Play with Me: Exploring the Autobiographical through Digital Games

This paper examines autobiography in digital games through two artworks by media artist Mary Flanagan, primarily the game modification [domestic] (2003), with a shorter look at [rootings]. Its central aim is to analyze how these games construct and represent subjectivity, how they negotiate agency both within the game and in cultural production, and how the game form structures self-narrative. The author situates this analysis within theoretical work from both autobiography studies and game studies, positioning these works as rare examples in a field where non-fiction and biographical digital games remain uncommon.

The analysis finds that [domestic] uses the first-person shooter framework in unconventional ways. By removing a visible avatar and replacing combat-oriented imagery with personal photographs and poetic text recounting a childhood house fire, the work leaves the player's identity in contention and produces a disorienting, shifting subjectivity. The paper argues that the game's appropriated rules, which originally hail a masculine subject of mastery, are reframed so that the player's "shooting" becomes defensive resistance against trauma, a reclaiming of agency within a feminist autobiographical project. The game structure is also presented as a technology of memory, where rules and systems offer a metaphorical means of gaining control over recalled experience.

The paper concludes that autobiographical game works, despite the tension between games' rule-based constraints and the fixed, non-fiction selves of autobiography, can exploit the fragmented, procedural, and hypermediated qualities of the medium. Its scope is conceptual and interpretive, drawing on close readings of two specific art mods rather than broad surveys or empirical data.