Joining various critical discourses, notably critical play (Flanagan, 2009), feminist and queer video game theories (Ruberg and Shaw, 2017), our project is interested in the potential of digital literary works (e.g., visual novels, video games) in raising awareness towards social issues, such as equity, inclusivity, and diversity. Analyzing digital literary works as text-objects, we can question them and the discourses they transmit through their procedural rhetoric (Bogost, 2008). With the growing interest in empathy-driven games in the industry and their mobilization of social issues, especially those related to queerness, we decided to explore these designed experiences and the ways in which they may provoke (or not) awareness in players. In this article, we analyzed through a socio-semiotic approach two video games, drawn from a larger queer video game corpus, dealing differently with social issues such as representation and normalization of queerness, to further understand their potential as literary works.
Vallières et al. (Thu,) studied this question.