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This chapter investigates the online reception of the Canadian video game Child of Light (Ubisoft, Child of Light. Montreal: Ubisoft Studios. Video Game, 2014) as a space of encounter between imaginary childhoods and experienced adulthoods. Child of Light is a well-selling video game involving a conventional fairy-tale narrative about a young princess Aurora battling against darkness with a party of companions. The game contains narrative elements typical of children’s stories but has been popular among adult players. The focus of this chapter is on a specific case study: an adult male professional game reviewer and his publicly shared online life narrative, in which he discusses his real-life traumatic experiences in relation to the fairy-tale game narrative. The chapter draws on the notions of speculative life writing (Lehtonen, Writing Oneself into Someone Else’s Story—Experiments with Identity and Speculative Life Writing in Twilight Fan Fiction. Fafnir—Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research 2 (2): 7–18, 2015), neo-sincerity (Vermeulen and Akker, Notes on Metamodernism. Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 2 (1): 1–14, 2010), and play as an emotional survival strategy (Sutton-Smith, Emotional Breaches in Play and Narrative. In Children in Play, Story, and School, ed. Artin Goncu and L. Elisa, 161–176. Klein: The Guilford Press, 2001). By applying a theoretical-methodological framework building on discursive psychology and sociolinguistic narrative analysis (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou, Small Stories as a New Perspective in Narrative and Identity Analysis. Text & Talk 28 (3): 377–396, 2008; Brison, Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of the Self. In Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, 39–54. University Press of New England, 1999), I examine the ways in which the adult writer positions himself with regard to the child or childlike characters and discourses of coming-of-age in his life narrative. I argue that in this particular case the intergenerational play between the gaming adult and the fictional child or young adult characters in the game provides possibilities for therapeutic uses of the game. |
