How Visual Novel Games Colonize Sexuality to Situating Sexualities

This paper argues that many queer visual novel dating games, including Dream Daddy: Dad Dating Simulator and UncleNeighbor: Uncle Dating Simulator, fail queerness not merely through poor representation but by constructing worlds that are detached from race, class, and other axes of identity, producing a "universal" sexuality that the author views as antithetical to queer politics. Drawing on Donna Haraway's concept of situated knowledges and on intersectional and anti-colonial feminist thought from Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and adrienne maree brown, the analysis contends that these games can reproduce post-racial, post-feminist, and even post-queer narratives that sustain white supremacy, including the fetishization of people of color within a colonial gaze.

The methodology centers on close readings of narrative text, characters, and imagery in the selected games, compared against Validate: Struggling Singles in Your Area, which the author presents as a counterexample. Validate, a demo previewed on its Steam page for a June 2022 release, depicts twelve struggling singles in their twenties navigating capitalism and is positioned as explicitly situated, intersectional, and confrontational in its queer representation. The paper notes that the game was developed by Queer Black and Brown game makers and drew criticism for departing from the conventions set by Dream Daddy.

The study's scope is limited to a small set of commercially released and upcoming PC visual novel titles, with no reported sample of players or developers and no quantitative data. Its conclusions are therefore interpretive, resting on the author's analysis of textual and visual content and on the theoretical framing that successful queer representation in this genre depends on rejecting universalized queerness in favor of messy, situated, and antagonistic portrayals.