The game “With Those We Love Alive” is an interactive fiction game centered around observing and existing within a fantastical society. Interactive fiction as a genre is usually almost exactly the opposite of the “gun-filled, violent, on-screen explosions” games described by Chess. The format itself is a departure from the traditional experience of game playing towards something more literary. Text-based games more broadly circumvents many of the issues issues of physical representation covered by Chess in her book, but are equally fertile ground for feminist worlds and stories.
Thematically, the author Heartscape does almost exactly what Chess calls for in her book. Chess writes that “we need to tell stories not just about women but also about characters who face the adversities set forth within our mainstream cultures.” The game focuses almost entirely on female characters (the player and the empress most notably), but more importantly than the characters, it constructs a society where the systems of cruelty are clear and the moral lens of the story is pointed directly at that cruelty. As an interactive fiction, the game also felt unusually restrictive, with each day often containing only a few lines of new content to be found before you had no option but to continue sleeping and waiting. This was sort of frustrating at times, but also created a stagnant atmosphere that I rather like (though I think I am unusually positive towards IF games overall).
The game is explicit about institutional violence in its society. In one section player gains a visceral understanding of violence as you crush newborn after newborn, no choice but to keep killing. After the massacre, you read that “Dehydrated femme carcasses are being thrown in the fire pits. Everyone is drinking and having a good time.” This stark description is a clear indictment of this fictional society, a framing which persists throughout the story. In the detailed descriptions of the characters feeding brutally off of human corpses, you read that the custom “persists because people are scared that if they question the custom they will fall victim to the intense cruelty of the custom, which persists because they fail to question it. At the same time, the feeling of subordination is also an important piece of the narrative. Most immediately, the player is employed at the castle and must construct whatever the empress asks for. At one point, the player can lick the empress’s slimy residue off of the castle floor, and seems to relish the opportunity to do so, cementing a fantastical power hierarchy into the player’s mind.
While not directly a feminist reading, I think that the presenting of player agency in WTWLA also relates to the idea of white protagonism in traditional games as presented here. Jayanth describes this as the phenomenon of games with an all-important player character who can do no wrong and remakes the world at the expense of all else in the game world. WTWLA very directly opposes this sort of protagonism, framing a player who is very clearly complicit in society’s cruelty, participating in systems they do not understand and are unable to stop. Chess also addresses the sense of agency, saying that “in playing video games, feminists are training themselves to reconsider their own agency against systemically oppressive structures.” WTWLA approaches this by making the lack of agency apparent, shedding light on the injustices in the world. The player has agency mostly in how they observe the world, in choosing how to construct and adorn their offerings to royalty. But these feel like helpless, idle choices. The player has no choice in whether or no they participate in the cruel hierarchy of the world, and has no means of helping those who suffer.
One “mechanical” element of WTWLA that also bears discussion is the drawing of sigils.At the start, the game says “Before living this life, have a pen or sharpie nearby, something that can write on skin,” asking them to physically draw on themselves as they play. This mechanic is invoked later as the player is asked to draw different sigils. For example, after having their character reject their family’s pleading letter and cut ties to their past, the player is asked to draw a sigil of severance on themselves. It is unclear what such a sigil should be, allowing the player to engage in a creative processing of the feelings that their character might be experiencing. We are told very little of the struggle faced by the character (though it seems highly likely to have to do with their trans-ness) , but we are regardless asked to empathize with the struggle in a very physical way through the sigils. Through it, the game transmits the world’s suffering onto the player’s body in a way that seemed like it would have been rather powerful had I actually followed the instructions.
If anything, the feminist bent of WTWLA is hindered only by that the story is told in a fairly genderless world, with the lack of contrasting masculine figures to the female player preventing some more explicit feminist arguments from being made.
Discussion question: Is an explicit lack of agency in video games usually empowering or disempowering? Can disempowering fictional lenses allow people to be more empowered in their actual lives?
