Stuck in Suburbia: Ineffable Glossolalia (Nikolai, 2017)
摘要
Tabitha Nikolai’s games play out in recreations of turn-of-the-millennium shopping malls, pizza restaurants and suburban homes. Bearing witness to waning American dreams of upward mobility, they help us to understand how videogames came to function as spaces where disenfranchised young men could rehearse regressive fantasies. At the same time, Nikolai’s work draws on her own experiences as a queer and trans teenager to suggests how videogames can foster less straitened understandings of identity, history and community. This chapter focuses on Nikolai’s 2017 game Ineffable Glossolalia. Shuttling players between a trans gamer’s bedroom and a recreation of Weimar Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science—the target of the first Nazi book burning—Nikolai uses spatial storytelling techniques reminiscent of ‘walking simulator’ games to explore parallels between Trump’s America and 1930s Germany.