Kübra Aksay

Mystery and crime fiction have always been popular genres in video games. Among the many games with a plot hinging upon the investigation of a crime, it can be said that there is no total lack of representations of women as criminals and/or investigators. However, the two games published in the past few years, Her Story (2015) and Overboard! (2021), take an unorthodox approach to both whodunnits and the role of female characters within them. Both games have female characters as the perpetrator and the investigator of the crime, and in both cases, the story of the crime is only told from a woman’s perspective. Particularly because of the duality of their roles and perspectives, the women in these two games are multidimensional protagonists, as opposed to those who are secondary characters portrayed as damsels in distress, or nurturing and redeeming figures in many other video games. While the contrast between the roles of women in these titles is especially noteworthy, analyses of female video game characters, especially those controlled by players, are crucial to understand how representations of gender within the medium have been changing and can change in the future.

In this talk, I aim to contribute to the debate surrounding present and future representations of women within contemporary video games by taking a close look into the female protagonists in Her Story and Overboard!. As the selected titles are both detective games, I will also discuss the relationship between the portrayal of these female characters and the gameplay elements. In order to do this, I will use Clara Fernández Vara’s critical analysis of game design in the Sherlock Holmes video game series 1 and make a comparison between the character actions in the series with the iconic male detective and the two games my paper focuses on.