other a question, acting as an exchange of information. Then the joke book, which is a gift from Riley to Ellie. They then enter the photo booth, a physically intimate space typically associated with relationships. Whilst in the booth, Riley asks Ellie if she “Wants to keep exploring”, a phrase that could be applied to both their queer identities and the space they’re navigating. They then move to the arcade machine, and ultimately share a kiss after a water-gun fight. These utilisations all reflect ‘cigarette psychology’ in a sense that the player is able to connote the romantic tensions between the two through their queer applications. The way in which the space they navigate and the objects they interact with reflect the gradual intensification of their emotions is an effective use of environments as a means to express a queer narrative.

In summary, The Last of Us: Left Behind is a text that’s able to effectively utilise it’s environment as a means to express and assist a queer narrative. Unlike Gone Home and Anatomy, this expression is not done exclusively through the environment, instead choosing to include physically present characters. It demonstrates that environmental methods can be an effective tool even with character presence, as Ellie and Riley repeatedly utilise their environment as their main means of queer expression. The mannerisms and way in which they handle the emotional conduits around them reflects ‘cigarette psychology’ and allows for a more abstract, queered mode of expression between the two. to express emotions, they forge their own queer mode of communication through the objects around them, utilising them as conduits to assert a ‘lost world’.

3.1: Conclusion

Each chapter of this project focuses on a particular game. All 3 of the games discussed are considered by most to fall into the ‘walking simulator’ genre, which has been identified as a “queer mode of play”. In ‘alienated serendipity and reflective failure’, queer modes of play are defined by the inclusion of: “failure, idle time, dis-empowerment, submission, vulnerability, non-closure, and subversion of the so-called chrononormativity” (Hantsbarger et al., 2022). The games I have analysed in this paper all include the majority of these mechanics; they utilise queer modes of play to express queer narratives.

Environmental storytelling is a mode of communication that’s typically wordless; the player must utilise their critical thinking skills in order to make connections and connote the intended meaning. I’d argue that fundamentally, environmental storytelling is queer in the way it subverts and utilises an otherwise innocuous element of simulated space as a ground to explore emotional connection, queer experiences and queer identities. There’s a variety of different ways in which environments can be used to do this; Gone Home focuses more on the ‘interconnected web’ of information it’s environment forms, encouraging the player to analyse and consider each piece they come across. This web ultimately forms to tell a queer love story. Anatomy applies horror tropes to the space within a suburban, heteronormative house as a means to reflect the trans experience. It personifies the house, directly queering the environment by giving the walls their own identity. The Last of Us: Left Behind instead chooses to focus on the way characters within an environment interact with it, their interactions acting as a reflection the development of their queer identities. The variety of different means that these texts utilise to express queer stories through environmental storytelling demonstrate it’s highly effective potential to express queer narratives through a queer mode of communication.



got a high first on this :D

isitchristmas.com and the definition of a 'game' (academic essay)

This essay will discuss the way in which Eric Mill’s website, isitchristmas.com, conforms to the conventions of a ‘game’ in such a rudimentary way that it simultaneously outlines the parameters for the definition of a ‘game’. In order to categorize the site as such, I will compare it to Chris Crawford’s ‘taxonomy of creative expression’ from his book, ‘Chris Crawford on game design’ in which he outlines a set of prerequisites a work must meet before it can be classified as a game. Crawford’s taxonomy categorizes potential works into 6 categories: art, movies/books etc., toys, puzzles, competitions, and games. (Crawford, 2003) My aim is to argue some aspects of isitchristmas.com are the most elementary paradigms of a game, therefore outlining the definition of games by establishing a benchmark. In order to do so, I will compare the site to each step of Crawford’s taxonomy.

The site seems rudimentary at first. Its purpose is to inform the user if it’s currently Christmas day or not. It does this by simply presenting the user with nothing but a large ‘NO’ if it isn’t the 25th of December, and a ‘YES’ if it is. Around the 25th of December, the site is altered to temporarily conform to the conventions of a game. Visually, the page still consists of just one word. However, your mouse cursor has been replaced by a flag of your country. You’re also now able to see other user’s ‘flags’ move around the page in real time. There are somewhat primitive avenues of interaction available; you can use the mouse to move your flag around the page, right-click to temporarily leave a stamp of your flag and use the scroll wheel to rotate your flag in place. There’s also a more hidden feature in the source code of the site; if the user navigates to the console, they’ll find it’s been modified to allow them to chat with other users. Although the site is still fundamentally a blank page with a singular word on it, the systems it temporarily puts in place around Christmas gamifies the fundamental systems of a website. The cursor moves the same, but it’s been retextured and therefore recontextualized to be more self-representatory; it could be considered an ‘avatar’ in this state, based on Goldberg’s definition; he considers ‘avatars’ to describe representations of real people, and ‘agents’ to be autonomous software, existing without player influence. (Goldberg, 1998, pp. 161–181) I argue that the flag that represents the player on isitchristmas.com is an avatar; as each player is represented by a ‘real’ factor of their lives; their country. Taking this a step further, utilizing location spoofing software like VPNs would allow users to intentionally change their flag, adding a level of customization based on their preferences. This is likely most rudimentary way of characterizing something as an ‘avatar’ instead of an ‘agent’.

The webpage of isitchristmas.com remains visually unchanged around Christmas, but the presence of other users and vague interaction recontextualizes it to conform to the base fundamentals of a ‘Networked Virtual World’ (NVW). Singhal and Zyda define an NVW as an environment which provides “a shared sense of space, in terms of creating the illusion to the users that they are being located in the same place; a shared sense of presence, which is mainly related to the virtual representation of the users that is commonly realized through human-like personas called avatars as well as to the visibility of others participants entering or leaving the environment; a shared sense of time, in terms of being able to see other participants’ actions when they occur; a way to communicate, which can be achieved through gestures, typed text and voice and finally a way to share, in terms of being able to interact realistically not only with other participants but also with the virtual environment itself.” (Singhal and Zyda, 1999). Isitchristmas.com conforms to each of these requirements. The website itself provides the ‘shared sense of space’, the visualization of the other users creates the ‘shared sense of presence’, the ability to ‘spin’, ‘stamp’ and send messages in the console chatroom provide a ‘shared sense of time’ alongside being an avenue of communication. It’s undeniable that if you follow these parameters, isitchristmas.com is a ‘Networked Virtual World’ in its most primitive form.

While the site may conform to some definitions of a ‘Virtual World’, this doesn’t say anything regarding its status as a ‘game’. A more effective comparison to determine isitchristmas.com’s status as a ‘game’ would be using Crawford’s ‘Taxonomy of creative expression’. The first step of Crawford’s taxonomy questions the artistic integrity of the property it’s being applied to. The primary motivation of the creator is called into question; “If the creator’s primary goal is to make money, then I call the result entertainment. If the creator’s primary goal is to make something that is beautiful, then I call it art” (Crawford, 2003). Applying this concept to isitchristmas.com would likely result in it being immediately categorized as art, making it unable to be categorized as a game under Crawford’s methodology. However, using a tool that allows you to view older iterations of websites (The Wayback Machine), you can see that if you clicked on the word ‘NO’ or ‘YES’ from 2009 to 2018, it would redirect to an external website. This knowledge could reframe the site’s purpose to being an advertisement for some, therefore altering the primary goal of the site to have monetary motivation. In its current state, the site doesn’t feature any immediately accessible links to external pages. There are links to Eric Mill’s website and social media pages located in the source code and on a subdomain, ‘isitchristmas.com/humans.txt’. It could be argued that the inclusion of these links multiple times makes the creator’s primary goal a self-advertisement, therefore making it monetary. Crawford’s ideology that games cannot be art is a complex argument, contested by many others. Even Crawford himself has referred to games as art. “A game is an artistically simplified representation of a phenomenon.” (Crawford, 1984). For the sake of my argument, I am going to classify isitchristmas.com as being ‘entertainment’.

The next step of Crawford’s Taxonomy evaluates the interactivity of the property. Isitchristmas.com’s temporary shift in identity during the Christmas period makes it unique – it’s sometimes interactive, sometimes not. It could be argued that the restricted access to the gamified version of the site invalidates its ‘interactivity’. However, similar systems of limited-time content are present in many ‘Live Service Games’ like Fortnite: Battle Royale (2017). Certain content is only available temporarily, known as a ‘Limited-Time Mode’. It could be said that isitchristmas.com’s gamification is a Limited-Time Mode, therefore classifying it as interactive.

Crawford then focuses on the goals associated with the property, questioning if there is “a defined goal associated with the use of the item?” (Crawford, 2003). He states that without a defined goal, the property should be categorized as a ‘toy’. The clear ‘goal’ of isitchristmas.com is to wait until the ‘NO’ changes to a ‘YES’. A common approach to ‘Networked Virtual Worlds’ is to categorise them as ‘informal play’ due to their lack of achievable goals. Games like Club Penguin (2005) and VRChat (2017) would be classified as ‘informal play’ as they prioritise the social aspects of their systems and lack a clear goal. It could be argued that isitchristmas.com is the same, as its ‘goal’ is not “associated with the use of the item”. (Crawford, 2003). The player has no control over the outcome, and simply must wait. Zimmerman and Salen argue that goals direct players regardless of their influence; “add a goal to informal play…you will usually have a game” (Salen and Zimmerman, 2004).

Crawford’s next step is to identify the difference between challenges and puzzles. He identifies puzzles as systems that can be understood and deconstructed, and challenges as having “An active agent against whom you compete” (Crawford, 2003). He acknowledges the ambiguity of this definition, describing it as “purely subjective”. I argue that the active agent in isitchristmas.com is more abstract; the challenge of reaching the goal is one of endurance. The ‘active agent’ is the time itself. The player must resist closing the site, instead waiting until Christmas. It’s a similar system to the one present in Desert Bus, a minigame from a cancelled Sega CD compilation game, Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors. The minigame is referred to as a ‘verasimulator’ in its introduction – defined as “Games stupefyingly like reality”. The goal of Desert Bus is to drive a bus along a straight road. There are no obstacles, and reaching the goal takes 8-hours real time. The challenge of the game lies in the player’s endurance. I argue that isitchristmas.com is also a ‘verasimulator’, as its goal is rooted in reality; the only way to win is by waiting for the real date to change to December 25th. However, there is nothing in place prompting the player to open the site and wait for Christmas; they could simply open the site at any point on December 25th and get to see the ‘YES’. I argue that the switching from ‘NO’ to ‘YES’ is akin to a ‘Live Event’. Live events are exclusive game modes that can only be played by players active at a specific predetermined time. They were popularised by Fortnite: Battle Royale (2017) which tells a narrative using live events, which only players that are active at a specific time can partake in. This is done in order to add a level of exclusivity to the event, encouraging players to attend. The switching of ‘NO’ to ‘YES’ on isitchristmas.com is similar to a Fortnite: Battle Royale (2017) event in the sense that users would want to be active on the website due to the rarity of the switch; it only occurs once a year. The final step of Crawford’s taxonomy focuses on differentiating ‘games’ from ‘competitions’. Crawford’s argument is that to be defined as a ‘game’, the work must grant the opponents a method of impeding the other team. If there are any rules in place preventing the user from doing so, it instead becomes a ‘competition’ (Crawford, 2003). Under this definition, isitchristmas.com conforms to neither, as there is no defined parameters in place to encourage opposition. It could be argued that the competitive aspects of isitchristmas.com fall under the definition of ‘informal play’. Players can set their own goals, creating ‘teams’ based on their flags and attempting to impede other countries in some way. This could be done through a form of domination (having the most flags from one country on the page) or by intentionally targeting flags from other ‘teams’ and oppose anything they might be trying to do, virtually shifting the genre to a player-made ‘war game’. Isitchristmas.com does not pass this step of Crawford’s taxonomy.

In summary, it’s clear that not all aspects of isitchristmas.com fit Crawford’s framework of what a ‘game’ is. It lacks a clear, rule-defined goal and contains no direct means of conflict. It would likely be classed as either ‘art’ or a ‘toy’ under Crawford’s taxonomy. However, I feel it was useful to analyse a work that contains some aspects that pass Crawford’s taxonomy and some that don’t. Doing so outlines an effective benchmark of what a game is and highlights the subjectivity of the definition of a ‘game’. Crawford’s definition excludes many works that others would consider a game. If I had instead compared isitchristmas.com to Zimmerman’s (2004) definition of a game, “An activity with some rules engaged in for an outcome” (Zimmerman, 2004) it would undoubtedly be classified as a such. The fact that isitchristmas.com fits some definitions of a game and not others calls attention to the impossibility of answering the question “What is a Game?” without including some level of subjectivity or bias. Some may feel that Crawford’s definition excludes too many works, and that Zimmerman’s includes too many. Crawford says that following Zimmerman’s definition would “Turn the act of driving into a game” (Crawford, 2003). If I were to define a game, I would outline it as ‘a rule system which prevents the player from immediately reaching their goal consistently, but is able to be optimised by honing skill or luck.’

Reference list
Mill, E. (2013) Is It Christmas? Available at: https://isitchristmas.com/.
Crawford, C. (1984) The Art of Computer Game Design. Berkeley, Calif.: Osborne/Mcgraw-Hill.
Crawford, C. (2003) On game design. Indianapolis, In.: New Riders.
Goldberg, A. (1998) Digital Illusion : Entertaining the Future with High Technology. New York: Acm Press ; Reading, Mass, pp. 161–181.
Salen, K. and Zimmerman, E. (2004) Rules of play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, Mass. The Mit Press.
Singhal, S. and Zyda, M. (1999) Networked Virtual Environments. Addison-Wesley Professional.
Fortnite: Battle Royale (2017). Epic Games. Available at: https://www.igdb.com/games/fortnite
VRChat (2017). VRChat Inc. Available at: https://www.igdb.com/games/vrchat
Club Penguin (2005). Disney. Available at: https://www.igdb.com/games/club-penguin
Penn & Teller Smoke and Mirrors. (Cancelled 1995). Absolute Entertainment. Available at: https://www.igdb.com/games/penn-and-tellers-smoke-and-mirrors

[07/01/24]

LGBTQ+ VISIBILITY WITHOUT CHARACTER PRESCENCE

[contains spoilers for Gone Home, A Normal Lost Phone and If Found...]

here’s a niche subset of story-focused games known as ‘walking simulators’. Most of these games feature no combat or NPCs (non-player character) and the narrative is typically conveyed through environmental interaction. Most games within this genre are unavoidably voyeuristic as the player is frequently tasked with deconstructing environments previously inhabited by others, commonly making extremely personal discoveries about the prior tenants as they do. Even games like Campo Santo’s ‘Firewatch’ which has much more of a focus on exploring nature cannot avoid featuring intrusive sequences. One part of the game has the player confront two skinny dipping teenagers at a lake, during which the girls refer to the player as a ‘peeping tom’. Prior to this interaction the player discovers and presses RT to ‘examine’ the girl’s underwear strewn around at the lakeside. Based on their actions, calling the player a 'peeping tom' seems like a completely reasonable statement. It’s impossible to convey a narrative about other individuals besides the player environmentally without some level of intrusion. Some games within the genre have a much more intensive focus on the invasion of other’s personal spaces, and one common theme found in these more voyeuristic walking simulators is the presence of LGBTQ+ characters.

Fullbright’s ‘Gone Home’ takes place in 1995. It has the player take the role of a young woman, Katie Greenbriar, returning home to find all her family members are seemingly absent. When you start the game, the first thing the player interacts with is a note stuck to the front door. It addresses you directly, urging you to not ‘go digging round trying to find out where I am’. It’s written by Sam, Katie’s younger sister. To complete the game, the player must ignore this note, directly participating in a form of intrusion upon Sam’s privacy. As you traverse the house, the player gradually pieces together the story explaining where their family members have gone. The story of Katie’s parents takes a backseat, and you can complete the game without discovering where they went. Gone Home focuses on the story of Sam, primarily on the development of her romantic relationship with another girl, Lonnie.

In Sam’s room, there’s a locker with a collage poster of female celebrities like Jodie Foster stuck on the front. The player cannot access the contents of the locker immediately, as they must find the code on a piece of paper that has been ripped into pieces and hidden around the house in secret wall compartments. The locker contains a photo of Lonnie that has been stuck to the interior of the door in a shrine-like way along with ‘Gentleman’s magazine’, which has a naked woman on the cover. I find the locker to be reflective of Sam as a character. The exterior of the locker is how she presents herself to others, with the poster of female celebrities on the front reflecting the ‘model woman’ that societal expectations at the time would expect her to conform to. The interior is the emotions she feels she must repress, primarily regarding her sexuality and her romantic feelings towards Lonnie. This suppression of LGBTQ+ identities is represented through locked & hidden spaces throughout the game. Any mention of Sam’s and Lonnie’s relationship is tucked away; hidden in secret compartments, locked in lockers, hidden in the attic. In a sense, the house itself reflects the way queer identities are shafted within a conservative society. This rejection of LGBTQ+ groups is also present in the game’s narrative. Throughout the game, the player hears audio logs recorded by Sam as they pick up and examine objects of relevance. One of these logs is titled ‘A Very Long Phase’ and has Sam recount her experience attempting to tell her parents she’s a lesbian. She notes she was “prepared for them to be mad, disappointed, or start crying or something. But they were just in denial”. Instead of accepting and reprimanding Sam’s sexuality, her parents instead reject the very possibility of her feelings.

The voyeuristic aspects of Gone Home allow the game to represent both sides of Sam to the player through the environments she inhabits. To show how conservative beliefs repress queer identities, queer safe spaces must be deconstructed and invaded to reveal the aspects their inhabitants felt they should hide.

Accidental Queen’s ‘A Normal Lost Phone’ doesn’t necessarily fit into the ‘walking simulator’ genre. Instead of traversing physical space, the player navigates through the menus and text messages of a mobile phone. Although the game doesn’t feature any explicit ‘walking’, It features all the cornerstones of a walking simulator, and I think it’s the most fitting genre for the game. The player takes the role of an unnamed character who comes across the titular ‘lost phone’ and investigates its contents. As the player reads through the texts and emails, they unravel the events that lead to the phone being discarded. You learn the previous owner of the phone is also named Sam, someone who the player would initially identify as male based on the easily accessible areas of the phone. As the player discovers passwords, they access locked apps and discover that Sam is a trans woman. The player also learns that Sam has a conservative family, and the town she lives in is also primarily conservative. Just like Sam from Gone Home, this Sam feels as if she needs to hide away the LGBTQ+ aspects of her identity to fit into her surroundings. The Sam in ‘A Normal Lost Phone’ has a much more explicit rift in their identity; they have two dating profiles, a ‘secret calculator’ app that can be unlocked by entering the correct sequence. She has repressed her identity so drastically that she is not living as herself, and decides to run away at 18, discarding her phone. The game, like ‘Gone Home’ demonstrates through environmental storytelling that conservative values force LGBTQ+ groups to repress their identities through physical representations of ‘repression’, may that be a locker or a secret calculator app. The game concludes when the player decides to erase all data on the phone.

Dreamfeel’s ‘If Found…’ has similar gameplay to ‘A Normal Lost Phone’. Instead of navigating a phone, the player reads and erases the pages of a journal, belonging to a trans woman named Kasio. The narrative is told through the pages of the journal, which utilizes its structure to convey emotions. To advance, the player must uncover text that Kasio has obscured with scribbles. This acts as yet another ‘invasion’ of a queer person’s space but is necessary to construct a clear picture of their experiences. The narrative follows Kasio as she returns home from university to stay with her conservative family over Christmas. Her mother, like Sam’s in ‘Gone Home’, rejects her LGBTQ+ identity entirely, instead concluding that Kasio needs to “face the facts”. Unlike the characters in ‘Gone Home’ and ‘A Normal Lost Phone’, Kasio is returning to a conservative environment, and is not attempting to repress her identity to ‘fit in’ to society. Because of this, she chooses to run away from home and live in an abandoned house with a group of other LGBTQ+ characters living in the town. The house is the equivalent of the locker in ‘Gone Home’ and the calculator app in ‘A Normal Lost Phone’. Instead of repressing their LGBTQ+ identities, the characters of ‘If Found…’ are confident to be who they are, so they are in turn ‘repressed’ as people to the house. They are ‘hidden’ in the same way the contents of the locker and the calculator app are, just in a more significant way. The game concludes when the player has erased the entire contents of the journal, leaving it empty.

In ‘Gone Home’ ‘A Normal Lost Phone’ and ‘If Found’ the player takes the role of an outsider, constructing the identity of a queer individual from an external perspective. This is done in order highlight what aspects of the individual’s life are supposed to be ‘hidden’. The act of ‘invading’ these spaces also puts more emphasis on the actions the individual has taken to prevent others from seeing these aspects of their identity, further highlighting the fundamental problem with LGBTQ+ people inhabiting conservative spaces. The separation of the player from the LGBTQ+ character also gives the game an opportunity to educate players not familiar with LGBTQ+ culture by simulating a relatable perspective. ‘A Normal Lost Phone’ takes the opportunity to do this through the in-game ‘Be You’ forum, where characters discuss what its like to be trans and share tips about how to pass well.

All these texts highlight the issues surrounding the treatment of LGBTQ+ individuals in conservative spaces. They all propose similar solutions. The best way to prevent conservative beliefs from rifting and encouraging the repression of queer identities is to reject their beliefs entirely- in the same way they reject LGBTQ+ identities. At the end of ‘Gone Home’, Sam decides to run away from home with her girlfriend Lonnie so they can live as their true selves, free from conservative jeopardization. Sam in ‘A Normal Lost Phone’ does the same thing, deciding to run away from her conservative family. However, ‘If found…’ proposes an alternative solution. Kasio runs away from home multiple times throughout the narrative, but the game ends with her educating her mother about LGBTQ+ culture and eventually reestablishing a healthy relationship with her. This is still a rejection of conservative beliefs but is executed as more of an extinguishing. The next step proposed by these games is for their repressed characters to start fresh; Sam in ‘Gone Home’ leaves behind her notes for her sister. Sam in ‘A Normal Lost Phone’ abandons her phone which is eventually erased by the player. Kasio from ‘If found…’ begins to rewrite her journal to contain fond memories during the epilogue.

The common denominator for these games is the lack of character presence. Each narrative is expressed through the collection and arrangement of ‘artifacts’ of identity to construct a picture of the character the game is focused on.

not a fan of this writing at all anymore. overall point i made feels reductive of queer identity - going to keep it up and rewrite it in the future to be less negative

update: this is the topic of my dissertation now!! its up on here as 'Are queer identities effectively expressed through environmental storytelling in video games?'


[22/11/23]