Riot grrrl gaming: gender, sexuality, race, and the politics of choice in Gone Home

ABSTRACT

In this article, we provide a critical analysis of the mystery/adventure video game Gone Home to demonstrate how the game resists norms of contemporary gaming by drawing on a tradition of feminist action in cultural spaces. In interrogating the ways in which Gone Home invokes the aesthetics, identities, and political strategies of the 1990s riot grrrl scene, we argue that Gone Home, in its centring of women’s narratives, collective feminist agency, and deliberate disavowal of unrestricted choice, can be read as a piece of riot grrrl art. Such ‘riot grrrl gaming’, wherein the narrative gameplay of Gone Home mobilizes riot grrrl feminist action, is a pertinent rejoinder to exclusory, and often violently misogynistic, contemporary gaming culture. However, in critically engaging with how Gone Home interpellates riot grrrl, both through its aesthetics and its game play, we argue that the game nonetheless retains white hegemony as a problematic central tenet of both the riot grrrl movement and gaming. This article thus argues that Gone Home disrupts the dominant gender and sexual politics of gaming, yet simultaneously reinstates deeply problematic racial politics, and in doing so calls attention to the need for intersectionality in the cultural spaces of gaming.

KEYWORDS:

• Gaming
• feminism
• riot grrrl
• gender
• sexuality
• race

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Gone Home’s creators have produced further downloadable content since the game’s initial release, including a commentary mode featuring the voice actors. However, here we focus on the narrative and contents of Gone Home as it was originally released by Fullbright in 2013.

2. It is of course vital to note that riot grrrl had an often-troubled relationship to second wave feminism, wherein the scene was accused of not paying due respect to its feminist forebears (Barrowclough 1993). Such criticisms were used to further critiques of the scene as ‘amateurish’, a typology underpinned by claims that riot grrrl musicians could not play their instruments proficiently. Nonetheless, we argue that such criticisms represent the musical, and indeed academic, gatekeeping which riot grrrl responded to and transgressed through its tactical resistance.

3. In 2013, Fullbright pulled their game Gone Home from the PAX Prime expo, stating that they had been ‘bothered by the public stances’ that the founders of the PAX parent-company Penny Arcade had taken on rape culture, paid internships, and representation of female characters. The final straw, according to Fullbright, was the approval of a panel for PAX Australia which included the following (hastily changed) description: ‘Any titillation gets called out as sexist or misogynist, and involve any antagonist race aside from Anglo-Saxon and you’re called a racist. It’s gone too far and when will it end’ (Fullbright 2013). Fullbright positioned themselves and their game as actively resistant to the white masculine heteronormativity prevalent in video-game culture in a move which could be seen as an early exchange of fire in the culture war now known as Gamergate.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rowan Tulloch

Rowan Tulloch is a lecturer in digital media and video gaming in the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies. His research looks at the technological and cultural logics embodied within practices of interactivity.

Catherine Hoad

Catherine Hoad is a Lecturer and Research Coordinator in the School of Music and Creative Media Production at Massey University, Wellington. Her research critiques and theorizes fan cultures, scene studies, and popular music and national identity, with a specific focus on the intersections of race and gender in metal music scenes.

Helen Young

Helen Young is a Lecturer in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. Her research is in critical whiteness studies and popular culture.