feminist

This paper analyzes the concepts of love and womanhood in the web serial novel Three Lifetimes, Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms (hereafter abridged as Three Lifetimes). As one of the most popular and representative works of its subgenre, “love story of immortals in a classical Chinese style,” this novel tells of a romance between Bai Qian, a 140,000-year-old female immortal, and Yehua, a 50,000-year-old male immortal. Author argue that the novel offers a false sense of feminism by analyzing its themes of love and womanhood and comparing the protagonists’ personality traits, de/merits, and experiences with those in three other love stories.Firstly this work compare Three Lifetimes with another web serial novel of the same subgenre, A Debt of Peach Blossom. It is a romance between two male immortals, Song Yao and Hengwen. Author demonstrate that Bai Qian and Song Yao, the first-person protagonists of the two stories, share certain personality traits including indolence, casualness, and light-heartedness; at the same time, Song Yao does not come from a privileged family background and thus lacks high rank in the heavens as well as peerless physical beauty, the advantages which Bai Qian and Yehua both have. Yehua’s personality traits and merits also include discretion, staidness, courage, patience, self-sacrifice, stead-fastness in pursuing love, and talents in many kinds of fields. Inferior to Yehua, Hengwen is described as a handsome and erudite immortal of lower status.Then author call attention to the difference between Three Lifetimes and two folktales which also present love stories of a female immortal. The female protagonists of both folktales, the Weaver Girl and the Seventh Fairy, are immortals of relatively low status and diligent wives of impoverished, simpleminded farmers, the Cowherd and Dong Yong. Their tragic stories are both thematized by the female immortal’s fearless pursuit of love, self-sacrifice for her mortal husband, and disdain for the sovereignty and glory of the heavens. These themes form a contrast to that of the happy marriage between Bai Qian and Yehua, which is arranged on the basis of their high status.The analysis demonstrates that Three Lifetimes endows Bai Qian with enviable natural advantages and good fortune, which enable her to win greater admiration than her male counterpart in a contemporary novel and to experience a degree of gender equality absent from the folktales about her female counterparts. The most significant indication of her high status is displayed by Yehua’s efforts to marry her, which results in the major part of her good fortune. Their relationship seems to represent a feminist ideal of love and womanhood. However, author argue that Bai Qian possesses few virtues which deserve admiration and makes little effort to achieve any goals, including her happy marriage. Instead, her good fortune is greatly determined by Yehua’s capabilities and endeavours. In their relationship, the male character plays a leading role, while the female character obeys patriarchal authority and never displays any intention or ability to decide her own destiny. Thus, her happy ending only represents a false sense of feminism.

The world of game development is heavily male dominated and sexism is notoriously endemic in online gaming and videogames. In this context, as a feminist woman and sole writer, developer and designer of an interactive digital narrative, I am something of a rarity. Doing it all myself may seem perverse, especially in a field where collaboration is common, but the ability to author code myself is empowering and, crucially, gives me independence - a development environment of one's own - a classic feminist goal. In this presentation, I will discuss how these factors are reflected in the interplay of genre, narrative, discourse, gameplay, game logic, character development and thematic content in my interactive digital narrative, Stitched Up (currently a work-in-progress).

In an extremely rare inversion of the 'Damsel in Distress' trope, a common plot device in video games, the central male character in Stitched Up is a 'dude in distress' (Sarkeesian 2013). A powerful female antagonist has trapped Joel in a perilous situation and he must be rescued by his wife, Sarah (both Joel and Sarah are player characters). However, rather than action adventure, I describe Stitched Up as a psychological thriller. Moreover, its feminist narrative themes, problematizing the idea of home, significant others, working women, parenthood and masculinity, suggest similarities with the emerging literary sub-genre of Domestic Noir.

To create an interactive narrative that is capable of exploring these issues, I am drawing together concepts from second-order cybernetics with Possible Worlds theory from narratology. Combining these abstractions provides me with a framework for not only thinking about character-driven playable narratives, but also a methodology for authoring and designing them. I am drawn to Possible Worlds theory because, unlike structuralism, it does not regard fictional characters as purely semiotic constructs but regards them as make-believe life-like persons, able to arouse emotions in the reader. Influenced by cybernetics, along with the concept of feedback and 'the art of steering' (cybernetics' etymological root), I am exploring the idea of the fictional character as a Black Box in order to simulate psychological depth.

An observer can only infer what is going on inside a Black Box from its inputs and outputs. Stitched Up is text-driven but highly visual and I am coupling my dialogue-based game engine with a responsive abstract visualisation system for the characters' internal emotional data to deliver subtextual layers of meaning. These combined outputs will affect the choices that reader-players make, the inputs. This stimulus-response model, which is my core gameplay loop, functions as a kind of rudder for the reader-player to steer a course through Stitched Up's narrative universe of Possible Worlds. How the reader-player chooses to interpret the characters' behaviour will determine the kind of story they experience and its outcome. The 'Damsel in Distress' trope invariably decrees a revenge-driven story, Stitched Up's 'dude in distress' device challenges that edict.