Reaching Toward Home: Software Interface as Queer Orientation in the Video Game Curtain

Abstract

abstract:Curtain (2014) by Dreamfeel is a queer video game about a “destructive” intimate relationship between two women. The game’s interface is so heavily pixelated it is difficult to make out the shape of a familiar home in the jagged pixels of the screen. Curtain questions the ability of narrative and visual representation to convey queer experience and queer space. This article examines how Curtain centralizes experiences and affects that exist at the periphery in mainstream games: the experience of being structurally disempowered, unsafe, and unable to move freely or make choices that matter. Using mechanics like repetition and multiplicity, Curtain produces the queer orientations and phenomenologies that make up a queer subject’s relationship to space and time.