A Body Without End: The Trans Twine Games of Porpentine Charity Heartscape

This extended abstract analyzes the speculative body horror in trans-authored Twine games, focusing on the work of Porpentine Charity Heartscape. The analysis employs textual and audio-visual-haptic methods to explore how Porpentine's games, such as With those we Love Alive (2014) and Vesp: A History of Sapphic Scaphism (2016), use experimental interactive fiction to problematize the division between body and world through a trans re-appropriation of body horror. The research contributes to the emerging field of Trans Game Studies and the study of Twine as a significant "Minor Platform."

Porpentine's games are characterized by surreal narratives, abstract eroticized punctuation, and looping structures that evoke the powerful strangeness of transition. Rather than aiming for cis/straight audience palatability, her work prioritizes "nonrehabilitated form of bad affect" for an engaged trans community, opposing assimilationist narratives often seen in mainstream media. The games frame transition as an ongoing carnal process, aligning with Susan Stryker's concept of Frankenstein as a radical trans subjectivity that mobilizes monstrous power beyond natural order.

The document argues that Porpentine's work exemplifies Twine's capacity to destabilize normative structures of feeling within gaming culture. Her games, like Only Queers in Love at the End of World (Anthropy, 2013) and Ritual of the Moon (Stone, 2019), align with radical, affective Twine and craft-based works that address queer utopian mobilization and queer negativity. Through eroticized networks, shattered cities, and industrial undead nations, Porpentine creates dark speculative playgrounds that expand understandings of bodily monstrosity, sensuality, and temporality.

The analysis highlights how Porpentine's games engage players as "operators" who re-orient their bodies by re-writing character desires and experiencing textual resistance. These dystopias function as "reparative games" that articulate resilient survival and utopian dreaming through surreal everyday rituals and hypertext loops. The work embraces the endless process of change and "decreation" rather than affective restoration, using body horror to frame open wounds as new points of attachment and extension. The trans player is afforded a corporeal poetics, finding catharsis and new understandings of the body's ecstatic extension and transmutation through play, embodying the concept of "bodies without end."