Playing with Time and Gender: Questioning Youth through Trans Games' Perspectives

I explore representation and experiential embodiment of the mixed temporalities of trans youth in games, and argue that play can help complicate ideas of selfhood and maturation. Transition doubles youth in many ways, such as experiences of second puberty through hormone treatment, the mismatch of coming-of-age and ‘coming out’ for those who transition later in life; it also problematises ideas of linear development and what is important for the survival of the self. Through scenes of ambivalent relationship to memory in games such as If Found… (2020), Celeste (2018) and Tell Me Why (2020), this paper uses trans temporalities and affects to think intersectionally about age through the bodily experience of play.