I played the game With Those We Love Alive. The target audience is young adults. The game’s creator is Porpentine. The platform of the game is the internet. The game is text-based, as it follows your journey through different screens with different sets of words that afford you different amounts of information. The first action that happens in the game is that the Skull Empress takes you to her palace because you need to make things for her. Otherwise, you can explore the balcony, throne room, your chambers, the garden, your workshop, and the city. There are different descriptions of your surroundings that you may click through as you explore the game.
However, the very first motion of the game begins with the player choosing attributes that lead to a name. This could be seen as feminist because agency is central to feminism, so being able to click through options again and again when the player doesn’t like an option, instead of having to stick with the first option presented, shows that agency is important even in this minor detail that is ultimately insignificant to the game’s narrative.
Next, we meet the Skull Empress. She seems to rule without an emperor, in fact as the sole ruler of her territory. This represents a marked departure from the norms of human history, where a male ruler, whether king, emperor, or something else, would normally take the throne. Even America is a country, albeit not a monarchy, that has never had a woman be elected president. The fact that the Skull Empress shows up so early in the game and is so crucial to its narrative function shows that With Those We Love Alive takes deconstructing traditional notions of femininity quite seriously. In “Play Like A Feminist”, Shira Chess references Judith Butler’s theory of performativity. To view the Skull Empress in this lens, we could say that by performing the role of empress in her capacity as sole ruler, she complicates traditional notions of femininity through her action, dress, and being.
Additionally, the game also challenges such notions by stepping away from a male-centric lens. When we are greeted by viewing the empress’s aides, there is no specific mention of their gender. The townspeople also do not have an emphasis on gender, and there are no clear gender roles at play. This seems to be an intentional decision on the part of Porpentine, as by removing an orderly set of gender roles, Porpentine is able to complicate players’ existing and even subconscious beliefs about gender and society. Through this, With Those We Love Alive becomes an intentional effort to make illegible the modern and historical confines of gender that we as the player have become used to during the course of our consciousnesses’ existences.
Lastly, another important idea that Shira Chess puts forth is that video games are traditionally masculine. By predominantly using traditionally female-coded colors such as pink and purple, and by constantly decentering male voices, Porpentine moves against this idea and situates the game as naturally feminist.
