Yaoi visual novel games have emerged as a contributable landscape in exploring queerness. To extend the queer representation and narration, this research investigates the players’ affective engagement in these games, specifically focusing on the non-human characters’ influence and their contribution to queer experiences. Employing “The Symbiant” (2023) as a case, the combination of visual content analysis and autoethnography was conducted. Results reveal that non-human elements enhance the affective interaction between players and avatars, especially when eliciting negative responses due to the visual representation of the non-human or disruptions in the agency. Meanwhile, in the sex scene, non-human elements function as visual manifestation of the player’s desire presence and interrupt the connection between the player and the avatar. The findings suggest that non-human characters break the stable pattern of the player’s gaming engagement. They encourage the players to find new ways of experiencing themselves by facilitating the “becoming”: “becoming-non-human” that shares their desires and “becoming-avatar” through uncanny narration, representation, and suspended agency. This process further justifies instability, thereby allowing players to navigate nomadic spaces that queer rigid, hierarchical discourses of gender and sexual identity. The analysis contributes to enriching the diversity of the discourse in game studies and queerness by investigating the potential of non-human elements in Yaoi visual novels to queer fixed identities.

Authors:
Chuxuan Zhang, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

About the Presenter(s)
Chuxuan Zhang is currently a PhD student at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Saturday Schedule

Bookmark