"This Is a Story About Regeneration": Understanding The Missing: J. J. Macfield and the Island of Memories

Katherine Isbister's and Bonnie Ruberg's work on empathy and permalife grounds the analysis of The Missing: J. J. Macfield and the Island of Memories (2018), a game whose grotesque self-harm mechanics, distorted audio, and text-message narrative are read as deliberate tools for building empathy with its protagonist. The central argument is that the game's brutal gameplay is integral rather than incidental to its story of self-acceptance and regeneration. Through a phenomenological and queer phenomenological lens, the study reads J. J. Macfield's experience of body dysmorphia, family rejection, and conversion-therapy pressure as the emotional core that the game's mechanics are designed to make felt.

The analysis identifies the game as a story about a trans woman's self-acceptance rather than a tragedy. Its body horror, dismemberment gameplay, and settings such as the Franklin Rose Church and the Vitruvian Man graveyard are interpreted as mirrors of J. J.'s struggles with dysmorphia, religious family pressure, and bullying. Key narrative beats, including the mother's texts, the Emily phone calls, the clocktower suicide attempt, and the closing message "This is a story about regeneration," anchor this reading. The author argues that the game reverses the tragic-ending trope common in transgender media, and cites developer SWERY's account that the team consulted transgender individuals and psychology experts during development.

The conclusion holds that the game avoids "empathy tourism" by inviting players to relate to J. J.'s story through their own experiences, framing survival and regeneration as a refusal of death in the face of oppression. The scholarship situates this work within broader critiques of "empathy games" and within queer game studies, noting the developer's real name, Hidetaka Suehiro, and the intentional allusion in the Hairshrieker's box cutter to J. J.'s suicide attempt.