Becoming Émigré through Digital Space: Negotiating Agency and Happiness of Diaspora in Venba

Abstract

Venba (2023) is a narrative-driven cooking game about an Indian Tamil couple Venba and Paavalan. The game explores themes of migration and identity through food. The recipes are cooked as a form of consolation, celebration, medium to reconnect with their roots or to instil cultural values in their son, Kavin. The paper argues that the disjunctive experience across three levels—the game's narrative structure, puzzle-solving gameplay, and the player's real-world societal context—generates an affective force that unleashes the potential of virtual. The paper will understand happiness as a tool of power that dictates and codifies the behaviour of the characters as migrants with limited agency. The game play of puzzles, allows the player to gain a fluid agency allowing the individual to switch between the ontological experience of agentivity through the game play and their own experience as subjects of a particular socio-political milieu. The disjunctive relation which erupts anew, a-logically among the events, can be seen as “a line-of-flight” (Deleuze) for the player interacting with the game, which induces ‘becoming émigré’.