By locating queerness in gothic media and monstrosity I have created a set of queer gothic design principles—which I call queer gothic poetics—to guide the creation of games that are structurally queer gothic: this is the name I propose for the new genre of media that I am identifying. Games can be aesthetically gothic—Bloodborne, with its Gothic architecture and narrative of corruption; Darkest Dungeon, with its focus on legacy, ruin, and evil; and Gloom, with its despair, family ruin, and titular gloom, are proof enough of that—but are there existing games that have a gothic structure? In answering this question, I turn to a couple branches of theory: queer, gothic, and monster. Additionally, I look at academic writing and research in queer game studies as well as queer games themselves. How do queer game designers approach the production of queer games? What can I learn from them and how can I apply their insight and wisdom to the creation of queer gothic games? I begin by drawing upon the work of Tanya Krzywinska and Matthew RF Balousek. Krzywinska identifies five “gothic coordinates”—which can be used to locate gothicism in video games—in her 2015 paper “The Gamification of Gothic Coordinates in Videogames”: story/character, mise-en-scène, affect, style, and function. Balousek’s 2017 MFA thesis Opening the Horse proposes a set of design principles using queer formalism as a structure. After creating my queer gothic design principles, I used them to guide the creation of queer gothic game fragments: Grey University v0.1.0. Grey University v0.1.0 is a set of Twine games, interactive fiction, about gay vampires struggling with their monstrous nature, religious trauma, and falling in love. It is only one part of a larger project, and is tied to a piece of ongoing fanfiction titled Grey University I, published on the fanfiction site archiveofourown.org, commonly known as AO3. The last portion of this thesis paper is a postmortem of both Grey University v0.1.0 and the thesis paper itself. I identify my successes and failures with the creation of the game and the design principles and answer the questions: What is a queer gothic piece of media and how does one create one?

ABSTRACT

Stephanie Layton: Onion - An Overview of Layers

This thesis explores the numerous facets of animation as it relates to the concept of “layers”. Onion, which in itself is composed of many layers, is also a layer within the fabrics of life. Onion attempts to separate each layer metaphorically and literally encountered through my informal approach to animation and the development of my thesis. It is an overview of layers.

In historical Persian mythology, female power is a symbol of mother nature, the protector of humans and Earth. I am interested in how this historical, supernatural, fantastical figure could inspire the restoration of the critical role of women in contemporary society.Anahita is the Mother of Gods in old Persian. She is a symbol of fertility, pureness, creation, and affection. The Worship of Anahita continued in the Sassanid period (224 to 651 AD). D. M. Murdoch writes, “In Persian mythology, Anahita is the goddess of all the waters upon the earth and the source of the cosmic ocean; she drives a chariot pulled by four horses, wind, rain, cloud, and sleet; She is regarded as the source of life.” (Murdock, 2013, p.3) In contrast with my childhood, as a woman in Iran, I did not have the right to do many things without the consent of my father. In fact, I am the legal property of my father. The “hijab” dress code is mandatory and is enforced both by the law and by male relatives. So, I did not have the right to wear what I pleased, or generally, to live my life in a way that I truly wanted to. In legendary stories of goddesses, associated with ideas such as fertility, motherhood, and pureness, is the power and confidence to face the patriarchal culture of my country. So, as part of my graduate research, I have become interested in topics around female role models and feminist values. I critique the patriarchal conditions of contemporary Iran by contrasting them with a narrative of powerful female figures from Persian mythology. My goal is to reflect these contemporary problems by criticizing the obstacles and limitations women in Iran struggle with on a daily basis, and present an alternative, even fantastical representation of true stories.

This thesis explores the development of a digital game, Buddytale, which is itself an exploration of our attachments to virtual pets, our responsibilities as their caretakers, and the way digital mortality effects the value we place on our relationships to computational entities. Buddytale attempts to build an empathetic connection between the player and their virtual pet, and use that connection to drive feelings of care, nostalgia, and grief. This paper engages in conversation about the moral implications of virtual pet ownership as we consider the different lenses through which we can view them. It attempts to answer questions surrounding the usefulness of mortality in a digital context and examines the implicit death uniquely available to virtual entities. This thesis leaves open questions about what we owe to our digital companions, the authenticity of digital connections, and whether or not that matters in the first place.

Applied Cuteness Research (ACR) is a multimedia virtual reality installation where audiences can play with an artificially generated entity called cutie through embodied interaction. Anyone who enters the space is invited to “hug cuties in virtual reality.” ACR consists of a social gathering space and a VR experience that encourages audiences to observe and interact during the exhibit. This work offers an interdisciplinary approach to researching art and technology. It captures a snapshot of our current moral and social aptitudes that can serve as freeze frame of our attitudes toward technology for future reference by practitioners in any field.

The game making up this thesis, Tracks in Snow, and by extension the underlying technology of Puppitor, began with a simple premise: what if instead of players choosing what they wanted to say they instead were mainly focused on how they were saying it? This approach has been heavily inspired by the work on theater productions, particularly when production started, seeing the actors and directors take the words I’d written in quite different directions than what I’d had initially envisioned. Also let’s face it, we call a play a play. Why not try to make the playing of a play the basis for digital character interaction? After all, it’s been working for humans for several thousand years. To reach these ends I built a computational caricature of theatrical acting practices, including Stanislavsky’s Method, Anne Bogart and Tina Landau’s Viewpoints, and Zeami’s Treatises on Noh drama as a way to shift players away from controlling the structure of a narrative and towards control over the details. Tracks in Snow is built in Ren’Py to wrap this novel interaction style in a more familiar format. The game’s story focuses on one character’s crisis of faith and another’s longing for a home that only really exists in the past. My hope is that the interface I have created gets players to focus more on role-playing characters than trying to optimize their responses.

Games of the Oppressed is a framework for creating liberatory interactive art based on the work of Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire. This framework is a prototype, as all art is. Global capitalism is a system which overwhelmingly harms humanity. The current frameworks for developing games, a powerful tool for artistic expression and cultural movement, are largely built to reinforce interconnected systems of capital. This thesis attempts to build a framework for gamemaking which reinforces the movement of humanity toward a brighter future. How can games be made with the ongoing intention of facilitating this movement, cultivating class consciousness, and leading to deeper community connections and conversations around issues of oppression? A formulation for such a framework is posited that includes two basic criteria: that during play, players change the rules of the game, and that they engage consciously and critically with an issue of oppression from their own lives.

As part of my investigation of the framework, I created six example games and shared them at my program's MFA show. Additionally, I created a workshop which anyone can host where participants learn to create games of the oppressed, and a zine which helps provide context for the works, both of which ask viewers/participants to modify their contents.But I'm not just here to share my work on an MFA thesis. I'm here writing, sitting at my computer on a Friday night for one reason only: to convince you, dear friend, to make art more actively that builds toward post-capitalism. And, if you feel you need a structure to do that creation with: I will happily provide you this one. So get ready, get comfy, grab some tea and snacks. Let's play some games. Welcome, friend, to Games of the Oppressed.

Games are capable of conveying meaning via their mechanics. This is an information channel unique to games, which has been called procedural rhetoric (Bogost, 2007). What a player takes from a game depends on their personal reading (Summerville et al., 2018; Treanor, Schweizer, Bogost, & Mateas, 2011), but game creators and scholars can benefit from understanding a typical player’s experience and interpretation. Learning from analogy involves transferring insights from one system to another (Day & Goldstone, 2011; Hofstadter, 2001). This kind of transfer can be encouraged by metaphorical language, as demonstrated in an experiment examining the influence of the language used to describe crime in a newspaper article on reader’s crime-related policy preferences (Thibodeau & Boroditsky, 2011). The contribution of the current study is a psychological experiment investigating the influence of a novel rhetorical game, replacing these differences in metaphorical language in the preceding experiment with differences in game mechanics. Additional interpretive context was gained from the inclusion of other rhetorical games. We found that players perceive rhetorical games to be making an argument, but player interpretations of these arguments and the games’ influence on their attitudes were not necessarily consistent with the games’ intended message.