Many contemporary girlhood games illustrate a post-feminist context, meaning that feminist messages are incorporated if searched for, although they mostly present their girl protagonists as already equal citizens. When I discuss their feminist affordances, though, I am considering their possible function as a resource for girl players which is also inclusive of pre-teens, teens and young adults regardless of assigned sex - simply put, any who self-identify as a girl. Girlhood games are, moreover, not explicitly gendered towards girl players as practiced within similarly termed "girls' games" that in the 1990s actively sought to exclude boys and men (Cassell & Jenkins, 1998b). The second feature of girlhood games is their formative coming-of-age themes, namely the negotiation of social and identity trials. I therefore consider a flexible and interpretive range from pre-teen and teen girls to young adult women. It is difficult to confine these characters to an age bracket as many games do not disclose their ages.
I define girlhood games as games that firstly feature adolescent or young adult girl protagonists (inclusive of anthropomorphic or other non-human characters). In light of this ever-increasing centralisation of girls across several game styles, I propose an approach for understanding the potential transformative functions of girlhood games upon girl players, although the category "girlhood games" first warrants addressing.
Oxenfree tvtropes series#
A number of contemporary videogames, however, are increasingly featuring agentic, adolescent girl protagonists and narrating coming-of-age girlhood experiences including, but not limited to: AAA action adventure games like The Last of Us series (Naughty Dog, 2013-2020), Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerilla Games, 2017) and Marvel’s Avengers (Crystal Dynamics, 2020) small studio exploration games like Mutazione (Die Gute Fabrik, 2019), If Found… (Dreamfeel, 2002), Oxenfree (Night School Studio, 2016) and Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall, 2017) walking simulators like Gone Home (Fullbright, 2013) and What Remains of Edith Finch (Giant Sparrow, 2017) episodic choice-driven games like Life is Strange (Dontnod Entertainemnt, 2015) and The Walking Dead: Season 2 (Telltale Games, 2013) platformers like Celeste (Matt Makes Games, 2018) and Indivisible (Lab Zero Games, 2019) driving games like Lost Wage Rampage (Jane Friedhoff, 2018) and RPGs like Ikenfell (Happy Ray Games, 2020). Perhaps the reason for this lies in videogaming’s troubled reputation for character representations fraught with hypermasculinity, hypersexualisation, exoticisation, white supremacy, damsels in distress, compulsory heterosexuality and the secondary status, stereotyping, or invisibility of marginalised persons. Many studies interrogating girls in the media, however, seem to avoid videogame analysis in way of film, television, literature, magazines and comics (see Bellas, 2017 Cocca, 2016 Kaveney, 2006 McRobbie, 1991 Projansky, 2014). There has been an increase of centralised girl protagonists in videogames. Keywords: Bildungsroman, coming-of-age, girlhood, liminality, Oxenfree, rites of passage Introduction: Girlhood Games Within this playful setting, its teen girl protagonist is able to move and lead in a manner that is comparatively difficult for adolescent girls in the regulatory “real world.” This freedom has the potential to extend to girl players who are likewise experimenting with comparable freedom from their regulated realities when occupying the liminal fantasy of the game space.
Oxenfree tvtropes free#
Oxenfree’s remote island setting is a liminal space where the teenage characters are free from institutional authority. Oxenfree achieves this through its use of playful temporal disruptions projected through the game’s supernatural timeslips and its cyclical conclusion that repeatedly transports its heroine back to the beginning of the game.
I propose that Oxenfree disrupts the frequent narrative of “overcoming” adolescence when its heroine Alex's conclusive reincorporation to normative society is denied. To illustrate this, I take Night School Studio’s Oxenfree (2016) as a case study for it offers a transgressive presentation of developmental linearity. Drawing on anthropological accounts of ritualistic rites of passage and on feminist appropriations of those accounts, this paper theorises what I call “girlhood games” as liminal spaces that have the potential to evoke transformative play.
The increased presence of adolescent girl protagonists in popular videogames calls for deeper analysis into their representational potential. Liminal Rhetoric in Girlhood Games: Developmental Disruption in Night School Studio’s Oxenfree by Stephanie Harkin Abstract
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