A Body Without End: The Trans Twine Games of PorpentineCharity Heartscape

This extended abstract outlines a textual (Myr, 2008) and audio-visual-haptic (Keogh, 2018) analysis of speculative body horror in trans-authored twine games, using the award-winning but under-researched corpus of Porpentine Charity Heartscape as central case study.Focused analysis of work by and for trans audiences in depth will contribute to the emerging field of Trans Game Studies and its initial summary and typological approaches (Ruberg, 2022), and to directions in the study of Twine as a significant 'Minor Platform' troubling gaming's margins (Nicoll, 2021).Games such as With those we Love Alive (2014) and Vesp: A History of Sapphic Scaphism (2016) confront players with experimental weird interactive fiction where choice is as much about perspective as the redirection of plot; text dissolves into abstract eroticised punctuation; and narratives loop around quotidian rituals in strange dystopias.I argue that uniting Porpentine's formal experiments is an interest in darkly problematising the division of a body from the world around it through the trans re-appropriation of body horror: "There is a dist....ance between my skin and my skull [] I perform this skin drag" (Orifice Clique, 2015); "under the onslaught of this almost billowing, vividly suffused skin [] Putting the mask on feels like attaching a healthy and proper face to a gaping hole."(Vesp: A History of Sapphic Scaphism, 2016).From surreal neon-lined quests under hormone withdrawal, to genre-blending narratives of selling memories for care or crafting reality-bending weaponry for love, her games evoke transition's powerful strangeness (Lavery, 2022); even viscerally exploiting the player-body's extension before and behind the screen (Keogh, 2018) with instructions to draw on our own flesh in rituals marking time and transformation.Rather than framing trans experience as palatable to cis/straight audiences as in the appropriation of many trans developers' work as 'empathy games' (Pozo, 2018), Porpentine generates new terms dedicated to an engaged community that "prioritise[s] a nonrehabilitated form of bad affect" (Lax, 2021:2) against its elision or sublimation.As Parasite's (2014) protagonist reflects, with textual redactions throughout destabilising its reading: "it wasn't until years later that id figure out what i could be, t at [sic] i would gain words to clad my nakedness".This opposes assimilation and trans(homo)nationalist (Pruar, 2015:46) extension of subjectivity to