Flânerie in the dark woods: Shattering innocence and queering time in The Path

Abstract

Focusing on The Path, this article aims at moving beyond the duality between the concepts of productivity and idleness in order to explore how the practice of gaming can escape heteronormative time. Positioning the gamer as a flâneur, I argue that The Path locates the player in a queer time through the fragmentation of its narrative, but also the shattering of heteronormative imagery – such as the figure of the child as pure and innocent – and its reappropriation in a queer text. Ultimately, this article argues that gaming has the potential to be considered a site of queer practice. In order to perform this reading, I first introduce my critical framework comprised from exploring how queer lifestyles detach themselves from normative time and focusing on the practice of flânerie as queer performance.