Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2018

Based in the 1990s, the video game Gone Home has the player take control of Katie Greenbriar, a woman who arrived at the United States to her family’s abandoned mansion from a year of travel abroad. Pinned to the front door, a note written by Katie’s teenage sister, Sam Greenbriar, urges Katie not to search the mansion for evidence of the family’s whereabouts because Sam has run away to live a life with her girlfriend, Lonnie, after her father, Terrence Greenbriar, surveilled them and forced them to conceal themselves in the mansion’s secret rooms. Deploying a queer theoretical approach informed by the work of queer game theorists and cultural studies scholars, this article analyses the queer narrative and content of Gone Home’s lesbian relationship in order to illustrate how the home the player interacts with is a site through which to deconstruct the public/private dyad. It is also a space where lesbian identities are constantly surveilled and forced into hiding. The article concludes that Gone Home rethinks the home as a series of figurative closets within which gay and lesbian identities can only temporarily escape the trauma of the public gaze.

In this study, I consider the ways in which Final Fantasy VII, a game with a history of over two decades, has been nostalgically and affectively remembered by a generation of global fans. By focusing on audience reception and employing qualitative methods, I show how players of video games can establish affective connections with game worlds and characters. This affective linkage between player and artefact is the result of emergent processes, which are accentuated by the emergent structures that make up video games themselves. The study also considers the affective association with Japan as site of national-cultural production of these games and the genre of Japanese role-playing games, in the context of an increasingly globally interconnected video game industry.

Non-player characters (NPCs) in most role-playing games (RPGs) are often creepy and eerie since they look like player characters but act like machines. However, the perception of uncanniness is often used deliberately in video game genres to create fantasy depictions. Despite providing empirical data to better understand human reactions, studies or actual measurements regarding what makes NPCs uncanny have been rare. In this article, the concept of NPC uncanniness was first reviewed using several theoretical frameworks. Then levels of uncanny perception were measured through human subject interactions. For measurement purposes, four NPCs were selected randomly from a commercial RPG focusing on two categories: character gender and hostility. Participants reported the sensation of uncanniness was evoked quickly and strongly at the beginning but significantly decreased over time and that female NPCs were creepier than male NPCs.

This article explores identity development and understanding of avatars as an important educational goal in the avatar-based multi-user virtual environment platform of Second Life (SL). There are in general two ways to understand identity development in virtual worlds. The first way is to examine the role that these platforms play in the search for identity. The second way is to see avatar development as a micro-version of the identity task outlined by Erik Erikson. This article, which also looks to explore how avatar identity development might foster what the Brazilian educator refers to as conscientization, the ability to recognize the ways that society predetermines perceptions of self and others, focuses on the latter. We suggest that these micro-identity tasks involve a place–space dialectic in which users’ experiences in their place-based emotional/identity development initially serve as context for avatar development. There is then an ensuing dialectic in which the space-based avatar helps these users gain further understanding of their place-based lives as they continue to create their in-world avatar identities. We include interviews and blog posts of four undergraduate students who participated in a course that integrated SL as a primary learning tool into a general education course. The students discuss the development of their avatars, which coincided with a unit on identity development. Each of these students brought their place-based experiences into their avatar development in different ways, which in turn affected their place-based understandings. The article argues that place-based experience serves as an important social/cultural indicator for conscientization as part of the ongoing learning process.

This discussion examines the use of sound in the massive multiplayer online social platform Second Life (2003–18), by drawing upon ideas and works of traditional and new media ‘sound’ scholars and practitioners. In particular, this study draws from the theoretical works of prominent sound scholar R. Murray Schafer, and new media theorists Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, Janine Marchessault, Lev Manovich and Edward Castonova. This study explores listening within simulated environments through a case study of sound teaching and research in what was constructed as a sound laboratory, which is situated on a simulated estate created in Second Life. Participation during the course work evoked students’ memories of childhood events and other prior experiences. The study is focused on the first phases of the project conducted during 2013 and 2014. What began as a lesson in sound literacy called forth questions about how sound contributes to understanding reality, especially when acoustic space is located within virtual reality. The sound laboratory is still operational in Second Life.

The game you don’t play

The Last of Us: Remastered, Sony Computer Entertainment (2014)