queering replay value

Anna Anthropy’s 2013 Twine game queers in love at the end of the worldhas been—for me, at least—one of the most potent games I’ve played so far on our syllabus. As I mentioned in class earlier this week, it’s also the game I’ve spent the most time with (apart from Braid), which—given its ten-second window of play (albeit one that invites recursivity)—seems rather counterintuitive. In a sense, I might be considered an ideal player for queers in love at the end of the world, given that 1) I am queer, 2) I am in love (aww), and 3) apocalypse is my central research topic. Without dismissing the personal parallel, I’d prefer to put the empathy conversation on hold instead to think through what this game captures about being in love—and, specifically, about being in queer love. According to parameters discussed in class, this game qualifies as queer both by its content as well as its auteur, but is there something about its form—specifically the Twine mechanics and the temporal frame—that can also figure as queer?

I believe the answer lies partly in the ephemerality of the apocalyptic scenario, which mirrors and amplifies the intensity of queer erotic/romantic intimacy. In a world in which queer love faces innumerable constraints, pressures, and stigmas, all moments of queer intimacy comprise a sense of the stolen and the short-lived, the precious and the subversive. More than that, I’d argue that apocalyptic temporalities are inherently queer temporalities. In the introduction to No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman outlines the concept of “reproductive futurism” with the claim that “the fantasy subtending the image of the Child invariably shapes the logic within which the political itself must be thought” (2). Society’s conception of the future—which is to say, society’s belief in a purposeful existence as structured by capitalist-heteronormative values—hinges on the figure of the child. Edelman critiques this framework for its exclusion and implied condemnation of queer experience. In reproductive futurism, heteronormative parameters dictate forward-moving ideologies of productivity and social progress as focused through the model of the traditional nuclear family. In foreclosing futurity itself, apocalyptic scenarios impose the queer alternative to dominant modes of heteronormative production and progress, and thus enforce a reimagining of human values to unearth intense meaning detached from future possibility.

Of course, I play queers in love at the end of the worldagain and again because I’m curious about the numerous Twine pathways—but that explanation for the replay impulse seems to fall unsatisfactorily short. There’s something about the Twine platform itself—especially when the player has to rush through it—that encapsulates a certain sublime affect of an experience that is there and gone in the blink of an eye, the text barely registering consciously as the player rushes madly to live life to the fullest—much like the experience of being in love. Playing over and over again collapses antithetical temporal modes into a perpetual instant of escape—not through death, but from the constraints of a world that no longer matters

It makes us wonder which world is coming to an end, and what might come afterward—or, rather, “Afterword”—for there is no apocalypse without postapocalypse. This game is narratively skewed towards recursive endings: at the level of game mechanics, the player has only one chance to “Begin” (unless they reload the website). When the clock ticks down to zero and the screen comes to rest at the ultimatum, “Everything is wiped away,” the only remaining choices are “Afterword” and “Restart.” The afterword, “WHEN WE HAVE EACH OTHER WE HAVE EVERYTHING,” counterbalances the apocalyptic ultimatum and disrupts time: even though “everything is wiped away,” the game tells us there’s still an “afterword” with a “when” in which “we have each other,” and thus “everything.” I don’t know that I would call it hopeful (“everything is [still] wiped away”), but I don’t think that’s the point—the “word” in afterword (and, hence, the Twine form) captures a queer potential for existing meaningfully in an instant. This game's so-called "replay value" eschews financial/capitalist connotations of profit, and instead resonates through queer structures of recursive temporality.

Work Cited

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke UP, 2004.