Breaking the Narrative: Queers in Love at the End of the World and The Inherent Feminism of Text Games
Queers in Love at the End of the World (QLEW) is a 2013 hyperlink text game created on Twine by Anna Anthropy. The game is free to play on itch.io, and its interactive fiction nature makes it very accessible, particularly for queer and feminist audiences who might not identify as traditional gamers.
As described by Shira Chess in her chapter on “Gaming Feminism,” feminist video games are feminist because of their “potential for empathy building, allowing the player to think within different perspectives and experiences” (87). In this way, QLEW is a game that is feminist in design, structure, and content, and pushes all players to be feminists. From its title that quickly claims its queer nature, to the focus on the relationship between the player and the partner character instead of narrative background, to the untraditional text-based game format, all the moving parts of QLEW contribute to the inherently feminist gameplay.
For QLEW, the narrative architecture of the game might be a pre-structured embedded narrative definitionally, but even the vast majority of the focus in these pre-written narrative chunks is just on direct interactions between the two characters, rather than much about the world and the apocalypse setting. This in of itself is a feminist decision. I am a narrative-drawn gamer, and I was disappointed by the lack of worldbuilding (Fig. 1). Instead, the game kept pushing me back towards its main central claim: focus on the characters, focus on the love at the end of the world. This is feminist gameplay, to center the empathy building of queer perspectives.
In particular, the text-based exploration in QLEW contributes to the feminist theory of agency. As Chess details, feminist agency is the idea of the “will to act and gain voice in a system of power” (90). Text-based games differ from books or short stories purely in the fact that they allow the player choice in how to navigate—and therefore agency in gaining their own voice through the gameplay. In many ways, text-based games as a genre are thus aligned with feminist gaming. Twine has a very low barrier to entry to create or play games without much knowledge of gaming. Twine games are also inherently about choosing different options of text, which supports feminist agency (Fig. 2).
However, this agency inherent to text-based games is then countered in the one major mechanic of QLEW that differentiates it from other hyperlink text games: the ten second timer.
Many Twine games have interesting mechanics that make them unique. Take the limitation of choices in Depression Quest, the flashlight in my father’s long, long legs, or the typing input in Type Help. The first time I played through QLEW, the timer immediately overwhelmed me. I actually didn’t click anything at all, waiting to see what would happen after the timer ran down. I was met with “Everything is wiped away.” In my next play through, I slowly clicked through the choices I genuinely wanted to make. However, this too was short-lived. Very quickly, I began to “speed run” the game by clicking options as fast as possible as words passed through the screen, just trying to see if I could collect all the endings (Fig. 3).
In this way, the mechanic of the timer leads to a dynamic of being rushed and an aesthetic of having fun by trying to “collect the endings.” However, I realized quickly that this is a traditional, dominant masculine gaming approach to playing QLEW (with the ideas of speed running and achieving all endings). When the timer limited my agency, I found that I fell back on previous gaming norms.
Instead, I started to use my own feminist agency to make another decision. Play slowly, read every word, believe in every choice I make. Yes, the game became slower and I didn’t progress as much in each ten second interval. However, through agentically choosing to play this way, the characters and the world of QLEW became much more meaningful because every action felt intentional. This is feminist gameplay.
Nevertheless, my one major critique: QLEW should have more paths that do not lead to sexual interaction between the characters. Sexuality and queerness can be very tied together, but as a queer person myself, I desire more queer narratives that don’t have such a focus on sexualization. QLEW did not satisfy that hope. Many times, I would try to click on choices that weren’t necessarily sexual, but be led to increasingly sexual prompts (Fig. 4). This choice leads to a dichotomy in interpretation. On the one hand, it continues to sexualize queer love and queer women in particular. On the other hand, it can take traditional sexualization of women in games and reclaim it for genuine queer love. Regardless of its abilities of reclamation though, I would still like to see more choices that didn’t keep leading to sexualization, if only to show diverse interpretations of queer love. More options about the memories between the characters, or gentle depictions of coexisting before death, could all bring further perspectives to the game.
Overall, QLEW displays feminism through all its forms. One does not even have to play the game intentionally as a feminist; the game has been thoughtfully designed to encourage feminist play regardless. Shira Chess would be proud. QLEW destroys the traditional notion of a video game for a feminist alternative world. It shows that queer love is not something to speed run, nor is it something that you are entitled to pry into every detail about. It is about the experience of being in the moment with your partner, even in the face of the end of the world.
