Document Type
Article
Abstract
In her essay on “Fractured Identities: Siblings and Doubles in Video Games” Laurie Taylor explores how certain norms of video game design – originally derived from technological constraints of code space and processing speed – continue as the narrative parameters of many if not most contemporary video games. Synthesizing approaches from literary studies and narratology, Taylor offers an innovative angle on the fractured identities of doubles and siblings as the narrative correspondence to now largely obsolete technological constraints. Game-play, related to but nevertheless distinct from the literary type of narrative, as Taylor insists, is a key factor in determining what might be called the identity politics of video games. Shifting her perspective to include a Deleuzian point of view, the author goes on to argue that such structures as created by mirroring characters and/or game worlds effectively remove parental figures from power. What appears as a mere aberration within conventional psychoanalytic terms thus takes on the quality of a utopian family as it installs the sibling/double relation, i.e. the relation between equals, as a radical alternative to traditional familial structures.
Recommended Citation
Taylor, Laurie N. "Fractured Identities: Siblings and Doubles in Video Games." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol. 5, no. 2, 2005, pp. 1–24.https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol5/iss2/8
Included in
Communication Technology and New Media Commons, Family, Life Course, and Society Commons, Game Design Commons