This Could Be Us: Networked Intimacy in Single-Player Games

This extended abstract examines how three single-player games use simulated social media to explore networked intimacy: Christine Love's Don't Take It Personally Babe, It Just Ain't Your Story (2011), Mitu Khandaker-Kokoris' Redshirt (2013), and Robert Yang's Cobra Club (2015). Its central argument is that these games use the narrative and interface conventions of digital platforms, alongside genres such as the visual novel, science fiction serial, and high school film, to dramatize questions of identity, privacy, surveillance, and consent. The paper positions this work within recent scholarship on affect and self-representation online and within game studies' growing interest in sex and relationships in games.

The analysis treats each game as a distinct case. Love's title frames players as a teacher with access to students' public and private online lives, exposing both the warmth and the hypocrisy, gossip, and abuse of trust that networked devices enable, while questioning the promise of agency that single-player games offer. Khandaker-Kokoris's Redshirt uses a Facebook-style interface on a doomed space station, where escape depends on cultivating powerful contacts, a premise that critiques the instrumental, "gamified" treatment of relationships on social platforms. Yang's Cobra Club, a sexually explicit game, uploads player-created images to a Tumblr page disguised as a government surveillance site, staging "context collapse" and highlighting how private media can circulate beyond its intended audience.

The paper's broader conclusion is that these sexual and self-representational concerns are also political, bearing on power, surveillance, and free expression. The author argues that single-player games remain relevant to networked culture precisely because they can examine online intimacy in ways that multiplayer and social games often do not. The analysis is qualitative and interpretive, based on close play and textual reading of the three titles rather than on survey or statistical data.