Abstract
In Herinteractive’s series of Nancy Drew point-and-click adventure games, many of the mysteries revolve around the secrets of historical-fictional women. In order to solve these cases, the player, through Nancy, must uncover the true stories of women who are wrongly maligned by traditional histories. The puzzle-focused gameplay paints the reconstruction of female history as a puzzle in itself, one requiring pieces of these women’s homes, words, and artifacts. Additionally, this negotiation of female history is not without its perils: the struggle to impact a misogynistic society motivates more than one of Nancy’s female villains. This chapter will demonstrate how games in the Nancy Drew series, through their gameplay and narratives, offer a model of how women’s history can be touched, accessed, and demystified.
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Hope, R. (2018). The Magnificent Memory Machine: The Nancy Drew Series and Female History. In: Gray, K., Voorhees, G., Vossen, E. (eds) Feminism in Play. Palgrave Games in Context. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90539-6_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90539-6_5
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