Abstract

Lucah: Born of a Dream creates a queer narrative of trauma, repression, and self-creation not only through story or representation, but through its aesthetic and gameplay. By fusing a scratchy, childish visual style with ritualized, intimate combat, and religious and dreamlike symbolism, the game creates what queer scholars describe as “queer resistance”(Ruberg and Phillips 2018). This is experienced through the player as much as the character. Drawing on frameworks from queer game studies, including Pozo’s discussion of haptic and bodily game aesthetics (Pozo 2018) and Dalby’s account of queer orientations in play (Dalby 2024), as well as takeaways from Codex Entry’s video essay Have You Ever Seen an Angel Die? (Seals 2024), this paper argues that Lucah models queer trauma as an embodied process of becoming: a recursive movement through vulnerability, transformation, and survival. The game functions not only as a spectacle of queer suffering but as a lived narrative that asks players to inhabit the unstable, disorienting, and ultimately liberating world where a self can be remade.

Document Type

Paper

Student Type

Undergraduate

Department, Program, or Center

Software Engineering, Department of

College

Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

Publication Date

2025

Comments

2025 recipient of the Henry and Mary Kearse Writing Award

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