Thirteenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

This paper centers the video game Life is Strange (2015), and uses textual and narratological analysis of player blogs, gaming statistics, and game mechanics to describe how its representations of white girlhood move beyond visual cues and into its mechanical makeup. Its gendered and racialized processes emerge through play when its mechanics most restrict player actions. Utilizing queer of color critique, which treats race, gender, and sexuality as co-constitutive, I describe these stakes by positioning the game within its context of gendered and racial violence in the gaming community. By reorienting literary theories of sentimentality for new media analysis, I show how the game’s deployment of a queer, white girl as its avatar formalizes patriarchal logics of sentimentality.