ABSTRACT
Games have the potential to disturb the white middle-class suburb by uncovering the violence of the police city. Games also allow players to explore fear, anger, power, agency, and resistance through feminist fantasies of violence. This chapter explores the representation of the suburb, and the gendered and racialized concept of ‘safety’ in Life Is Strange (LIS) (2015) (and briefly, its prequel, Life Is Strange: Before the Storm (2017)), and Night in the Woods (NITW) (2017) before moving on to discuss the messy and ambivalent performance of feminist violence as a form of pleasure. Role-played and imagined acts of feminist violence are modes of ‘critical play’ (Flanagan 2009) that allow for complicated feminist identity performances that acknowledge and celebrate the bad feelings of hurt, fear, and anger that marginalized bodies experience under settler colonialism. This mode of affective play honours Rebecca Traister’s call to ‘recognize our own rage as valid’ (2018, xxviii). Sara Ahmed envisions ‘killing joy as a world-making project’ (2013); in these games, suburban digital spaces become reclaimed through destruction-as-feminist-creation.
