We must be unfortunately aware of the ways in which different minorities are undermined either through extreme visibility or extreme invisibility, unrepresented or represented in ways that don’t correspond to their identities nor their idiosyncrasy as individuals. As we all know, the history of moving images was decided by people who had the money and power to shape the social imaginary through big, expensive tools and big, expensive budgets. However, as the tools for image making became smaller and easier to reach, many people, especially artists from underrepresented and oppressed group, could take upon the new access to some media and make a stand for who they are, their bodies and their history. And now, in an era when digital fabrication is the new tool by which the master shapes our idea of our bodies, ourselves and others, artists take these new (media) tools to dismantle the master’s house.

This paper will analyze the possibilities of 3D and VR technology as an artistic tool to explore the body and identity outside of the normative ideas imposed upon it. By allowing artists and digital users to create new ways in which a body could exist and be represented, 3D in contemporary art has a powerful political potential. Many artists are currently using CGI and other new media means of expression, but this essay will focus only on a group of artists coming from social groups that have suffered and still suffer from oppression. 3D and VR technology allows these artists to represent themselves and their stories in new ways that help them resist and repair the endured oppression and gives them freedom to find unique identities for themselves and/or their social groups. At the same time, 3D technology used in this critical manner enables artists and users to place these digital bodies within a virtual space where traumatic events (personal or/and historical) can be depicted, described and lived within the protection of virtuality. I will argue how in the digital realm, bodies and identities can exist, tell their stories and meet others through the protection of a proxy element – the avatar – and a spatial and temporal distance – the virtual – that allows them to think, dialog and express hard experiences without being directly exposed to them. Avatars allow artists to choose whether to represent or camouflage themselves, to hide or show - or to hide showing, to show while hiding. in any case, to take power back to their representation and to the way they tell the stories that were unheard or heard to with pain.

As a widely used, popular medium, digital games successfully circulate a variety of narratives, discourses, and practices among highly diverse audiences. While games are often riddled with references, players sometimes encounter narratives that draw on recent or more distant pasts or that engender connections with contemporary issues and topics. This paper explores how digital games may be read, studied, and crafted as cultural texts. I argue that games have the potential to address and document topics and concerns that are contextual to, and reflect discourses which are prominent in the public imaginary. I first discuss some examples, such as the experience of living with anxiety and depression as portrayed in Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (Ninja Theory, 2017), and Red Dead Redemption 2’s (Rockstar Games, 2018) interpretation of racial and ethnic discrimination in the US during late 1800’s. Then, I draw on my ongoing textual analysis and ethnographic research of the game The Elder Scrolls Online (Zenimax Online Studios, 2014). I focus on examples that are woven into the narrative architecture of the game, whereby quest narratives are reminiscent of real-world testimonies linked to collective traumatic pasts, or where the dynamics between different types of characters bear familiarity with current debates and perspectives surrounding climate change emergency. Finally, I propose some of the ways through which digital humanities scholars and practitioners could consider engaging with digital games and the constellated bodies of knowledge they produce through various channels. Throughout my discussion, I draw on Sanford et al.’s (2016) expanded definition of intertextuality as they exemplify some of the ways through which game texts connect to a wide range of other types of texts and could enable the development of pedagogical frameworks for fostering a literacy of intertextuality. While digital games are slowly finding their way into the classroom as pedagogical support, much like films, literary texts, and other media, digital humanities practitioners may tap through several ways into this still-young medium for addressing pressing issues and to explore solutions that could help us to create a more equitable and sustainable world.

Gamergate – the infamous anti-feminist “born-digital” movement (Burgess & Matamoros-Fernández, 2016) thinly disguised as activism for ethics in gaming journalism – was comprised of dozens of harassment tactics, hundreds of individual figures, and an expanse of interactions across multiple platforms and several years. While the online hate and harassment campaign began to proliferate through the gaming subculture back in August 2014 following accusations of adultery between a prominent game developer and games journalist (Dockterman, 2014), Gamergate remains relevant today. The movement has had a marked impact as the precursor to modern-day reactionary movements such as MAGA and QAnon, offering digital humanists the complex yet important challenge of unpacking its vast network of events, individual agents, ideological submovements, and their constituent tactics (Mortensen, 2020). This challenge is intensified when researchers are interested in tracing the ontology of particular memetic threads –such as the emergence of transphobia or white supremacy– given the complexity of the web and the cascade of relevant data from multiple social media platforms.

Developed in response to these challenges, the Interactive Gamergate Network is an open-source web-hosted utility created using the network software Gephi (Bastian et al, 2009). The project is designed to allow users to visualize, parse, compare, and interact with specific subsets of the Gamergate movement, including temporal events, important figures, relevant media platforms, and Gamergate-adjacent concepts such as specific harassment tactics. Specifically, we approach the Gamergate quagmire from a standpoint informed by network science (Brandes et al, 2013), parsing the above categories into a series of divergent nodes joined through weighted edges based on extent of participation and interrelationship, ultimately aimed at mapping the complex interconnectedness of the movement. The resulting system benefits from the traditional boons associated with network analysis, including measurements of centrality and betweenness for various figures, events, and ideas (Borgatti, 2009). We additionally integrate a temporal element by utilizing Gephi’s ability to create dynamically ‘phased’ network analyses, featuring research done by our sister team on the different ‘phases’ of Gamergate as informed by multiple means of textual analysis on Gamergate-related tweets (Rockwell & Suomela, 2015). Through this lens, Gamergate can be both understood and analyzed as a movement which was far from static and monolithic, but one which morphed, fractured, and reinvented itself across time.

In the context of this paper, we demonstrate the possible applications of the interactive network through an examination of a specific case study; the development and propagation of transphobic rhetoric and transphobic conspiracy across Gamergate. With this in mind, the tool assists in revealing how transphobia gradually manifested itself within the Gamergate movement as the intersectional culmination of several malicious patterns defined by researchers to be at the ideological crux of Gamergate; namely misogyny, conspiracy, anti-progressivism, paedophilia, and ‘militant meninism’ (O’Donnell, 2020). Ultimately, we believe our project can connect and share methods with other researchers investigating contemporary hate movements and the unique ways they propagate in virtual spaces, drawing a roadmap for future research aimed at combating online bigotry.

Galatea, a piece of interactive fiction (IF) by Emily Short, begins by presenting your player character (PC) – an art critic – with an exhibit of Galatea, a statue-like woman who has come to life. This piece of interactive fiction does not contain any puzzles or quests. You cannot move into other rooms, interact with other non-player characters (NPCs) besides Galatea herself, and there is no clear winning state. There is only conversation between you and Galatea. The narrative of Galatea is driven solely by the dialogue, resulting in a story that reflects your choice of prompts. Interactivity and narrative is closely tied together in this sense – Galatea’s gameplay is centered around discovering and writing a story.

This paper argues that the driving force of the narrative comes from the interactivity of the work itself. This is achieved by virtue of Emily Short’s non-player character (NPC) design in the character of Galatea herself. As Montfort (2003) describes, Galatea is essentially a “chatterbot with a more sophisticated architecture for behaviour than had been seen in IF before”. Galatea’s responses vary based on multiple factors that the game keeps track of. These statuses, along with the current topic of conversation, all interact with one another to make conversation flow more realistically. By examining Short’s NPC design and the current state of NPCs in interactive fiction, the paper argues that the design of Galatea creates a “desire to confide in her” (Galatea).

I argue that this is what drives the narrative of the story – the “desire to confide” in what we logically know to be only a computer. This paper claims that it is the interactivity itself that creates the narrative. Many scholars have spoken about the contentious relationship between interactivity and narrative, with some claiming that the two cannot exist simultaneously without working against each other. However, this ignores the unique storytelling capabilities of mediums like interactive fiction.

By centering its entire gameplay on developing and telling a narrative, Galatea is able to explore a multitude of themes that would have been difficult to express through another medium. I argue that it is the combination of NPC design, the rewarding dialogue and writing, and the relationship of interactivity and narrative that highlights the strengths of the interactive fiction genre, with Galatea being an especially pertinent example.

References

Galatea. Self-published by Emily Short, 2000.

Montfort, Nick. Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. The MIT Press, 2003.