Thesis abstract:

Pleasure is seen as central to the formation of sexual, gendered and erotic subjectivities within feminist media studies, and is thus inseparable from contemporary considerations of power, privilege, the personal and the political. Mediated eroticism is accordingly regarded as a cultural force with subjugative or emancipatory potential, reflected in its legacy within feminist film studies and feminist literature studies. However, ludic pleasures, which I term as the gendered configurations of desire, intimacy and fantasy in video games, remain under-theorised despite the unique role games play in disseminating cultural myths surrounding sexuality and gender. This lacuna means there is a strong impetus to discover how games, as an emerging medium, (re)produce or disrupt existing ideological and heteropatriarchal arrangements of pleasure in preceding media forms. This thesis works towards a theory of ludic pleasure, specifically taking dating simulations as its object of inquiry to uncover whether interactive romance games can facilitate playful, experimental and non-normative modes of expressing desire for emerging digital audiences. Drawing on Adrienne Shaw’s (2017) updated model of Stuart Hall’s canonical Encoding/Decoding (2001) framework for interactive digital media, this project adopts a digital feminist approach: qualitative mixed-methods are utilised to explore the confluence of representational, spectatorial, and subcultural practices associated with dating simulations. While digital technologies have traditionally been inscribed as masculine in limiting ways within game studies and broader culture, this project offers a compelling alternative use for these technologies by examining how they can offer a freer, feminist and transgressive politics of desire for new digital audiences.