Games+Learning+Society 11 Conference

Love Is a Battlefield: A Comparative Analysis of Love as a Game Mechanic and SartreÍs Being and Nothingness
Kyrie Eleison H. Caldwell

This piece uses a semiotic textual analysis to discuss love-based mechanics in particular games, namely Fire Emblem: Awakening, Persona 3 and Persona 4, and the Harvest Moon series. These games’ love-based mechanics share an archetypical construction that posits a problematic discourse of love that revokes subjectivity and agency from the (usually non-player) characters who serve as objects of love for the player character. That rhetoric of love is then compared to that of Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness in order to explore how these games’ mechanics of love undermine the diversity of games’ narratives and people’s actual experiences of love.