Possibilities at Play: On Games of Joy and Power
This is a lightly-edited transcript of my Eyeo talk from 2018. This talk had a bibliography of sources and related reading, which can be found here.
This is a bit of a time capsule of my thinking on games and joy at the time. I continued on a much deeper dive, taught a 14-week class on it in 2019 at NYU, and am currently (slowly) writing a much larger piece synthesizing it all. If that is something that interests you, holler!
So, yeah, I’m Jane Friedhoff. This is where you can find me on the Internet.
I do a lot of different things. I’m a creative coder. I make weird interactive art. But primarily I am a game designer.
I make a bunch of weird games.
Some of them are about serious strategy. Sometimes they’re about screaming super, super loudly. Some are about playing as a disembodied arm playing a 2D text adventure. Some games are made for standard consoles and mobile devices. Others are played on five-foot long wooden controllers. I make games about stealing, and about creating chaos. For the most part, I make games that are ultimately loud, over the top, and very, very silly.
Goofy games are fun, fun is good, end of talk — right?
There is a particular thread that all these games have, though. They follow a very particular line of thinking, which in turn points to something larger, even though you might not guess it from their largely-goofy faces.
It’s easiest to tease this out by looking at through four of them.
The first one is a game called Scream ’Em Up.
As you can see, I made it a long time ago — back in grad school, before I knew how to document games well. So sad. Take high-quality pictures and lots of video of everything you make, you guys, don’t be like me.
Scream ’Em Up is basically like a Space Invaders remake/clone, except it’s two-player and collaborative, and in order to move your ship you have to move your body. So the Kinect acts as one half of the control scheme, and the two of you have to actually move laterally in order to move your ships.
The second thing that’s interesting about it is that in order to shoot your gun, you have to scream as loud as you possibly can into an iPhone mic.
And there’s none of this quiet fake-screaming, like… ₐₐₐₐₐₐₐₐₐₐₐₐₐₐ
No, no, no, no, no, no, my friend. The thresholding is far too high. You gotta really, really want it.
The second game is Slam City Oracles.
In 2014, I received a commission to make a game from NYU. They have an event every year called No Quarter, where they ask around four or five game developers from around the world to to make an installation game for a gallery space.
So I made Slam City Oracles, with artist and game designer Jenny Jiao Hsia, and music from a band called Scully. It’s another two-player collaborative game, except in this one, you work with your partner to cause as much chaos
in the world as possible in under two minutes.
You play in this massive, vertically-oriented world, where every surface acts like a giant trampoline. The harder you slam down, the higher you fly up, which gives you more power to slam down higher, which in turn makes you able to go up higher, and so on.
So yeah, that’s your verb, it’s slam.
You can of course move left and right, to position yourself advantageously for optimal destruction, but going up and down, this massive bouncing motion, is the big thing.You’re kind of just moshing yourself into the Earth, over and over again. And the more stuff you send flying, the higher your score is.
It’s furious and it’s fast. The trailer for Slam City Oracles is almost as long as a round of the game itself.
One of my favorite things about this game was that by accident, I
made the score multipliers way too big, and so poor overwhelmed Unity defaulted to using scientific notation to display your score. And I was like, “Well, I’m definitely keeping that.”
The third game in this thread, I co-made for Global Game Jam 2017, with a friend of mine, Ramsey Nasser. It’s called Handväska! (handväska is Swedish for “handbag”).
It was inspired by this photo, taken by Hans Runesson in Sweden in 1985, of Danuta Danielsson. It is titled A Woman Hitting a Neo-Nazi with Her Handbag.
Danuta was a Polish woman whose mother had been in a concentration camp during World War II. A Neo-Nazi march happened in her town in the 1980s. This is a photo of her reaction.
That year, Global Game Jam took place around inauguration weekend, which was a time when people were discussing the ethics of punching Nazis.
You could say that this was Ramsey and my’s answer.
And then finally, my most recent game, Lost Wage Rampage.
This was another commission, this time from The Peabody Essex Museum for their exhibit, PlayTime. I made this with Andy Wallace and Marlowe Dobbe, and the music is by Streepthroat.
Lost Wage Rampage is a fast-paced arcade driving game — kind of in the vein of games like Crazy Taxi or a little bit like Grand Theft Auto, if you’re used to that kind of thing.
The difference is that in Lost Wage Rampage, you play as two shop girls who find that they’ve been paid less than their male coworkers. They decide to steal a car, and steal as much of the mall’s merchandise as possible, as a way of forcibly making up the difference.
You zoom around in this car, in this infinite, procedurally generated, sprawling suburban mall, and you try to pick up as much stuff as possible before the cops smash up your car one too many times.
Everything that’s outlined in green is something that can get you points, so you try to smash into it to accumulate money, which you see in the upper right-hand corner. The mall and its stores go on forever: you don’t have to worry about remembering directions or exits or backtracking or anything, because the game will always populate more mall around you. You just have to focus on avoiding the cops as long as you can.
So this is kind of a weird set of games, but it sums up what I do pretty well, I think.
I make games about power fantasies.
And “power fantasy” is a super loaded term in games.
It is a loaded enough term that it might even seem like I’m kind of veering off into left field, because none of those really look like power fantasies. But that’s because people, I think, tend to have a very particular idea of what a power fantasy is when it comes to games.
They tend to think about games where you play as, like, Gritty McToughGuy, space marine, shooting aliens on a far-off planet.
Or like those games where you’re encouraged to murder sex workers.
Or like military simulators where you’re dropped into some place in the Middle East and you just go around shooting brown people, where the guns are hyper-realistic but the Arabic is nonsense.
It’s this, and slight variations on these things, that we’ve been told constitutes the notion of a power fantasy in games.
It’s kind of gotten a bad rap, this phrase, “power fantasy.” And I think that’s sort of understandable, because what these games tend to do is they give power to the already powerful. It’s the same old thing, right?
In comedy, there’s the difference between punching up at power and punching down — the difference between roasting a politician, and just, like, straight up bullying a kid on the street. Punching up is interesting; punching down is shitty. In games, there’s a tendency to punch down.
What I’m interested is different power fantasies than the ones that we see all the time. I’m interested in what happens when we create games that have power fantasies for folks other than the sort of stereotypical game demographic of the stereotypical cisgender, heterosexual white man.
And a lot of interesting questions come up when we decide to rethink
the concept of the power fantasy as it relates to games.
What happens when we change the group of people that we’re giving power to?
What happens when we change the kind of power we’re giving those people?
What happens when we design worlds that let people practice that power?
And furthermore, if we make those kinds of games, can they help us envision alternate ways of being? Can we use those game worlds to practice inhabiting power that we’ve lost, or never had or maybe need right now?
And can this affect the rest of our lives?
I’ve been fixated on these questions for a while now, and they started from a very particular time in my life where I felt like someone or some group of people was giving me those answers about sparking these possibilities through art.
As a true 90s kid, journey for me started with riot grrrl. Riot grrrl was a feminist punk movement that started in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s. It was a woman-led reaction against a society they felt offered no validation of their experiences.
A major tenet of riot grrrl was the importance of women and girls actively engaging in cultural production, sharing their experiences and emotions through original art, regardless of whether they had formal skill or not. It had a Cambrian explosion of music and visual art and zines that centered on the personal and the political and the intersection of the two. It had an emphasis on raw honesty, creation over perfection, and making spaces for each other to be ourselves.
Big shocker, riot grrrl had a lot of its own class and race issues. It ended up being very much a movement for white girls from the suburbs, but as a white girl from the suburbs, I have to admit that it made a big impact on my life.
There was one document in particular that it produced that had a huge impact on me, and that was the riot grrrl manifesto.
While riot grrrl music was the first time I saw the bullshit I was dealing with reflected in media, the manifesto was the first time that I saw a
way to navigate out of the bullshit.
A couple lines that spoke to me:
“BECAUSE us girls crave records and books and fanzines that speak to US that WE feel included in and can understand in our own ways.”
“BECAUSE we recognize fantasies of Instant Macho Gun Revolution as impractical lies meant to keep us simply dreaming instead of becoming our dreams AND THUS seek to create revolution in our own lives every single day by envisioning and creating alternatives to the bullshit christian capitalist way of doing things.”
“BECAUSE we know that life is much more than physical survival and are patently aware that the punk rock “you can do anything” idea is crucial to the coming angry grrrl rock revolution which seeks to save the psychic and cultural lives of girls and women everywhere, according to their own terms, not ours.”
This totally exploded my brain. I could not get enough of it, and I desperately wanted to be part of it.
Sadly, even by amateur punk terms, I was like, really bad at music. So there was no way I was gonna join a band. Visual art was out too, for a similar reason.
But I was pretty good at making games.
So I started to wonder if, maybe instead of making a zine, or making music too bad to even be classified as noise, maybe instead I could try making a riot grrrl game. What would that look like?
I got really excited by this concept and decided to run with it, even though I didn’t really have any sense of what it actually entailed, or why it really mattered to me all that much.
I came up with a design manifesto for myself on what that would look like. It had just a few tenets. Although I’ve moved away from riot grrrl, this design manifesto is still hold myself to, more or less.
A riot grrrl game wouldn’t be concerned with polish. Enough of assimilating to someone else’s standards of what is valid or talented and what isn’t. Raw and unpolished is good and honest. (Also, games are really expensive to make, so they have to be small and unpolished because otherwise wow that’s a lot of money.)
A riot grrrl game would use game rules and mechanics to value what the rest of the world doesn’t. The rules of a riot grrrl game would value women being loud, taking up space, and girl solidarity.
A riot grrrl game would point to some desired world, a way to create revolution in our own lives by envisioning and creating alternatives to the every day way of doing things.
Finally, to me, a riot grrrl game would be about interpersonal catharsis
instead of outsider education. About supporting each other and seeing each other, instead of explaining ourselves to others.
Going back to the games I mentioned, you can kind of start to see some of those lines light up.
The first two games — Scream ’Em Up and Slam City Oracles — are about this idea of using rules and mechanics to value what the rest of the world doesn’t.
In Scream ’Em Up, you’re given an excuse to embody a kind of frenzy you’re rarely allowed to embody. You cannot play this game without hearing your voice and feeling the edges of your body. Indeed, being loud and indelicate will likely net you the highest score — so why wouldn’t you do it? The point of a game is to win it, right? All of a sudden, you have a glorious excuse.
Same goes for Slam City Oracles. It’s not a physical game in the way that Scream ’Em Up is, but at its core is these girls using the power and space and physical force of their bodies to create a mess. Their size is an asset, helping rack up more points on the high score board. There’s a freedom and a lightness there that was meant to mirror many, many joyous nights that I had in the mosh pit.
Likewise, Handväska and Lost Wage Rampage are about flipping imbalances of power in unfair situations, freeing us to do what we need to do without consequences. They are meant to be ways to release the stress of being certain kinds of people in the word.
The modern inspiration for Handväska came really easily to me, a queer Jewish girl, and Ramsey, an Arab man from Beirut, in January 2017:
And the whole concept of Loss Wage Rampage was largely thanks to my spillover of anger from having to deal with the same gendered wage nonsense my entire life.
So these four games touched on these tenets in their own ways.
But what I found that’s kind of interesting over time is that this last one — prioritizing catharsis over outsider education — is the one that got the most resistance from the public.
And yet to me, it was also the thing that was most critical to what I was doing.
Indeed, nowadays I get a lot of questions about why my games — whether about bodies or fascists or pay disparity — don’t model the real world systems that lead to those conditions.
Well-meaning people constantly ask me why I didn’t, for example, include pay differential statistics in Lost Wage Rampage, or make games that are more realistic about the consequences of fighting fascism, or games that are much more autobiographical, literally about times in my life when something shitty or scary happened to me (whether about pay discrimination or bigotry-related or worse).
They ask me why I make dumb, goofy games like these instead, which only seem to touch on these topics in a sort of surface level.
They ask why I don’t make “empathy games,” to teach people how and why this shitty stuff happens, and why people should care that the shitty stuff happens.
I understand where they’re coming from.
There are so many ways to be marginalized in this world, and privilege allows so many of us — even those who are marginalized on other axes — to be oblivious to so many forms of harassment, discrimination, and violence that other people face every day.
And there are a ton of incredible game designers actively trying to combat this now, where their explicit practice is to take a facet of their experience as a marginalized person and make it tangible, for someone who has never been
in that experience before, in order to facilitate that understanding.
But I think that explicit intention is really the key.
If the artist and audience share this same intention — if it’s a two way street — there can be some incredibly interesting and life-changing connections between people that couldn’t have happened otherwise.
But what I find is that when people react to my games — or other people’s games, as you’ll see in a second — they kind of come to expect this empathy education from them. It’s a one-way label slapped on to someone else’s work.
And that gets kind of weird when it might be someone who is not, in fact, intending on making an empathy game at all. It creates a sort of strange power imbalance that leads to a facile understanding of what their games are trying to do in the first place.
The trick to me is right in the title of this label empathy game.
Empathy for who? Who are we trying to convince to empathize with us? Do we have a good track record with them? Do they tend to actually believe us, and why would a game make that any different? How is this empathy constructed, and is it weird, when ostensibly we’re centering the marginalized, to immediately center the observer? How does the “empathy game” treat its subject, and is it messed up that there’s a subject in the first place?
When this one-way label of “empathy game” is applied to other people’s work, you get a strange warping, this imbalance of power that almost immediately poisons that very interaction.
Robert Yang is a game designer in New York City who thinks and writes a lot
about so-called empathy machines, especially in VR.
Robert makes games about gay culture and intimacy. He has a historical bathroom sex simulator called the Tea Room, a male shower simulator called Rinse and Repeat, and a gay sex triptych called Radiator, among many others.
In his piece Empathy Machines as Appropriation Machines, Robert talks about his track record of making 3D realistic games about gay relationships and how this leads to a widely held, but incorrect assumption among his audience, who is majority straight, that he quote, “makes games for straight people to understand ‘what being gay is like’” instead of “highlighting gay culture or queer solidarity, as [he] intended.”
He continues,
“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!”
The self-obsession and entitlement of his straight audience immediately recasts Robert’s games into something for the benevolent straight person to understand and ingest all in a neat little package. There’s no consideration that perhaps the target audience is other queer or gay people. The target audience must be the outsider, peering in, attempting to get “the gay experience,” whatever that is.
In addition to centering the conversation on the already powerful, this tendency to insist that people create an easily digestible nugget of their experience is impacted by the belief that these things can be so compressed in the first place.
In BOMB Magazine, Steiner talks about a comment she overheard in front of her installation, Cost-benefit Analysis, at the Whitney Biennial: someone frustratedly saying, “I just don’t get this lesbian thing!”
Steiner notes that this person assumes that there’s some concrete Thing to get in the first place. There’s something to pull out, to consume from this piece before it’s Finished and can be put in a pile. Like, if you see a whole “lesbian thing,” then you did it! Yay, congrats! Plus that means Steiner did her job too, so she gets a check mark.
There’s sort of a transactional nature to this. If you see a lesbian thing and you got it, then she did her job and you did yours. If you don’t see it, then it’s her fault, because that’s what she should be doing.
But, of course, as Steiner says, the question isn’t what a Lesbian Thing is,
because she herself doesn’t even know what that would be in the first place. What she’s putting out there is more complex than the checkbox that the other person, so frustrated, so confused by this lesbian thing!, wants to fill in.
Lili Loofbourow had a wonderful article this year called The Male Glance that’s all about how we fail to see the intentionality and depth in the work of women.
She says,
“Faced with a woman’s story, we’re overtaken with the swift taxonomic impulse an amateur astronomer feels on spotting Sirius — there it is! he says, and looks to the next star.”
She describes how, when we’re faced with stories from marginalized people, we’re overtaken by these impulses to kind of fit them into taxonomies that we already know, and then once we fit them to those taxonomies, we file them away, content with our evaluation, ready to find something else more worthy of a close reading. We bar ourselves from seeing intentionality or subtlety in the work, and then accuse it of lacking depth — which is a really brutal feedback loop.
She says the male glance “produces the fantasy that a lazy reading—not even a reading but a looking—is adequate, sufficient, complete, correct.” This idea that we can understand what these works have to offer with a mere glance. The ‘lesbian thing,’ the ‘gay experience’ — this compulsion on the part of an out-group audience to flatten artworks into predictable experiences of the marginalized that can be compartmentalized and checked off in our minds.
When we do this — when we reduce the work of creators into something that must be directed outwardly rather than towards an in-group; when we insist on an easily digestible nugget that we can Get— it becomes the only thing we’re able to parse from them, and the only thing we’re willing to receive.
Mattie Brice, a game maker and critic, writes about this in light of her game Mainichi. Mainichi is, in her words, a game that helps communicate daily occurrences that happen in her life, exploring the difficulty of expressing these feelings in words.
Mainichi is just one of Mattie’s games. She’s designed games that physically take place in her neighborhood, activated by the player, moving through real world space. She’s made Twine-based dating games, card games about militant fem-bots aiming to destroy all men by breaking their hearts. And she’s done design interventions on her own games and has a really seriously broad body of work that interrogates games along many angles, from UI to devices to kink.
But she found that the industry’s emphasis on deeming things ‘empathy games’ led to several points of erasure.
In her essay Empathy Machine, she notes a larger industry pattern of:
“[only] caring about what marginalized creators are doing if it involves talking about their pain and trauma.
And in her personal experience,
[C]ritical engagement with other games, and my future work that isn’t about painful experiences are completely sidelined.”
A sort of transactional flattening of one’s work and the subtle refusal to engage with an artist as a whole person, with a whole practice.
Melissa Gira Grant talks about this with regard to gender, sex, sex work and sexual assault:
“What’s being requested here is not a considered engagement with how our bodies teach us, carry our experience, how our bodies and what passes between them shape public life. How could you survive that? When did you first know? Why did it take you so long to say? All too often all that’s being demanded is a peep show. […] Successive revelation is how one generates value. The narrative goes in one direction: disclosure after disclosure.
She continues:
Each thing disclosed is supposed to be about revealing some bigger truth, but it’s a truth measured mostly by how well you’re drawing the audience in. […] Get vulnerable enough for someone to step in with the right story, the perfect #hashtag, the slightly more powerful person to carry your cause for you. […] This is how people working for justice, people frequently shorthanded by friendly policymakers and funders as “those who are most impacted” by oppression, are transformed by their allies into useful tokens.
This poem from Power Politics echoes this notion of transactional love and allyship pretty well, I think. Starting at stanza two:
2
I approach this love / like a biologist / pulling on my rubber / gloves & white lab coat.
You flee from it / like an escaped political / prisoner, and no wonder
3
You held out your hand / I took your fingerprints / You asked for love / I
gave you only descriptions / Please die I said / so I can write about it.
Which is the most Twitter thing I’ve ever heard in my life.
The love and empathy that she’s talking about in this poem is not really an attempt to love or empathize with anyone else in any meaningful way, right?
Instead, the response to this other person’s vulnerability is clinical and extractive, with the other person being mined for their painful experiences.
So okay, a lot of words, a lot of quotes, a lot of academic reasons for me to be somewhat suspect of this, and kind of be worried about this label and wanting to avoid it being applied to my own work.
But even aside from all this, I have my doubts about the capacity for games to change folks who weren’t gonna be changed in the first place, frankly.
I’m going to show you some screen shots from the comment sections of articles covering Lost Wage Rampage.
Don’t worry. I don’t read the comments. I have someone else read them for me and pull out the good stuff.
What’s wild is that a ton of people who react to my games cannot even accept the fiction I am putting forward as a creator. Like the area that I have total creative control of, that we have all agreed creators have full control of — they refuse to accept it. Even aside from the fact that these details are based on my own real-life experiences, as the creator, I am empowered to say what the canon is. I even have the power to be like J.K. Rowling and retcon everything! And yet they cannot accept that that fundamental principle of creation.
So instead I get comments like:
“How do they know the other workers are men? Have they specifically asked these other workers what gender they identify with?”
I’m the author. They’re men. When it happened in real life, they were men too.
“Were they doing the same job, with the same experience? If so, then all they need to do was contact the HR department.”
Anyone here ever had a successful experience getting justice from an HR department?
Finally:
“Is there any alternate path where they just ask for a raise? That could lead to choices like ‘don’t go to jail’ and ‘find a job where you’re more appreciated.’
Right.
It’s just like Grand Theft Auto 4.
Everyone knows our favorite part of Grand Theft Auto 4 was when Niko Bellic comes to America and he’s super tempted to go into a life of crime.
But then he goes no, I’m gonna become a certified public accountant.
“This is the path for me!,” he says, and he settles down with his nice job, and he’s got a white picket fence and everything is great and he never does a crime.
I’m sure these commenters asked Rockstar, with moral outrage, why Niko couldn’t have pursued that path, and become an upstanding and productive member of Liberty City.
So forgive me if I don’t really believe that an educational game will sway the beliefs of these folks.
But that’s okay, because there’s so many other people to make games for.
What I can do instead is, I can make games that are cathartic for the people who have lived those experiences already — who I don’t need to try and justify them to, because they Get It. They’ve also lived it.
I can create, for other people, the same kind of spaces that made me feel alive when I was younger.
So I don’t necessarily have be out here educating outsiders.
I can be here to make mosh pits for my friends.
Indeed, I find for a lot of people — typically women and non-binary folks — these games that I make scratch an itch they don’t often get to scratch.
This is reflected both in the press my games get, as well as the games’ immediate aftermath.
In sharing Scream ’Em Up at public games festivals, I remember I would often get pairs of women walking up to the game. They’d typically be two women who looked totally normal, or sometimes actually really fancy and femme. They’d ask to play, sweet as anything, and get the microphones, and start.
And they would go absolutely goddamn bananas. Screaming, shoving, they were brutal! I saw bruises! They would yell and scream and push and shove each other, and when they handed me back the microphones they would kind of, they’d still look basically the same, but they’d have this, like, feral look in their eyes, this yes yes yes.
Before I even made the game, just talking about the concept of Lost Wage Rampage tended to leave sweet women throwing their heads back with uncharacteristically menacing laughter.
I think that game has a 98% cackle success rate, which is awesome.
One of the reasons it’s so hard for me to care about some cranky dude who wants to Debate Me In The Marketplace of Ideas on Twitter, is: why I should talk to him when I can be getting reviews like this?
A few years ago, I got a text from my partner about my game Slam City Oracles, which has an arcade cabinet thanks to the Death By Audio Arcade collective, and is often part of their arcade at MAGFest.
I was not at MAGFest that year, so he texted me like 2 a.m. to tell me that two
queer girls in dinosaur onesies had taken over the Slam City Oracle’s cabinet. They had apparently been alternating between wildly playing the game and making out against the cab between rounds for hours.
And I just go, fuck yes! Right?!
That will always be the review that’s closest to my heart.
In part because it’s like just the cutest mental image — but it also means that this game, this dumb little game I made, made them feel things. And maybe not things that they can put into words, but something they felt together and something that they clearly wanted to bask in for just a little while longer.
It reminds me a lot of this incredible Maurice Sendak story about a boy he had a correspondence with.
This boy wrote Maurice Sendak a fan letter with a little drawing, and Maurice Sendak wrote him back, and Maurice Sendak made a drawing for him.
Big deal, right? A Maurice Sendak original.
So Sendak then got a letter back from the kid’s mom, and the mom said: Jim loved your card so much he ate it.
And Sendak was like, hell yeah!
He saw that as the most special thing. One of the highest compliments he could receive.
The kid saw it, he loved it and he ate it.
That to me is like the Holy Grail feeling as a creator.
What I’m chasing in my players is something I call “the glint.”
This moment when you see someone go from playing a game to engaging on some other weird and inscrutable level with it.
It’s not competitive thing, and it’s not even necessarily linked to fun per se.
(Although if you think I’m gonna try to define “fun” in public, you’ve got another thing coming. I don’t need to get assassinated by everyone in games studies today.)
I think it happens when people see some part of their lives not only represented in a game, but blown wide open. There for them to play with and to take charge of as they please.
The excuse of the game gives them some chance to relieve something that’s pent up in them, that maybe they didn’t even realize they needed to experience in the first place.
They light up, they smile, their eyes narrow. They go, like I said, ever so slightly feral, and they look that way even when they’re passing the controller on to the next person, which I think is the most important.
So yes, games can use procedural rhetoric to teach outsiders how
systems of oppression work, and there are a lot of incredible game developers doing this on purpose, in beautiful ways.
But I super don’t want anyone to be required to make Mavis Beacon Teaches Feminism for the benefit of some antagonistic goober in the comments section, when they can have the freedom to make joyous experiences for people like them who need it.
So probably some of you in the audience are like “okay, Jane, that’s sounds
fun, but are you being kind of flip? Isn’t it really privileged to say you don’t want to educate anyone, and aren’t you being just a little selfish?”
And my answer is, sure.
But the caveat to that is I think it’s okay, maybe even critical, because the work of making cathartic fantasies for each other is also important.
I think we take it less seriously because it’s more elusive and harder to quantify than Serious Games. But it doesn’t make it any less meaningful.
There’s an article, It’s Time For A New Kind of Power Fantasy, from 2016 that helped me categorize a lot of my thinking around this idea. In it, the author cracks open the common game design term, possibility space.
What we mean as game designers when we talk about “possibility spaces” are the breadth of decisions that we are able to make in a game. The possibility space of chess is all of the movements you can make with all of the different pieces, given the rules and current state of the board, at some given point in time.
But she kind of thinks of this as more abstract term:
“[T]o whom have we been promising possibility? Whose future is coming, and with what will they be armed?”
She notes that oppressive power-crazed politics and the sexist, privileged world of much entertainment technology go hand-in-hand, and are holding on ever-tighter to each other. In the face of that, maybe what we can do, must do, is “offer different definitions of power, different fantasies for different people.” She continues:
“We don’t need to make yet more realms where the power fantasies of these male consumers are everything. We need more means for the rest of us to escape the one they’ve already made for us.”
So these power fantasies, these means of escapism, are important on their own terms, and they matter even after you put the controller down.
Because one of the things that we can do with games is use game rules and
mechanics to create worlds that we can point to, that let us step out of the ordinary for a little bit. Like any good art, they take the fuzzy feelings we’ve had about the world, and put those feelings into concrete forms that we can discuss and think about and share. When we have those things to point to, we can start building off them, practicing them, and taking steps to live them.
Nicholas Bourriaud wrote about this in his book, Relational Aesthetics. In relational art, the art is a social circumstance shared within and between people. So rather than having like a painting where each person interacts with it one-on-one, the form in relational art catalyzes a social interaction between people. That social interaction is itself the art.
(Actually I think there’s a lot in common with the social role making
of relational aesthetics in game design, but that is a whole ‘nother talk.)
Maybe the most important quote for me from this book is this one:
“Producing a form is to invent possible encounters[.]
[It points to a] desired world, which the beholder thus becomes capable of discussing, and based on which his own desire can rebound.”
Once we have this form — and a game is as valid a form as any other — it can point to a desired world, which we then become capable of discussing, and based on that we can have our own desires rebound.
Aya De Leon has a wonderful take on this idea that we can use media to
point to a desired world — one free of the restraints of the one in which we live.
She wrote an article for Bitch magazine called the Unusual Suspects: What Heist Narratives Hold for Women. (I found this article very serendipitously while I was still incubating the baby idea of Lost Wage Rampage, and it definitely lit a fire under me to get it done.)
She says:
“For women the fight for worldwide economic equity is long and grueling; I write feminist heist as a joyfully imagined set of shortcuts to us as women getting our due[.]”
I love this phrase, “joyfully imagined set of shortcuts.”
It’s not necessarily about doing any of these things in real life, like robbing banks, unless that’s your jam I guess. It’s about imagining a world in which we can take what’s ours, and the joy of imagining and inhabiting that space together.
This moment of entering some other world and sharing that joy matters. It sparks something in us and it opens up something in us. Something that is hard to quantify, but something that’s no less important.
This moment of opening up is something that Bernie DeKoven talked a lot about.
Bernie was one of my idols, both in games and in general. He was sort of my mentor from afar, if someone can mentor you without knowing or agreeing to it.
One of Bernie’s core beliefs was that rules are less important than fun. A game is about the people playing it, and rules only matter in as much as they serve us.
This might sound like kind of a weird idea, but you’ve probably experienced it if you’ve ever played a game that had house rules. You’ve taken the sanctity of the original game rules and changed them, either to accommodate something or someone else, or to simply make the game more fun, in your subjective opinion. You’re not going to play football the same with your 30 year old cousin as your 7 year old nephew.
Bernie noted that when we do this, when we make these changes, we’re becoming attuned to each other in what we need.
That’s like a kind of empathy, but the good kind, in my opinion.
When we’re attuned to each other, we can play really well, and we can play really well together anywhere, in any context.
He was really insistent about that last part, which I loved.
Playing well can mean playing video games well together, or doing sports well
together, but it can also be the feeling that you get of participating in an orchestra. You can play well together in a business meeting.
When we play really well together, we achieve something larger than ourselves, and we come away transformed.
Bernie called this transformation co-liberation:
“[a] sudden, momentary transformation of our awareness of the connections between ourselves, each other, and the world we find each other in. […] We return changed, not the same person we were — our understanding of who and what we can become[ — ]redefined.”
So co-liberation has implications outside of the game we’re playing or the
experience we’re having.
We return changed, not the same person we were. Our understanding of who and what we can become now totally different.
We can use a game to create some alternate world that shows us some new facet of ourselves that we can take into the rest of our lives.
This echoes to an eerie extent the ending to one of my favorite movies — I’m sure this is a shocker, it’s Thelma and Louise.
After everything that’s happened to them and everything they’ve done, Thelma says:
“Something’s crossed over in me and I can’t go back[.]
“I don’t remember ever feelin’ this awake. […] Do you feel like that? Like you’ve got something to look forward to?”
They’ve cracked open their usual ways of living and being and experienced a totally different world and the way that they operate in that world and they just can’t come back from that.
They’ve been transformed by the journey they’ve shared together, and they’ve kind of co-liberated each other.
This is what I want my games to feel like.
Untapped, joyous possibility.
Indeed, in Lost Wage Rampage, the last thing you see is the girls driving away,
and the last thing you hear is their carefree laughter fading into the distance.
Out of all the aesthetic decisions I had to make for this game, I think this was actually really the most important one, the laughter.
This assurance that they got out safe, that they’re free and they’re off to live in this brave new world.
This understanding that the girls got away for sure — canonically, I’m the author, canonically, all you in the comments section…
That their world is cracked open, and that your world can be cracked open too.
I think in the end that’s what I’m really trying to do.
I make games about finding joy.
While that might intersect with fun, I think it can be so much more than that.
I think joy can be defined in a lot of ways.
The capacity for action.
The sense of feeling seen and heard.
The feeling of being part of a larger whole.
The ability to envision a new and better world.
And it’s something that can’t fully be explained or quantified.
I’m really excited by this idea of designing games that let us take care of each other.
Whether that’s creating our own power fantasies, or our own systems of
healing, or something else that I could never have thought of that someone else has to invent.
Games that are unapologetic, unquantifiable, free from justification and make us feel connected and alive.
I may not super believe in empathy games, but I do believe in joyful games as ways to care for each other, as ways to envision alternate ways of being and living, as a way to say what if this instead, as ways to say me too, or fuck ’em, or hell yeah, just a shared primal scream.
I consider myself to be kind of like a genre game maker, so that involves lots of car chases, explosions, and screaming, but I think this joy can take a lot of different forms.
If you’re thinking about making these kinds of interactive experiences or games, these are the prompts that I use nowadays.
You can use them too if you want.
What if you made a game about the daydream that makes you happiest?
The thing that you most vent about.
The power that you wish you had.
The care systems that you wish existed.
The things that you wish were valued.
What if you could make a game about creating that environment
for someone like you who needs it?
Maggie Nelson has a quote about the protectors she deems the many-gendered mothers of her heart.
“They insist, no matter the evidence marshalled against their insistence: there is nothing you can throw at me that I cannot metabolize, no thing impervious to my alchemy.”
These are the games that I wanna make and I want to play from other people. These assurances that there’s nothing that we can’t handle.
Maybe we’ll reach those imagined worlds, maybe we won’t, but we can at least live life joyfully along the way.
Thank you.
This talk was slated to be forty-five minutes long, which felt so long when I started writing it, but ended up being so short when I tried to cram everything I loved into it. In addition to the sources I cited, I added some related reading that I encourage everyone to check out here.
This is a bit of a time capsule of my thinking on games and joy in early 2018. I continued on a much deeper dive, taught a 14-week class on it in 2019 at NYU, and am currently (slowly) writing a much larger piece synthesizing it all. If that is something that interests you, holler!
