The importance of personal games with Porpentine’s With Those We Love Alive.

With Those We Love Alive (WTWLA), by twine game creator Porpentine is viscerally interested in the body. Players are prompted to choose the body type of the queen at several intervals, creating an inconsistent image. The player too, undergoes body modification, with the instruction to draw symbols on their skin at notable parts of the narrative of the game. The game uses its physicality and exploration of the grotesque body to depict a deeply uncomfortable and dysphoric experience.  The bodily awareness and discomfort caused by the descriptors of the people in WTWLA mimics the dysphoria of transgender people, made apparent by the periodic applications of hormones by the player character.

Unreal and surreal bodies are a common theme in Porpentine’s work. She refers to herself with similarly unreal terms as the characters in WTWLA are described, her website even logging her as “slimedaughter” rather than using her name in its url. She also describes her work as “a sort of diary” (Michael Rogeau, 2014) and mentions that using metaphors and indirect ways of addressing her experiences is the only safe way to do it, as a transfeminine person.

This is not an uncommon approach to twine (the system on which WTWLA was made), Morgan Sea using the system to portray the kind of microaggressions that a trans woman faces at a zine fest in her game Zine Fair Lady. The medium of interactive fiction allows these voices, marginalised even by the indie community, to be heard. A twine game can easily be self-published and self-promoted without the necessity of physical space or the requirement of face to face interaction with other people, making the process of getting the voice out there safer, as Porpentine mentioned, and less likely to face discrimination that would halt production. In addition to this, twine is an accessible medium, requiring little to no knowledge of coding. This leads to a community that, according to Alison Harvey (2014), queers the common ideas of game design by derailing industry expectations of games being inherently difficult to create and by including “personal” content like Porpentine’s diary approach to her games.

Porpentine maintains this queered version of game design deliberately, and WTWLA represents this. The game tells the player that there are no wrong actions in the game, but there is a right and a wrong answer to one question in the game. “Are you part of the world, one with others, a person, or are you alone and apart?” If you choose to be “one with others, a person”, you become complicit in the killing of the spores of the queen, which are described much like new born kittens. “The more someone identifies themselves as being part of a social organism, the more they surrender of themselves, the less able they are to help the weak,” Porpentine said of this (Rogeau 2014). By keeping the games personal and independent, she is able to communicate the experiences of her life and potentially reach and help those who experience the same.