Conferences, Conventions, Conversations, and Coffee

Abstract

Coffee: A Misunderstanding is a mobile device–assisted interactive play that explores a fan/creator relationship and the many twists and turns such a relationship can take. The two protagonists, always played by audience members, are Twitter acquaintances who first meet in person during a fictional convention called AwesomeCon; during the course of a single playthrough they can become friends, get into heated arguments, or simply have an awkward conversation and leave. In a similar tradition to ideas advanced in feminist film theory such as Kaja Silverman's Subject of Semiotics (1983) and The Acoustic Mirror (1988), Coffee interrogates the symbolic work done by mainstream cinema in constructing and maintaining binary gender roles—with such binaries also being upheld in high-budget, multimillion-dollar video games produced by the mainstream AAA industry—by subverting the assumed heteronormativity of the characters in the script as well as by not limiting who can be cast as each character: a straight white man, for instance, can find himself playing a queer woman of color. Coffee troubles the idea of the gaze in the sense of being a transparent production wherein the audience can see all of its component pieces rather than a finished, curated product. Finally, as Coffee is frequently performed at games conferences and fan conventions, it creates a layer of metacommentary wherein participants have a mediated space in which to explore particular issues brought on by the experience of attending such an event.