Playing in Postmortem: Link Rot, Memory Decay, and Haunting Archives at the End of the World
Submission Type
Paper
Start Date/Time (EDT)
18-7-2024 4:45 PM
End Date/Time (EDT)
18-7-2024 5:45 PM
Location
Hypertexts & Fictions
Abstract
Anna Anthropy’s Queers in Love at the End of the World (2013) is one of the most celebrated games from the “queer games scene” of the early 2010s (Keogh, 2013). Made in Twine, Queers in Love depicts the last moments between two lovers at, appropriately, the end of the world. Scholars have analyzed the game’s mechanics and narrative, describing it as a poignant representation of queer life amongst inevitable death (Lo, 2017; Ruberg, 2017; Salter & Moulthrop, 2021). But the game is not what we remember. No game ever is. Even one as beloved and theorized has died, just as the fictional lovers have.
This talk emerges from my discovery of a glitch that adds extra, refreshed clocks, irrevocably shifting the game’s possibilities. A narrative about precious moments before the apocalypse becomes about hanging on, and how these moments sour when we hold too tightly. Instead of the game haunting us when we step away, we haunt the game, lingering in its passages. I propose a trans understanding of games that acknowledges their perpetual becoming, of the ways that play always changes games, and of the need to accept (and even celebrate) this change.
In exploring this glitch I found other ways the game changed since its creation. I perform an autopsy, moving through the ephemeral traces of life that mark its shifting archival body, which become interwoven into accounts of my experiences, snippets of saved IRC chats, Discord messages buried under ever-refreshing feeds, and posts on defunct blogs. The code remains the same, but links rot, social media accounts change hands, and thus the game connects to a surprising collection of intertextual documents. Through this excavation I ask who is left behind in imaginings of technological stability? How do trans designers and players haunt games? And how might we care for games and those that make them by allowing them to change?
References
Anthropy, Anna (2013) “Queers in Love at the End of the World,” Web.
Keogh, Brendan (2013) “Just Making Things and Being Alive About It,” Polygon.
Lo, Claudia (2017) “Everything is Wiped Away: Queer Temporality in Queers in Love at the End of the World,” Camera Obscura, 32(2).
Ruberg, Bo (2017) “Permalife: Video Games and the Queerness of Living,” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 9(2).
Salter, Anastasia & Stephen Moulthrop (2021) Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives, Amherst College Press.
Recommended Citation
Schmalzer, Madison, "Playing in Postmortem: Link Rot, Memory Decay, and Haunting Archives at the End of the World" (2024). ELO (un)linked 2024. 6.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2024/hypertextsandfictions/schedule/6
Playing in Postmortem: Link Rot, Memory Decay, and Haunting Archives at the End of the World
Hypertexts & Fictions
Anna Anthropy’s Queers in Love at the End of the World (2013) is one of the most celebrated games from the “queer games scene” of the early 2010s (Keogh, 2013). Made in Twine, Queers in Love depicts the last moments between two lovers at, appropriately, the end of the world. Scholars have analyzed the game’s mechanics and narrative, describing it as a poignant representation of queer life amongst inevitable death (Lo, 2017; Ruberg, 2017; Salter & Moulthrop, 2021). But the game is not what we remember. No game ever is. Even one as beloved and theorized has died, just as the fictional lovers have.
This talk emerges from my discovery of a glitch that adds extra, refreshed clocks, irrevocably shifting the game’s possibilities. A narrative about precious moments before the apocalypse becomes about hanging on, and how these moments sour when we hold too tightly. Instead of the game haunting us when we step away, we haunt the game, lingering in its passages. I propose a trans understanding of games that acknowledges their perpetual becoming, of the ways that play always changes games, and of the need to accept (and even celebrate) this change.
In exploring this glitch I found other ways the game changed since its creation. I perform an autopsy, moving through the ephemeral traces of life that mark its shifting archival body, which become interwoven into accounts of my experiences, snippets of saved IRC chats, Discord messages buried under ever-refreshing feeds, and posts on defunct blogs. The code remains the same, but links rot, social media accounts change hands, and thus the game connects to a surprising collection of intertextual documents. Through this excavation I ask who is left behind in imaginings of technological stability? How do trans designers and players haunt games? And how might we care for games and those that make them by allowing them to change?
References
Anthropy, Anna (2013) “Queers in Love at the End of the World,” Web.
Keogh, Brendan (2013) “Just Making Things and Being Alive About It,” Polygon.
Lo, Claudia (2017) “Everything is Wiped Away: Queer Temporality in Queers in Love at the End of the World,” Camera Obscura, 32(2).
Ruberg, Bo (2017) “Permalife: Video Games and the Queerness of Living,” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 9(2).
Salter, Anastasia & Stephen Moulthrop (2021) Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives, Amherst College Press.
Bio
Madison Schmalzer (she/her) is a media scholar, competitive speedrunner, and glitch artist currently teaching at Ringling College of Art & Design. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media from North Carolina State University. Madison’s scholarship explores trans media art, emergent play practices like speedrunning, and embodied relationships to technology. Her published work can be found in or is forthcoming at The Journal of Cinema & Media Studies, Game Studies, Animation, Camera Obscura, and The Journal of Games Criticism. You can find her speedrunning Hades, Inscryption, and breaking all manner of media on Twitch as @MadzBrutal. Website: https://madisonschmalzer.com/