"You" Made into Queerness

Queers in Love at the End of the World uses the second person in a way that asks the player to assume queerness. The second-person “you” is an unpopular point of view because of it challenges the person reading the second person to identify as the “you” of the game. The second-person “you” creates a subject and object; it makes the object of the address very self-conscious, while drawing that object’s attention to the subject who is addressing them. “You” can provoke defiance or rebellion. Queers in Love, however, integrates the second person with an assumed queerness to make the player feel the crisis of the end of its world.

Because of the way second-person creates or enforces an identity, players tend either to be fully accepting of the “you” or to react strongly against its incompatibilities with themselves. But in Queers in Love at the End of the World, there is too little time to reflect on whether the “you” of the game matches with you the player. The second-person “you” is present in the game, but “you” is not only characterized very little in the story, but not even the focus of the story. The actions players can take within the game center around the relationship between the two characters; the passages describe the player’s actions and how they affect the player’s partner; it focuses on affect and memory, and characterization is secondary. This effect makes it easy to be the object of the “you,” but makes it hard for a player to feel defiance towards that.

The title “Queers in Love at the End of the World” makes the player queer despite the fact that the player’s character is never characterized or identified. The game doesn’t explicitly state that the player’s character is female or queer; that aspect is the backdrop of the game, an assumption whose implications resonates throughout the game’s structure but whose immediacy fades in light of the urgency of the gameplay. In some ways, this is like many mainstream games that assume the player is male. Diversity has come in the form of allowing players to choose their character, but even that is not as freeing as might be assumed. Designers still make choices about what types of looks and actions are possible and which are recognized. For example, the Elder Scrolls series of games is notorious for their customizability. In this series, choosing between “male” and “female” models leads to different, typically male and typically female facial structures. Queers in Love abandons any prescriptive take on a player character’s appearance and characteristics (with no images at all), and instead prescribes only a status essential to its ten seconds of gameplay: queerness. Unlike what Whitney Pow states in “Reaching Toward Home Software Interface as Queer Orientation in the Video Game Curtain”, though the love and the desperation to hold onto each other embodies queerness, queerness in the POV is embodied at a deeper level.

The two effects combined creates a queerness of the POV: a casual point where the player has no time to challenge the queerness of the main character, but rather understands it as the thread through the crisis of the ending of the world.