Games, Play, and Joy: Part 7
The joy of feeling seen.
This is Part 7 of my series Games, Play, and Joy, which is based on a class I taught in 2019 at NYU’s ITP (as part of my residency there), aimed at games-curious artists. As ever, this essay series doesn’t represent the opinions of my employers or whatever — just me.
Hope you enjoy.
Theory
- Part 1: Creating joyful possibilities with games.
- Part 2: Using rules as excuses and catalysts.
- Part 3: Playing with systems of power.
Tactics
- Part 4: The art of finding the fun.
- Part 5: Adding gamefeel and juice.
- Part 6: The promises and perils of simulations.
- Part 7: The joy of feeling seen. (you are here)
Your Turn
- Part 8: Epilogue.
Part 6 ended on a pretty bummer note. We talked about how simulation games can create a space for people to experiment with new ways of being, which can influence how they see the real world and how they should act in it — super cool! But then we looked at the myriad ways that approach can fail or convey the opposite of what the developer intended — not super cool.
Remember: the takeaway from that section wasn’t “never make simulation games”: it was “consider the values you are encoding into systems that you create.” The options included or left out are meaningful; the assumptions encoded are meaningful; how agency is represented is meaningful. All of these things are shaped by the values of the developers.
This isn’t inherently a bad thing. Most things are shaped in some way by the values of their creators, after all. (This essay series is shaped by my values, for sure!) It’s just important to not ignore these values. As game players and designers, we should have the media literacy skills to notice what beliefs are embedded in seemingly apolitical and universal systems, especially when they are trying — even with good intentions — to influence real-life human behavior.¹
Let’s lower the stakes slightly by looking at simulation games closer to home. Rather than purporting to simulate world systems from an omniscient, universal, and unbiased point of view, we can narrow our scope and take an explicitly subjective approach, wearing our values on our sleeve and generating game mechanics from our own experiences. What does it feel like to have a particular experience — whether we represent that literally, fantastically, or abstractly? How might games about those experiences create space for others to feel seen?
“What are videogames about? Mostly, videogames are about men shooting men in the face,” says Anna Anthropy in her influential 2012 book, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters. She continues:
Surely an artistic form that has as much weight in popular culture as the videogame does now has more to offer than such a narrow view of what it is to be human.
As a queer transgendered woman in 2012, in a culture pervaded by videogames — a culture in which, typing on my computer, I am seconds away from a digital game, even if I have not taken the time to buy or install a single game on my computer — I have to strain to find any game that’s about a queer woman, to find any game that resembles my own experience.
Anthropy encourages the reader to bring their own lives into their creations to broaden what (and who) is represented in games. In a section called “What to Make a Game About,” she lists everything from ‘your first kiss’ to ‘the experience of opening your heart’ to ‘the subtle ways in which we overcome authority,’ and more.
How do we go about turning these abstract experiences into games?
One way we can go about it is to look for ludic-like systems in our lives and play with removing those constraints and expectations. This is the notion of de-gamification, from Bo Ruberg’s Video Games Have Always Been Queer. They say that to de-gamify “is to strip away the game-like structures already imposed onto life and to remake the world without the imposition of those structures.” This takes place in three steps:
First, de-gamification entails identifying instances in which society has already mapped game-like systems of goals, achievements, points, etc., onto human experience in an attempt to regulate, normativize, and exploit that experience. Second, de-gamification entails breaking down those structures and liberating the human experience that they oppress. Third, de-gamification entails creating opportunities for exploring — and thereby playing with — those experiences outside of the game-like structures that have been imposed upon them.
Ruberg uses Realistic Kissing Simulator as an example of de-gamification in action. Realistic Kissing Simulator is a two-player game where each player — upon receiving consent — attempts to kiss the other. The hitch is that players can only control their tongues, which are incredibly unwieldy. Players end up with their tongues flailing all over the screen, batting up against the other’s, occasionally poking the other player — or themselves — in the eye. It is incredibly silly and — dare I say — not so realistic.
It might seem strange to view kissing as having an inherently game-like structure — after all, isn’t it just kissing? But Ruberg points out that, in both videogames and real life, there is often a notion of “goals” when it comes to intimacy. In a dating sim, we might look up a guide for the “best” things to say to our love interest, with the goal of getting a certain ending with them. Patricia Hernandez discusses the way this can sour in a post on Nightmare Mode:
In any Bioware game, kindness is a currency. You make regular payments to earn affection points. You pay by listening to someone talk about their problems and giving them cheap gifts. Put in enough coins and sex falls out.
After that, the relationship is over. Sex was your end goal, the reason for everything you did. There was no reason to stick around after you got it. That was what you were paying for.
Regardless of whether you’re a fan of in-game relationships (I’ve certainly enjoyed a visual novel in my day), Realistic Kissing Simulator sidesteps any goal-oriented notions of intimacy by removing goals entirely. Ruberg says:
There are no achievements to unlock, no way to advance through levels, no checkpoints to reach, no opportunities to save, no culminating battles to win, no systems for accumulating goods or currency, and no reward for playing well. Every play-through of Realistic Kissing Simulator ends the same way: with the brief, anticlimactic flash of a “thank you” screen. In this sense, the game communicates that it values all types of play equally: from the longest, most elaborate kiss to the briefest touching of tongues. Only players can determine when they have accomplished their goals — and what those goals might be.
One interesting thing about Realistic Kissing Simulator is that — despite its absolute lack of physical realism — it can actually feel surprisingly real. In fact, these unrealistic and over-the-top qualities can actually help convey the awkward nature of first kisses. By removing common game-like structures of intimacy and ignoring the physical reality of kissing, Realistic Kissing Simulator manages to evoke a very personal, yet extremely relatable, experience.
On the flip side, we can look for ludic-like systems in our own lives and play with making those constraints and expectations even more visible. This is Ruberg’s notion of re-gamification. They differentiate it from gamification and de-gamification as follows:
Whereas gamification forcefully applies game-like structures to human experiences, and de-gamification strips human experiences of game-like structures, re-gamification identifies, literalizes, and thereby critiques the game-like structures that are already being used to shape human experience.
Ruberg juxtaposes Realistic Kissing Simulator with Consentacle, a collaborative two-player game whose goal is for each player to “enjoy a mutually fulfilling romantic encounter with a sentient member of an unfamiliar species.” Ruberg lays out the gameplay:
At the start of the game, players choose to play either as the human character, Kit, or the blue, tentacled alien, Dup (figure 4.3). Both Kit and Dup receive individual sets of cards associated with actions they can perform on and/or with their partner, such as “gaze,” “kiss,” “penetrate,” “restrain,” and “release.” Performing these actions at the right time allows players to earn “trust tokens,” which in turn can be exchanged for “satisfaction tokens.”
Consentacle’s core mechanics are borrowed from fighting mechanics in tabletop games. Ruberg points out the way Consentacle uses combos to represent familiar things from intimate encounters:
[Combos] normally multiply the strength of a player’s attack. Here, the combo is playfully reclaimed as a structure for quantifying both the harmonious and awkward interactions between sexual partners. If both players play their “gaze” cards simultaneously, for instance, they form the combo “meaningful stare” and earn additional trust tokens. If they attempt to kiss each other on the same turn, however, they form the “Fumblemouths” combo, which detracts from their score.
You may have seen the phrase “trust tokens” and immediately thought “wait, isn’t that just reskinned ‘kindness coins’?” I would argue that the way Consentacle is scored shifts this dynamic. In “kindness coin”-style games, there is a sense of transaction: you say all the right things to the the character that you want, with the ultimate goal of later getting what you want from them. Compare that to Consentacle, again from Ruberg:
The goal of the game is for players to maximize their combined satisfaction score while minimizing the difference in their individual scores. Thus, in Consentacle, the most successful romantic encounter is one that results in the most pleasure, equally distributed between partners. In this way, Consentacle communicates that it values mutual experience over individual gain.
Consentacle takes traits that tend to make for a good intimate experience in real life — paying attention to your partner, learning to read them well, aiming for equal satisfaction²— and turns them into game mechanics. Even without much physical realism, this re-gamification again evokes a super-personal but (hopefully) very relatable experience.
So, we have two tactics for deriving game mechanics: de-gamification and re-gamification. We can add them to our toolbox for sniffing out compelling game mechanics, asking ourselves questions like:
- What are the game-like systems that surround us in real life?
- Can we use games as spaces to loosen the rules and/or remove the goals of those systems? What might that space feel like, and what might people take away from it?
- Alternately, can we use games as spaces to literalize and explore these systems? Can we tweak them so that the goal and mechanics incentivize things we think are important, valuable, worth critiquing, or worth embodying?
Once we settle on an interesting system, the next question is: what are some frames can we use to convey these abstract, personal experiences?
There are endless categories that bubble out here (probably more are being invented as I’m writing this), so we’ll just cover three: vignette, procedural autobiography, and rewriting the world.
Ian Bogost described the aesthetic of the vignette in How To Do Things With Videogames as “a brief, indefinite, evocative description or account of a person or situation.” They’re less about advancing a narrative, and more about giving a sense of character, and to “depicting an experience or environment, roughly, softly, and subtly.”
This may make it sound like vignette games are necessarily poetic and high-concept, but they don’t need to be.
How do you Do It is a vignette game, capturing the extremely common experience of being a tween trying to figure out what the hell sex is from playing with dolls. There’s not really a win state, nor a scoreboard to try and get to the top of. The end screen even seems unsure as to whether you’ve “done sex” or not.
The controls are super-clumsy, and that’s on purpose: in a 2015 interview, one of the developers, Nina Freeman, said:
When I was playing with my dolls as a kid and banging them together to “do sex”, I honestly had no idea what I was doing. Sex was just a really big hug for all I knew. So, of course, it was awkward when I was playing with the dolls, because I didn’t really understand what I should be doing. I was just trying whatever came to mind, and most of what came to mind was silly hugs, or just banging their faces together. It was really important to convey that lack of understanding and the awkwardness it entails.
In this vignette, the mechanics are pretty literal: you clumsily smash dolls together, just like little kids tend to do. The awkwardness of these controls, the relatability of the dialog, and the tentative tone of the entire game all evoke this snapshot of youth.
Other vignettes take a much more impressionistic and abstract approach to capturing the feel of a given moment. Slave of God, by Increpare, is a 3D game in which the player wanders around a highly-abstracted, hyper-glitchy, super-psychedelic nightclub. In a blogpost about the game, videogame researcher Brendan Keogh describes the visuals as:
something like putting on 3D glasses and looking at an analog television tuned to the wrong channel while trapped in some weird dimension where everything consists of watercolour paint and it is raining. Lines and textures throb over adjoining walls but don’t shift with perspective, as though the three dimensions of this space are irrelevant to them. The colours of people and cups of alcohol and dancefloors smear and blur in the spaces around them.
It’s hard to describe with words. If you’re okay with flashing lights, check out the gameplay video below — but seriously, if you have photosensitive epilepsy, don’t watch.
The assets in Slave of God do not look realistic. Objects in the space are abstracted; walls and floors have no texture other than the unrelenting glitchy visual effects; other clubgoers are faceless stick figures, not so much animating as jerkily switching between a few predefined poses. But this abstraction doesn’t take away from the realistic feeling that Slave of God conveys: that is, the sense of being overwhelmed, drunk, and disoriented in a nightclub. Keogh says:
Movement is key. Movement is all you have, really, and it’s in movement, trying to move, and trying to figure out how to move that the game best captures that feeling of being lost and confused and disorientated in a club. Since the colours and lines and flashes and strobing lights have little to do with the dimensions of space, trying to move around is incredibly difficult. You bang into walls and look at your feet and end up in the bathroom when you were trying to go to the dancefloor. You get to the dancefloor and you end up dancing with the stranger and the camera locks onto them and you can’t escape because the buttons you would use to strafe and get away just spin you around and around and around and any sense of space you did have just falls from your grasp. Suddenly you’re on the stage with the DJ. Or suddenly you’ve fallen off a ledge onto the bouncer guarding the VIP room. Or you’ve just slipped off the dancefloor on the opposite side of the club than you thought you were on. […]
It’s not a game about intelligible meanings or mechanics or interactions but, as Kopas notes, an intensity of feeling. Trying to describe it in words is like trying to describe a guitar solo or the taste of a meal. It’s just something you experience through your body.
In Slave of God, all these abstractions — the hyperactive shaders, the blending of the crowd into each other, the jerkiness of everyone’s movement — combine to create a visceral, recognizable feeling of overwhelm and disorientation. Rather than attempting to look like a realistic club, Slave of God tries to feel like a club — and, arguably, is more successful in that goal than any photorealistic VR simulation could be.
In addition to capturing moments through vignettes, we can also use game mechanics to reflect on the overarching systems in our lives in a kind of procedural autobiography.³ This speaks to the idea of re-gamification, where we expose the underlying game-like structures of everyday life. Unlike a simulation game that purports to represent a universal phenomenon or experience, these games are more tailored windows into a specific person’s life.
Of course, vignette games and procedural autobiographies aren’t mutually exclusive: you can make a vignette about a system you experience in your life. However, I would say that the two categories tend to rely on different design tactics for expression. Bogost says that proceduralist games:
are process intensive — they rely primarily on computational rules to produce their artistic meaning. In these games, expression arises primarily from the player’s interaction with the game’s mechanics and dynamics, and less so (in some cases almost not at all) in their visual, aural, and textual aspects.
Dys4ia, by Anthropy, is an autobiographical game about Anthropy’s experiences starting hormone replacement therapy. The game uses mini-games with controls that riff on classic arcade games to capture these different moments of her process. There is a stealth game about trying to use the bathroom without getting harassed; a side-scrolling section where the player literally goes through hoops to find a good clinic; and a catch-the-falling-object section where the goal is to swallow enough blood-pressure-lowering medications to finally get an estrogen prescription.
These mini-games are fast, typically don’t provide explicit instructions, and often subvert the players’ expectations of how the game can be ‘won.’ Elaine Fiandra describes an early mini-game:
One of the first mini-games to do this happens when the author is describing how she was verbally assaulted by trans-exclusionary feminists that did not consider her a woman. As this mini-game starts, the player is presented with three game-objects: A shield, on the left, which they can move up and down, and two mouths on the right, which move around randomly and shoot speech bubbles toward the shield. The player looking at this will immediately assume that their task is to parry the speech bubbles with the shield, given that a shield is a generally known symbol of protection against harm and the narration makes it clear that the speech bubbles are harmful to the author. Once the first speech bubble collides with the shield, the reaction of that game object subvert the expectations that the player had, as a low descending sound plays and the object flashes in a manner resembling the ‘invincibility frames’ animations that often denote being hit in 2D games (Megaman (Capcom, 1987) is one of many possible examples). After that, the player will try to avoid the speech bubbles, in their attempt to unfurl the mechanics of the game, but even then, the result will be a descending sound and an indicator of failure coming from the right side of the screen.
The mini-game ultimately ends after a set amount of time, without any clear symbol of victory presented to the player. […] This, as also pointed by the author in an interview with Ben Kuchera, is an attempt at invoking frustration in the player to match the situations described in the game’s narration (Anthropy, 2012b).
As game progresses, it further subverts’ players expectation by reiterating old mini-games with new mechanics and win conditions. Fiandra continues:
the frustration will be increased in the second reiteration of this mini-game, and then subverted in the third, where finally the shield is able to reflect the speech bubbles back at the ‘enemies’, empowering the player to finally achieve the apparent goal of not being hit.
There was a boom in highly-personal and autobiographical games⁴ around the time that Dys4ia came out, and upon its release, Dys4ia was often called an “empathy game”: a game that can give the average player insight into the issues faced by trans people, and empathy for them.
The idea of “empathy games” can be seductive: imagine, we can make the world a better place just by making games! But like in our simulation talk, we have to be careful about using games for empathy — or referring to games as “empathy games” — as it can cause as much harm as good.
Around the time of the personal games boom, there was a similar boom in personal essays on the internet. Writers have always written about personal topics, of course, but the economics of the internet and the attention economy kicked a certain kind of personal writing into high gear. Laura Bennett describes this moment in her 2015 article, The First-Person Industrial Complex:
The rise of the unreported hot take, that much-maligned instant spin on the news of the day, has meant that editors are constantly searching for writers with any claim to expertise on a topic to elevate their pieces above the swarm. First-person essays have become the easiest way for editors to stake out some small corner of a news story and assert an on-the-ground primacy without paying for reporting. And first-person essays have also become the easiest way to jolt an increasingly jaded Internet to attention, as the bar for provocation has risen higher and higher.
What that means for aspiring writers, Bennett says, is that “offering up grim, personal dispatches may be the surest ways to get your pitches read.” The rawer and more sensitive the subject matter, the better the chance of getting published. Bennett quotes an xoJane editor, describing how her inbox was constantly crammed with stories of “eating disorders, sexual assault, harassment, ‘My boyfriend’s a racist and I just realized it.’”
An appetite for hyper-honest and hyper-vulnerable personal work is not a bad thing on its own: Bennett points out that the first-person boom had the significant benefit of creating a market for more underrepresented viewpoints than ever. When written and edited with care, these essays can be models of “how to write about oneself in a way that is at once gripping and sensitive and that sheds light on broader sociopolitical issues.”
The problem is that market forces rarely incentivize taking this sort of care, instead prioritizing speed, clicks, and engagement — positive or negative. Editors are incentivized to seek out increasingly raw and shocking content that they can pay pennies for; in turn, authors are incentivized to churn out raw content about their own lives as quickly as they can, to get a byline and the little cash on the table. This cash can come at the cost of a guaranteed “lifetime of SEO infamy,” and the psychological effect of making writers feel — as Jia Tolentino says — “like the best thing they have to offer is the worst thing that ever happened to them.”
As someone who lived through a similar period in games, I’ve seen developers burn out from feeling pressured to mine their own traumas for game content, to set themselves apart from the crowd. So even if your goal in making a personal game or an empathy game is noble, consider whether it is coming at the cost of you.
Like simulation games, empathy games can easily backfire and cause the player to leave with messages the developer didn’t intend. In the Wired article Can VR Really Make You More Empathetic?, the author dicsusses Leaf Van Boven’s findings in an experiment where non-blind people were blindfolded, and non-wheelchair-users were asked to use a wheelchair, to increase empathy for blind people and wheelchair users. Boven found that the participants:
end up with greater sympathy for people with impaired vision and mobility. But because they only experienced their own fumbling attempts to navigate an unfamiliar condition, they also tended to come away thinking blind and wheelchair-bound people are less able than they actually are.
This attempt at empathy can quickly sour into condescension, with players assuming they can truly “understand” the suffering of a marginalized group simply by playing a short game about them. In an interview with Angela Chen for The Verge, Paul Walker says that this attitude is “hopelessly arrogant”:
Another thing is that there are many calls to feel the suffering of marginalized groups, like a trans kid who is discriminated against in school or a black teenager who is harassed by the police. […] It’s really arrogant for somebody like me to assume that I can know what it’s like to be a woman experiencing sexism or a black teenager who’s afraid of the police.
It is also worth noting that many “empathy games” were only deemed such by outside audiences, and that many game developers trying to center their communities instead found that discussions of their games were centered around the non-marginalized instead. In Why Video Games Can’t Teach You Empathy, Cecilia D’Anastasio points out that:
Anthropy maintains [that] Dys4ia was never intended to be an “empathy game.” […] She had made the game for other transpeople and questioning gamers. The outpouring of professed empathy and support from straight, cis-gendered people was unexpected. Their pretentions toward understanding, she thought, were dangerously misguided.
“If you’ve played a 10-minute game about being a transwoman,” Anthrophy told me, “don’t pat yourself on the back for feeling like you understand a marginalized experience.”
Robert Yang had a similar critique in a 2017 essay, “‘If you walk in someone else’s shoes, then you’ve taken their shoes’: empathy machines as appropriation machines.” Yang makes games about gay culture and intimacy, like his historical bathroom sex simulator, The Tearoom; his male shower simulator, Rinse and Repeat; and his game about spanking and consent, Hurt Me Plenty. Many of Yang’s players and fans are straight, which he notes:
“leads to a widely-held but incorrect assumption that I make my games for ‘straight people to understand what being gay is like’ […] This “straight empathy” suddenly makes my games more about “how beautiful and benevolent the straight people are, to tolerate my gay existence instead of vomiting” — instead of highlighting gay culture or queer solidarity, as I intended. I want to imagine fantastic worlds where straight people aren’t as important — and yet, they demand that I dance for them in VR, whenever they want, forever. For this reason, I hate it when people think my games are like empathy machines. I don’t want your empathy, I want justice!
So when it comes to “empathy games,” a few things to keep in mind:
- As game makers, we need to be aware of the limits and unintended consequences of trying to make “empathy games,” and
- As game players, we should notice any knee-jerk reactions to classify a personal game as an “empathy game,” especially if the creator hasn’t categorized it as such. What perspectives might we be de-centering when we do so?
We’ve touched on capturing moments of our lives and capturing systems that we live under — but we also use games as spaces to rewrite the systems that we live under. Related to Yang’s notion of “fantastic worlds,” these games play with power: purposefully subverting the rules of dominant culture and handing the reins to someone else instead.
When we think about power in games, there’s a certain type of power fantasy we tend to envision. Maybe we get to play as a guy who’s a powerful space marine, or a super-violent gangster, or a super-elite soldier. As Anthropy said, “Mostly, videogames are about men shooting men in the face.” This is the typical kind of power fantasy we see in commercial games.
Now, there’s not necessarily anything inherently wrong with that. (I am a hopeless fan of an absolutely ridiculous, super-over-the-top, stereotypical dude power fantasy gangster series, so it would be hypocritical for me to entirely write those tropes off.) But what’s worth noting is that the power fantasies in these games tend to lean on certain ideas about what masculinity looks like, what relationships look like, and what violence is justified, that hew pretty closely to the dominant culture.
As game makers, we can create spaces for different types of power fantasies — and make them for any audience we like. What happens when we change the people we give power to? What kind of power do they want? How might the conditions of winning change? Can we use games with these different power fantasies as spaces to envision alternate ways of being? And what might our players take away from those experiences?
We touched on this in Part 3: ways that games can provide safe spaces to subvert oppressive power structures, and provide moments of joy and catharsis for their target audiences.
Let’s go back to Hair Nah, a game in which you play as a Black woman trying to live her life while constantly having to swat away people trying to touch her hair. The creator, Momo Pixel, points out the power dynamics at play in real life:
When this happens to us we don’t really get a chance to defend ourselves. At least, I know when it happens to me that there was no prelude, so I didn’t know it was about to happen, or it happens just because our whole lives we’ve been taught that we have to be quiet and respect white people’s feelings and don’t really say what we want to say but as a whole you don’t hear of black women being like, ‘What the fuck! Why you in my hair?’ You want to, but you don’t do that.
While Hair Nah depicts a relentless invasion of space, the mechanics shift the power dynamic by allowing the player to (literally) strike back. There is no consequence for slapping hands away — in fact, you have to swat at least some to clear a level. It gives its players a chance to, as Pixel says, “finally get to say no, ‘I’m telling y’all, get the fuck out my hair’.”
We also touched on Treachery in Beatdown City, which takes a familiar genre but replaces the typical power fantasy with one that touches on everything from racism to sexism to micro-aggressions and more. Brendan Sinclair describes how the diverse trio of characters fight their way through “trust fund punks, racist preppies, trendy gentrifiers, abusive cops, and other sources of anger” — a far cry from who usually gets the spotlight, and who usually receives the violence, in these kinds of games. Dia Lacina describes the game as:
a catharsis for everyone who has to deal with this shit daily. A place to unapologetically throw hands at all the people who need to catch them. It’s a power fantasy for everyone left out of the normal videogame power fantasy.
This sentiment is echoed in a post by Kimari Rennis:
[P]olice brutality is a real thing that has taken the lives of many people of color, people my age, people like George Floyd. You see it happening Right Now. But when I play Treachery in Beatdown City and I face a cop who proudly admits to getting famous on TV in a bad way for abusing innocent protestors, I don’t have to be afraid. At that moment in time, I and the character that I am playing are one. We are aligned to smirk with a witty line and proceed to knock the, dare I say, racism out of that cop with ease (but not in real life). Then, I move on in the quest to save my black president. It’s then that I am hopeful, even outside of the game.
I use this tactic in my games as well.⁵ Take Handväska!, which I made with Ramsey Nasser for Global Game Jam 2017. GGJ 2017 took place during a strange set of dates: right around Trump’s inauguration, his Muslim ban, and that year’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day. With Richard Spencer getting socked in the face, the internet was lit up with discourse as to whether punching Nazis was ethical. It is perhaps not a surprise to reveal that Nasser (an Arab Muslim from Lebanon) and I (a Jewish person) were on the side of ‘it’s very fucking okay to punch Nazis.’ While going slightly mad, we stumbled across a 1985 photo of Danuta Danielsson hitting a Nazi with her purse — an act of resistance gave us inspiration for our “first purse-on shooter.”
Kotaku described it in an article called “A Game Where You Go Bowling For Fascists”:
The game is simple enough. Line yourself up and charge towards a blocky group of fascists. With enough speed and a powerful swat of your purse, you’ll send them tumbling into the air in a dazzling display. It’s a game that you play in bursts, a sort of digital stress ball for the current, dire zeitgeist.
It’s definitely healthy to use games as an escape from the world from time to time. To enter into a less political sphere where you slay demons, kiss aliens, or cruise the countryside. Handväska! leans in the other direction, wearing politics on its sleeve and turning real anxieties into a cartoonish but cathartic experience.
Lost Wage Rampage is another game of mine in this vein. Made with the support of the Peabody Essex Museum, and in collaboration with Marlowe Dobbe and Andy Wallace, Lost Wage Rampage is a fast-paced arcade driving game, in the style of games like Crazy Taxi. In Lost Wage Rampage, you play as two shopgirls who find out that they’ve been paid less than their male coworkers — so they decide to steal as much of the mall’s merch as possible, to forcibly make up the difference. Lost Wage Rampage was inspired by wage inequality I had dealt with in my own life, and the burning frustration that a lifetime of these experiences had given me. I knew I wasn’t alone in this experience, and I wanted to make something cathartic about it, and thus Lost Wage Rampage was born.
Quite a few people resonated with this power fantasy of cheekily evening out the wage gap.⁶ From a very insightful (and flattering!) review written by A.E. Osworth:
First off, consider the space of gaming, which has the reputation of housing a good many cis dudes that don’t believe the wage gap is a thing. What Friedhoff is doing is making space in nerd culture for folks who are a) affected by the wage gap and b) believe actual statistics and the lived experiences of marginalized folks. That’s a space that’s not inherently built into nerd and gaming culture. The game then brings something that needs to be talked about to a place where it is shunned and blows it up WITH FUN. […] And then there’s the idea of constructive fake violence — likely, none of us are actually going to do this IRL (mostly because people will get hurt and we will go to jail). This game is a fantasy and allows us to express frustration in a destructive way without ACTUALLY being destructive. For those of us who experience the wage gap, it’s a way to blow off steam.
Of course, this notion of rewriting the world and its power structures for catharsis doesn’t need to be violent. Consider Dream Daddy, described by Aja Romano for Vox as “a choose-your-own-adventure dating game, with each dad embodying a hunky trope that takes you down a different narrative journey to romance.” There are goth dads, preppy dads, and mysterious dads; there are ripped dads and bear dads and dads who wear binders. Whatever type of dad you want to woo, or be, Dream Daddy probably has coverage of it.
What’s interesting about Dream Daddy is what it leaves out: namely, the types of marginalization and oppression queer people face in real life. Romano notes that in Dream Daddy, there aren’t really straight people; there’s no homophobia lurking around the corner; there’s not even really use of the terms “gay”, “bi”, or “trans”, even though there are characters representing all three. Being gay, trans, or queer is treated as so commonplace that it’s barely worth commenting on.
For some gay men, this approach doesn’t resonate. Romano quotes Tim Mulkerin’s article about the game, where he says Dream Daddy’s lack of realism “doesn’t capture the experience of what it feels like to be a gay man and fails to engage with or invoke gay culture in a meaningful way.” Romano notes that this makes the game feel as though it’s written more for fandom communities, which tend to gravitate to queer male romances where the protagonists “exist in a distorted version of reality where everyone is gay and homophobia doesn’t seem to exist.”
Still, Romano points out that this lack of realism “is both a bug and a feature,” and that other queer gamers see it as “the quality that makes the game so refreshing and fun”:
Pregegg disagreed with the idea that the game’s escapism is inherently a flaw. “I personally think that the final game is a great example of gay romances,” he said. “It feels like any other romance game; it makes being gay feel regular. Sure, a little escapist, but we all need that.”
For Pregegg, Mulkerin’s sticking point about the word “gay” never being used in the game meant that Dream Daddy doesn’t “focus on a weird or fetish-y way on its gayness.”
“Being gay is never even really mentioned in the game, it’s just accepted, which has honestly been so refreshing and nice,” Pregegg said. “I can just enjoy the game — it’s not weird to be a gay dad, my in-game daughter doesn’t stress about me being a gay dad, no neighbors think it’s strange, I don’t have anything to fear except making a fool of myself on a fictional date by picking the wrong trivia answers.” […]
“I’m gay and transgender,” Pregegg said. “It’s taken a long time for me to come to terms with my identity as a gay man … so seeing a game that not only embraced being gay so openly but also gave you the option to be trans without question, and featured a trans dad, was a huge deal.”
When it comes to rewriting the world, we can think of these jumping-off points for inspiration:
- Can we create games that allow people to break rules, subvert power differentials, and reclaim space in ways that are underrepresented and that they find meaningful?
- Can we create games that allow people to simply be, without the anxiety and pressure of real-life rules, norms, or systems of oppression?
What are our audiences and communities aching for, and how can we design those spaces for them?
This is usually where I give a sneak peek on what the next session is about. The thing is, there is no next session. So I will link you to the epilogue instead.
¹ For more on this, see Paolo Pedercini’s Making Games in a Fucked Up World, which also points out that:
If you actually figure out methods to control people’s behavior.
You can bet they will be adopted by governments and advertisers in no time.
² And hey: note that this means Consentacle assumes and encodes certain values, too! After all, there are other relationship dynamics in which both people are extremely satisfied with one person getting much more physical attention than the other. Remember: most objects have values, and that doesn’t make them a bad thing — it’s just worth being literate in reading those values. (And if you’re still confused, open an incognito window and start googling.)
³ These are frequently referred to as “personal games,” but I find this term way too vague be meaningful. It also implies that games are only ‘personal’ if their content is autobiographical, which is a super-limiting way of thinking about what can be ‘personal.’
⁴ There have always been indie personal games, of course. See Bennett Foddy’s 2014 keynote at Indiecade East.
⁵ I did an Eyeo talk on the topic.
⁵ There’s a common statistic that women earn ~80 cents per dollar compared to men, but this doesn’t reflect how the pay gap affects marginalized groups differently. For example, the GAO reports that Hispanic or Latina women earned about $.58 and Black women earned about $.63 for every dollar White men earned. LGBTQ+ workers earn 90 cents for every dollar that their coworkers make, with LGBTQ+ people of color earning even less.
Hope you enjoyed! If you want to buy me a socially-distanced coffee, you can do so here. If you would rather donate somewhere, I’d be delighted if you’d send these folks a couple bucks.
Also, full disclosure, I’m friendly with some of the folks I cited here. But as a rule, I only cite folks whose work I think is legitimately important and great, regardless of whether we are friendly or somehow mortal enemies.
