Bride, Demon or Alien? Undressing Stigma in Catherine: Full Body

This work-in-progress paper examines how digital games can foster affective engagement with characters in order to explore social stigma, focusing on the stigmatized theme of infidelity in romantic relationships. Its central argument is that players' emotional responses to fictional characters should be understood as part of wider social practices, and that games like Catherine: Full Body can prompt reflection on stigmatization by allowing players to act on stereotypical notions of character traits. The authors ground this argument in a textual analysis of the 2019 Japanese game Catherine: Full Body, using a reader-response framework adapted to the ergodic structure of games, and they position their work against a gap in empirical research on how actual players experience emotional engagement with commercial game characters.

The theoretical foundation draws on Frow's account of affective engagement as recognition and reconstruction of characters, Leino's view of emotionality as highly subject-dependent, and Goffman's and Link and Phelan's conceptions of stigma as arising from relations among attributes, stereotypes, and social power. The game's three female-presenting characters, Catherine, Katherine, and Rin, are examined through its "system of affection," which shapes how players interact with them and makes player choices visible as consequences of their engagement. The authors note that Rin was added in this version as a more diverse representation, which they treat as an opening for a more nuanced look at the stigmatization of female-presenting bodies.

The study is methodologically modest by design. It proposes open-ended, phenomenologically informed interviews with a small sample of empirical players, justified on the grounds that the research prioritizes individual felt experience over generalizable effects. The paper's scope is therefore qualitative and exploratory rather than statistical, and it is presented as an early-stage contribution to research on affect, stigma, and player experience in narrative-driven games.