What can a curious game known in Japanese as Kisegeau Ningue, or changing clothes doll, offer the game designer, cultural critic, or media scholar? This first chapter revisits an early phase of the Web in the 1990s in order to analyze an open-ended game known by its once-active community of creators as KiSS. Queer, edgy, erotic, light-hearted and comical, interactive digital KiSS dolls are my first example of ludic mutation. Players performed transformative play with doll avatars, experimenting with projecting fantasies of becoming other genders, creatures, and imaginary beings onto player-created characters. As a free of charge, Do-It-Yourself digital craft, these games are free from the market pressures found in many commercial games. Although the attraction of role-playing games is often attributed to the draw of a liberating escape from everyday life pressures, in comparison to the open-ended fluidity of KiSS, a popular, mainstream game like World of Warcraft constrains the player's experience of the game via their character in a number of ways. Unfolding game is the genre term I propose to use for open-ended, generative, iterative games like KiSS, whether digital or otherwise. An additional feature of many unfolding games is that they produce unique artistic results each time a game is played.

What follows the presentation of this chapter's cultural object, the KiSS doll and a few of its earlier historical precedents, is an attempt to map the conditions that facilitated the growth of a creative and diverse online community of player-makers. International adult players remixed these digital doll games each time the game was played, turning their dolls into soft-core digital erotica. KiSS games thus break from the domestic setting and the roles commonly associated with women's and girls’ dolls, the private domain of household ‘necessity’ that political philosopher Hannah Arendt describes as ‘the oikia’ (24). I will appropriate from Arendt her generative divide between a household, economic sphere of vital necessities vs a freer, aesthetic, public arena, hazarding a stretch of her public ‘Space of Appearance’ to encompass the anonymous, online, collaborative identity play of KiSS (199). This chapter, then, becomes an introduction to and an appropriation of Arendtian biopolitics, a critical and theoretical framework that will be picked up again in Chapter Five's analysis of augmented reality games.