The conceit of A Normal Lost Phone is that the player has found an abandoned smartphone and is trying to locate its owner, a teenager named Sam. This conceit has been used to great effect by game designers looking to explore questions of privacy, secrecy and consent. In A Normal Lost Phone the game lies in using the available information to unlock new apps - and, with them, new narrative insights. Finally via a secret diary accessed by entering Sam's zip code into what is ostensibly a calculator app , we learn that Sam has left town to start a new life with a new identity.
The putative justification for violating a stranger's privacy here is our desire to make sure that a missing teenager is safe - but this narrative framework is arguably little more than an alibi for players to indulge their prurient fantasies. Black Room Cassie McQuater, Described by McQuater as 'very autobiographical', Black Room draws on its creator's experiences of 'insomnia and anxiety' and her memories of childhood sleepovers spent watching her grandmother also an insomniac playing Super Nintendo games.
In Lost Memories Nina is a lovelorn teenager learning to build websites and starting to document her life online; Cibele is set several years later, and sees her striking up a romance with a fellow player of the massively-multiplayer online roleplaying game Valtameri , who lives on the other side of the USA. As I note in my article on Cibele , 3 where many videogames promise players control over the course of the plot, here our ability to alter Nina's fate is ultimately rather limited. While we can assume that this is a matter of maintaining fidelity to Freeman's actual experiences, it also feels fitting given the feelings of marginalisation and disempowerment with which the games deal.
Cobra Club begins with us taking racy images of the player-character and ends with a twist that foregrounds state surveillance, as we discover that the game has been uploading our photos to an NSA database actually a Tumblr blog masquerading as an NSA database. While the game offers an account of privacy, play and online sociability that is at once ingenious, funny and thought-provoking, for the videogame streaming platform Twitch it was simply too rude. When Twitch added Cobra Club to its blacklist Yang expressed his disappointment that a game with a 'focus When Apple dropped Tumblr from its app store over concerns that the platform was being used to distribute child pornography and so-called 'revenge porn', Tumblr reacted by banning all 'adult content', using software that incorrectly flagged innocuous posts.
This move has hamstrung Yang's satire even as it illustrates his arguments: as he has explained ' I had chosen Tumblr because it seemed like it was queer-positive and sex-positive, with a large enough infrastructure and community.
