Autistic Masking

A new book with Brontë-related content:

Victorians and Videogames

Edited By Lin Young, Brooke Cameron

Routledge

ISBN: 9781003498995

October 2025

Victorians and Videogames will examine how games interact with nineteenth-century genres, aesthetics, and literary themes as a means of engaging, critiquing, or challenging their original contexts. In essence, this collection will consider the ways in which embodied, user-driven storytelling can impact new and challenging engagements with the nineteenth century in the contemporary world. This book contains four categories that summarize major trends in nineteenth-century-oriented games. The first section, “Ludic and Narrative Intertextuality,” examines games that directly adapt nineteenth-century texts, considering how ludic and literary elements work together to produce new commentary on the original texts. Second, “Genre and Character (re)Creation,” will examine games that are more thematically engaged with the nineteenth century. Third, “Navigation, Colonization, and Exploration” examines the ways in which players move and interact with game environments, and how game design itself can often evoke social systems, or the politics of imperialist conquest. Finally, “Science, Systems, and Technologies” will examine how contemporary games engage with nineteenth-century innovations (both good and bad) in science and technology. In this way, the sections begin with more explicit nineteenth-century engagements and build to more theoretical and subtextual ones.

The book contains the chapter: 

Autistic Masking in Wuthering Heights and Little Nightmares II

By Brooke Cameron

This chapter uses disability theory to talk about autism in the Victorian videogame. This chapter takes as its primary texts Emily Brontë’s 1848 Gothic masterpiece, Wuthering Heights, as well as Tarsier Studio’s puzzle-platform horror adventure game, Little Nightmares II (2021); we read both novel and game as privileging the neurodivergent child’s point of view, and more specifically, we read both as focused upon the autistic child’s use of the partnership (or Gothic double) as a form of “masking”—and therein navigating—structures of early socialization and education. And we see in both texts the latter’s (education’s) very Victorian legacy of “mainstreaming” the disabled child and of the psychological horrors that ensue—from Catherine’s mental breakdown and premature death (and permanent separation from Heathcliff) to Six’s shocking betrayal of Mono and the cyclical trauma which then consumes the pair.