The Most Intimate Conflict of All: Marriage as Conflict in Digital Games

In daily marital lives, spouses often engage in various conflicts and employ a mixture of different strategies when resolving these. According to family development theories, conflict resolution processes influence couple relationship well-being. This chapter examines and compares different attempts to convert intimate marital conflicts into video game mechanics. Are games self-aware about the delicate, intimate, and intensely emotional nature of marital conflict, and thus the difficulty of conveying such conflict in a medium oriented towards entertainment values? Using strategies borrowed from textual analysis, the chapter considers how digital games make sense of marriage life and marital conflict experiences. Examples are drawn from a range of games, e.g. Façade (2005), The Novelist (2014), Firewatch (2016), Gone Home (2014), and Grand Theft Auto V (2013). Ultimately, the chapter argues that games struggle and partially fail to overcome the key difficulty lying in the fact that emotional involvement in personal conflict demands personal experience and memory-based connections with the parties involved. Nonetheless, the different mechanics these games employ to overcome this challenge provide valuable lessons on current capabilities and limitations for personal conflicts in the digital game medium.