Tamyres Lucas Manhaes de Souza

Thesis title: You Could Have Saved Her: Representations of Violence Against Women in Choice-based Games

Tamyres Lucas (she/her) is a MA student who is interested in exploring ways video games can respectfully represent and meaningfully address systemic violence such as violence against women considering their potential and limitation as an entertainment medium. Should video games avoid tackling such sensitive topics? What are the roles of video games when portraying such themes?

To answer these questions, she does a case studies of choice-based games that represent violence against women where she examines how video game elements, such as narrative and mechanic, overlap to perpetuate hegemonic discourses on VAW.

As analytical tools, Tamyres develops the concepts of Meaningful and Meaningless Agency to address how video game developers define what choices should matter in video games and what messages these distinctions between meaningful and meaningless choices serve to render gendered gameplay experiences.

Publications, writings and/or artwork:

• https://www.classandgames.com/post/there-is-no-happily-ever-after-the-representation-of-social-markers-in-the-wolf-among-us-2013
• https://www.classandgames.com/post/it-comes-in-waves-game-art?fbclid=IwAR1DzaUoUIB9A9PHUxZQp-VS5-MsfTrrbsQa1_wFt7RR32tGbtMKwWMkA8A
• https://www.sbgames.org/sbgames2019/files/papers/ArtesDesignFull/197777.pdf
• https://www.sbgames.org/sbgames2017/papers/ArtesDesignShort/175381.pdf

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