Haunting Looking is a marriage of my two great loves: video games, and history.
Haunted Looking is an experiment: can a video game teach history? Can its narrative impart a meaningful experience that facilitates a deeper understanding of lesbian life in the United States?
In Haunted Looking, players randomly encounter “ghosts,” or the portraits / archival objects of Joan E. Biren’s Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians (1979). Players navigate through a digital exhibit of photographs of lesbians guided by the narrative frame of a haunted house. No single play through of Haunted Looking will allow the player to discover all of the portraits / archival objects. I encourage players to play the game multiple times and think about how the exhibit shifts with varying combinations of different archival objects.
With Haunted Looking, I argue that video games are persuasive tools that uniquely engage their audience, investing the player in thinking deeply and critically about the content of the game. Haunted Looking encourages the player to think critically about visual representation of lesbian subjects, including the photograph and the game itself.
[ Problems of Representing Lesbians ] [ Video Games as Queer Objects ]