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A quick Google search for "games for girls" yields a rather finite set of categories. There are cooking games, dress-up games, makeup games, shopping games, a few that feature household chores, childcare games, and pregnancy games. What exactly is a pregnancy game? How can the physical and emotional labor of forcing life into the world be conveyed as entertainment? Perhaps more pressingly, why does such a form of online engagement even exist?
Sifting through the hues of pink and purple that punctuate websites devoted to games for girls, I learned that pregnancy games are formulaic. Almost like recipes or the washing instructions on clothing tags, these games transform the travails of childbirth into a series of regimented and repetitive tasks. Through strictly enforced steps, the player may give the pregnant woman an ultrasound, send her a message, dress her in maternity clothes, or, quite ambitiously, perform a C-section.
I am interested in the way pregnancy games fit into understandings of gender and emotional labor in a worid intimately linked through technological globalism. When young people identify with representations of pregnant women, diere are instructive assumptions about the female body in labor implied by the constructed game. When technologies allow for the projection of the self into virtual worlds, identity is redefined by the structured and subjective realities of that representation. By enabling emotional identification with a rendered alternate experience, the avatar enables an extension of perspective. Avatars, icons that represent particular people, are both intimately linked to the person they represent and formally estranged. Considering the subjective association young girls might have with avatars in pregnancy games, I wonder how a relationship to one's own body might become representational during the lived experience of childbirth. In many ways childbirth forces a sensitivity to futurity, as the pregnant woman must think about how her present choices will affect her child's future.
The pregnant female body becomes a representation, or symbol, of die child to be born. When people transfer the responsibilities and physicality of childbirth to a surrogate mother, the body of the woman carrying the unborn baby in the real world becomes even more like an avatar. When a mother proudly gazes upon a high-definition sonogram image, she has attained another virtual avatar for her...