With four ‘Buffy’ videogames now available it would appear that the Buffy franchise is well-suited to interactive game formats. With the mainstream media’s current romance with kick-ass action heroines, the advantage of female game avatars is their potential to broaden the appeal of games across genders. What might the Buffy games add to the ‘girl power’ format? Are existing theories of gender representation adequate to the task of addressing the media-specific attributes of games and their particular ways of organising power regimes? While theories of gender representation can go someway towards understanding the ideological construction of game characters, such theories can sideline the media-specific context in which they appear. The fact that players are interpolated into the game world of the Buffyverse in ways different to other media forms is significant and I offer the concept of ‘being-in-the-world-of-the-game’ to illustrate how theories of representation alone are not sufficient to the task of analysing the game forms of BtVS. This paper focuses on the ways in which the remediation of the show into videogame format affects narrative structure, characterisation and theme (particularly agency) and argues that an address of the way that media forms operate structurally is necessary if we are to understand the meanings and pleasures of the franchise.

I will require a laptop and projector (with powerpoint), and a video that plays PAL tapes.