Enter the Swift extended universe
Taylor Swift is soft curling her hair, rerecording the music that made her, and singing through the AirPods of every girl you know, especially if that girl once had a Tumblr. Love or hate Swift, there’s no denying that her 10-minute “All Too Well” made November a bit colder and probably also made Jake Gyllenhaal cry, dominating headlines and playlists and summoning oily spirits of dead relationships. But if you feel like you’ve missed the Taylor Swift boat, or want permission to dip even deeper in her choppy waters, all Swift’s journal page lyrics about December mean that now is the best time to nourish your inner scarf-wearing child.
But how do you really reach the next Swift level this December? Well, you already know about Swift’s music, and her role in Cats undoubtedly appears every time you close your eyes, so there’s nothing left to do but scour the internet for Taylor Swift video games.
At least, I did on your behalf, in hopes of expanding my personal Taylor Swift universe. I have a fascination with celebrity video games, especially if they’re ridiculous, most likely because I used to play celebrity dress-up games online and read People as a kid. All that celebrity really makes a mark on one developing brain.
But there’s also something uncanny about seeing a real, 3D human stranger rendered into a digital doll you can play with, especially if it’s of Taylor Swift. Her experience as a famous woman and current rerecording project encourages questions about celebrity and ownership, so, really, there’s nothing better to do while simultaneously listening to folklore and pondering the ways we commodify people. I started to Google.
Let’s get the disappointing news out of the way: other than in those aforementioned celebrity dress-up games, Taylor Swift really doesn’t make many video game appearances online. Since I’m no longer eleven and a bit more sensitive about computer viruses, I wanted to avoid dress-up games, and instead, I headed to itch.io.
Once again, there wasn’t much. I forced myself to go on a date with Taylor Swift in the visual novel A Date With Taylor Swift, which is described as not “too different from a real date with Taylor Swift. It’s free to download, and it gave me nightmares.
You start out in an “empty diner without color” (maybe you are a dog?), until Taylor Swift suddenly appears, wearing an apple-red dress (maybe you are in The Giver?). You immediately confess your love to her, like any normal Giver would do, and eventually access the core of the game, which is a lyrics generator. Taylor Swift wrote me a chorus that went like “And I was there when you cut me run away smile / If you like a million little piece love story of me,” which hurt my head, so I stopped playing and uninstalled the game out of spite.
Although I did have to take a Tylenol, that was mostly because my boyfriend was screaming while playing League of Legends and not because of A Date With Taylor Swift, so I recommend you download it if you like avant-garde dating and hate syntax.
Then, it’s not a video game, but I enjoyed the feel of this …….
Source: https://www.destructoid.com/taylor-swift-video-game-universe/