Digital literacies of intimacy: women’s engagement and learning in otome video games

Abstract

This article explores the concept of ‘digital intimacy literacies’ by analyzing how Chinese women gamers form deep emotional connections with virtual male characters in otome games. The study examines how players engage with the games’ textual narratives, character design, and immersive interactions to create a complex structure of feeling. By focusing on these more-than-human digital intimacies, the research argues that the gaming practices of these women are a form of organized literacy, which allows them to interpret, communicate and negotiate meanings within the encoded texts and affodances of games, and to cultivate intimate relationships with virtual characters that are comparable in depth to those in real life. While these games provide genuine feelings of empowerment and authentic affective connection, they are also sites where players critically engage with and resist the embedded post-feminist and consumerist ideologies. The article thus broadens the discourse on digital intimacy and highlights its socio-cultural implications within the virtual-real continuum of post-socialist China.