Abstract: Siblings (and Doppelgangers) in Video Games
Digital media differs from traditional media not only in terms of formal media structure and interaction, but also in terms of theme and narrative construction. For instance, video games cannot be examined under the traditional Freudian models that are applied to film and print because the primary relationships in video games are not romantic, but sibling relationships. The shift from romantic to sibling relationships change both the ludic space in which the games are played and change the overall movement of these narratives. While many games do follow more conventional romantic storylines, these are often in conjunction with or as a subset to sibling storylines. For instance, both of the early games Super Mario Brothers and The Legend of Zelda are technically princess on pedastal stories, but to read these in a Freudian manner misses the sibling relationships in each. In The Legend of Zelda, Link and Zelda are seemingly brother and sister (Link and Aryll in The Wind Waker are definitely siblings) and Super Mario Brothers predicates first on the relationship between Mario and Luigi and then on their quest to save the princess.
The Resident Evil series epitomizes the significance of sibling
relationships because the series is Teen or Mature rated - areas where
romantic relationships tend to be more prevalent than in gaming overall.
While Resident Evil does have the romantic tension between Jill
and Chris Redfield and others, the more significant relationship is that
between Chris and his sister Claire. Resident Evil and other
games use sibling relationships because they are more familiar relationships
for their audience (often sibling sets with absent parents) and because
it makes the characters equal, important for designers because designing
alternate characters where one is greatly more powerful proves detrimental
to gameplay. The flipping of brother-sister pairs in games like Resident
Evil – Code: Veronica - concretizes the seemingly simple sibling
relationships in video games, but the also twisted relationships of dual
character games where the male and female characters are used as interchangeable
counterparts for each other in order to add player character choice without
disrupting the game narrative. In this paper, I argue that video games
must be examined both for the new stories they tell and the new ways in
which they tell these stories. For this, I focus on the significance of
romantic and sibling relationships in video game narratives to argue for
an examination of video games that addresses them in relation to similar
media, like fairy tales and comic book teams. I also draw on Deleuze and
Guattari’s theories of schizoanalysis to establish a method of studying
these sibling relationships.