Playing out the unspeakable: the rhetorics of trauma in The Day the Laughter Stopped digital game

The article undertakes a detailed analysis of The Day the Laughter Stopped – a simple text-based browser game about rape, told from the perspective of a young teenage girl. While seemingly straightforward, the game uses choice poetics to build expectations of agency on the side of the player, only to subvert them at the most climactic moment, provoking emotional responses and serving as a commentary on the experience of loss of control and loss of words in the face of a traumatic event. Following existing approaches to rhetorical, emotion-evoking qualities and capabilities of digital games, the article explores the potential of the digital medium to communicate the unspeakable, overwhelming dimension of trauma, as illustrated by the game. The analysis not only explores the medium-specific means of expression which the game utilizes to encourage the audience to explore the perspective of a rape victim in an engaging way, but also leads to the conclusion that in doing so, the game aims to make persuasive statements about the social and cultural discourse around rape trauma and its representations, and therefore contributes to the larger socio-cultural discourse. As such, the article aspires to add to pre-existing studies on the specific rhetorical means of digital fiction, as well as on the approaches to cultural renditions of trauma.