ABSTRACT
How do games express and represent parental love, affection, and caretaking through their goals, game mechanics, and other design elements? How is parental love both exalted and problematized? This chapter discusses how these parental tensions play out in two different games, That Dragon, Cancer and Life is Strange 2, building off a previous analysis conducted with Bioshock. This chapter argues that these games enable players to build relationships with other characters and/or practice affection and caretaking. These games express the tensions of parenting in their storyline, themes, and the player’s activities. Moreover, the game itself also acts as a type of authority figure who parents the player through a system of rules and boundaries. The two games are explored and compared using a textual analysis approach. Implications for game designers are also shared, such as to how designers can more effectively “parent” their players, while also facilitating trust and affection in a game.
