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Sucht und Technik: Game Over - Feuilleton
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Sucht und Technik: Game Over - Feuilleton

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Selten hatte unser Kind eine solche Liebe zu einem technischen Gerät entwickelt wie zu dem Nintendo 3DS. Er töpferte ihn sogar.

Vor drei Monaten, es muss ein Samstag gewesen sein, fuhren wir mit unserem Sohn plötzlich in einen Elektronikmarkt, um einen Nintendo 3DS zu kaufen. Ich weiß, dass es Samstag war, weil bei uns dann gern die Situation entsteht, in der absolut alles denkbar wird, obwohl es erst einmal nur darum gehen soll, was wir an diesem Tag unternehmen. Es gab Samstage, an denen wussten wir am Morgen nicht, was wir machen wollten und waren bis zum Abend Reiten, Paddeln und im Kino gewesen. Nun waren wir also im Begriff, einen Nintendo 3DS zu kaufen, von dem wir tags zuvor noch gelesen hatten, dass er unausgereift sei, was keineswegs bedeutete, dass wir überhaupt schon entscheiden hätten, dass es in unserem Haushalt einen Nintendo 3DS geben würde. Wir hatten eigentlich überlegt, in einen Biohof vor die Stadt zu fahren oder wenigstens in die Skateboardhalle. Das war jetzt nicht mehr die Frage.

„Ich liebe Euch“, sagte unser Sohn, „ich liebe Euch so sehr. Ihr seid die Besten!“

Er saß hinten im Auto und hatte sich so weit nach vorn gelehnt, dass er uns abwechselnd küssen und umarmen konnte. Er ist neun Jahre alt, ihm sind schon ein paar Dinge passiert im Leben, aber solange es gute sind, staunt er über sie immer noch, als passierten sie ihm zum allerersten Mal. Seine Freude ist dann so groß, als hätten wir ihn gerade aus einem rumänischen Waisenhaus geholt, genau so echt und vollkommen rein. Selbstverständlich war er wieder nicht angeschnallt.

„Ich hätte nie gedacht, dass wir heute einen 3DS kaufen“, sagte er.

„Wir schauen erst mal, ob er da billiger ist als im Internet.“

„Und wenn er billiger ist, dann kaufen wir ihn, ja?“

„Jetzt schnall Dich bitte an, Schatz.“

„Mama? Ja?“

Der Nintendo 3DS ist eine Spielkonsole, früher hätte man gesagt ein Gameboy, was zeigt, wie lange heute früher her sein kann. Ein Gameboy hat mit einem 3DS in etwa so viel zu tun wie ein Faustkeil mit einem Schweizer Taschenmesser. Mit beiden spielt man Computerspiele, aber mit dem 3DS spielt man sie auf DS, also Dual Screen, und außerdem in 3D. Ein Gerät, zwei Bildschirme und drei Dimensionen, das ist eine Menge für eine Familie, die nicht einmal einen Fernseher besitzt.

„Wir schauen es uns an.“

„Also ja?“

Keine halbe Stunde später standen wir an der Kasse, in der Hand einen metallicblauen Nintendo 3DS für hundertneunundfünfzig Euro, zehn Euro mehr als im Internet, wo er allerdings erst in drei Tagen lieferbar gewesen war. Eine Wartezeit, die uns zu Hause noch sinnvoll, nun aber grausam und willkürlich erschien.

Wieso kaufen wir plötzlich einen Nintendo?

Wie immer in Situationen, in denen wir sahen, dass uns die Entscheidung bereits entglitten war, knüpften wir sie schnell an Bedingungen, um den Schaden zu begrenzen, und vereinbarten mit dem Kind noch im Geschäft, dass von nun an der Hamsterkäfig regelmäßig gereinigt und die schmutzigen Socken selbständig in den Wäschekorb gebracht werden müssten.

„Das mache ich“, sagte unser Sohn, „wirklich. Ihr müsst es mir nur sagen.“

Aber schon auf dem Weg zum Auto hatte er vergessen, dass er das Gerät bitte erst zu Hause auspacken soll, damit unterwegs keine Teile verloren gehen. Noch in der Tiefgarage drückte er sich den kleinen glänzenden Kasten an die Brust und sagte, dies sei der schönste Tag seines Lebens, während wir uns wunderten, wie bei einer Entscheidung, in dem wir alle Schritte genauestens auf ihre Vernünftigkeit hin überprüft hatten, wieder einmal genau das Unheil herausgekommen war, was wir verhindern wollten.

Was den Nintendo 3DS anging, war es so, dass unser Sohn eines Tages, Weihnachten war gerade vorbei, aus der Schule kam und sagte, er wünsche sich einen Nintendo 3DS. Der sei viel schneller als der alte DS. Die Spiele seien besser. Alle Kinder hätten inzwischen einen. Außerdem erlaube sogar der Schulhort, dass sie freitags die Geräte mitbringen, verbinden und gegeneinander spielen.

„Bitte Mama!“

„Wer sind denn alle Kinder?“

„Na Leon, Hakan, Samuel und Jule.“

Es vergingen ein paar Tage, in denen wir hofften, das Thema würde sich von selbst erledigen, während das Kind im Internet ständig neue Informationen fand - Farben, Preise, Testberichte - mit denen es die Diskussion am Laufen hielt, bis wir schließlich sagten, wir würden uns die Sache einmal ansehen. Ein Wunsch, das hatte ich in einem Erziehungsbuch gelesen, ist erst einmal als Ausdruck einer Sehnsucht zu verstehen, die wachsen und gesehen sein will, wenngleich ihre Erfüllung naturgemäß auch ihr Ende bedeutet. Ab einem gewissen Punkt sagen wir meist, wir sehen uns die Sache an, um sie mit dem Kind zu besprechen. Bei technischen Geräten hoffe ich heimlich, dass neben unseren guten Argumenten auch der Preis gegen eine Anschaffung spricht. Leider sind diese Geräte dann aber selten so teuer, dass ein Kauf ausgeschlossen erscheint.

Danach zögerten wir die Entscheidung eine Weile hinaus, handelten eine finanzielle Beteiligung des Kindes aus, zahlbar in Raten vom Taschengeld und fanden am Abend zuvor noch einen Videoblog, in dem ein offensichtlich kundiger Jugendlicher sämtliche Nachteile des Gerätes anführte - der Akku sei schwach und von dem 3-D-Effekt tränten einem die Augen - woraufhin sich unser Sohn empört darüber zeigte, was für ein Unsinn im Internet verbreitet werden darf. So war dann alles gekommen. Wir glaubten, wir hätten alles bedacht und hatten doch das Entscheidende übersehen.

Warum wissen wir nicht, dass er süchtig macht?

Am ersten Tag zog sich unser Sohn, kaum waren wir zu Hause angekommen, auf das Sofa zurück und stand nur noch zum Essen auf, eine Pause, in der er den Akku auflud, der sich wie angekündigt schnell entleerte. In der ersten Woche stand er jeden Morgen eine Stunde vor allen anderen auf, um vor der Schule noch ungestört spielen zu können. Kaum war er am Nachmittag aus dem Hort zurück, saß er wieder vor dem Gerät. Am Abend ging er nie ohne das Gerät in sein Zimmer, versprach, es nicht zu benutzen, konnte sich aber nicht daran halten. Tagsüber war es in der Wohnung jetzt so still, dass wir überhaupt nicht merkten, dass er da war. In der zweiten Woche hatte er das mitgelieferte Spiel durchgespielt und wollte ein neues. Ein neues Spiel kostete vierzig Euro.

„Das musst Du Dir von Deinem Taschengeld kaufen.“

„Aber dann dauert das noch so lange.“

„Dann musst Du sparen.“

„Aber das alte Spiel ist voll langweilig.“

Wir hofften, die Sache würde sich erledigen, dann sahen wir sie uns an, dann knüpften wir den Kauf an Bedingungen. Da entdeckte unser Sohn, dass Nintendo im Internet einen Shop betrieb, in dem man Spiele für weniger als vierzig Euro herunterladen konnte, und wir entdeckten, dass er für eines dieser Spiele auf einmal bessere Noten in Diktaten oder Mathematikarbeiten schreiben konnte, während nach wie vor seine Schwester den Hamsterkäfig für ihn reinigte, seine schmutzigen Socken im Wohnzimmer herumlagen und er mit seinem Nintendo 3 DS spielte.

Kann man wirklich nicht speichern?

Inzwischen hatte er herausgefunden, dass er sich mit dem Gerät ins Internet verbinden konnte, um dort gegen Gegner zu spielen, die besser waren als die aus dem Schulhort. Einmal, es war Sonntag sechs Uhr morgens, fuhr er eine Stunde lang Autorennen gegen eine Gruppe Japaner, bei denen es gerade Nachmittag war. Über den kleinen Autos blinkten die weißen Fähnchen mit dem roten Punkt für das Land, aus dem sie kamen. Er war der einzige Deutsche, er nannte sich „Playboy“.

In einer typischen Szene aus dieser Zeit sitzt unser Sohn direkt neben der Tür, weil dort die Steckdose ist, mit der er den Akku auflädt, während er spielt. Dann gibt es Abendessen.

„Leg bitte das Ding weg. Es gibt Essen.“

„Nur noch fünf Minuten.“

„Nein, bitte jetzt. Das Essen wird kalt.“

„Nur noch das Level zu Ende.“

„Mach es bitte!“

„Aber dann sind meine Punkte weg!“

„Dann speicher das Spiel ab.“

„Das geht nicht.“

Erst später fanden wir im Internet eine Seite, auf die wir zuvor nicht gestoßen waren und auf welcher Eltern ihre Schwierigkeiten schilderten, ihre Kinder von dem Nintendo 3DS zu trennen. Sie bekamen fast alle dieselben Antworten: „Nur noch das Level.“ - „Dann sind meine Punkte weg.“ - „Ich kann nicht speichern.“ Es war, als hätten sich die Kinder untereinander abgesprochen und zitierten sich nun gegenseitig. Womöglich war das sogar die Wahrheit. Jedenfalls fand ich in einem Forum den Eintrag eines Dreizehnjährigen, der sich fragte, ob seine Mutter das Recht habe, ihm seinen Nintendo 3DS wegzunehmen, wenn er zu viel spiele. Die Mehrheit fand, das dürfe sie nicht. Nur eine Minderheit wand ein, vermutlich meine sie es nur gut. Unser Sohn neigte ganz offensichtlich eher der Mehrheit zu.

„Leg es weg, oder ich nehme ihn weg.“

„Warum sollte ich?“

„Ich zähle bis drei.“

„Na und?“

„Eins.“

„Ich mach das nicht.“

„Zwei, und die letzte Zahl heißt…“

„Ihr seid die schlimmsten Eltern der Welt!“

Danach verließ er äußerst verärgert den Raum und wir, die mit dem Essen Zurückgebliebenen, bestätigten einander, dass sich nun aber etwas ändern muss. Wir gaben ihm das Gerät abends nicht mehr mit ins Zimmer und standen morgens früher auf, um zu sehen, ob er spielte. Wir handelten mit ihm aus, dass er in der Woche jeden Tag nur fünfundvierzig und am Wochenende sechzig Minuten spielen darf, die er sich frei einteilen kann. Sieht er einen Film, geht das von der Zeit ab. Der Zettel über die Vereinbarung hängt noch an unserem Kühlschrank, gleich neben dem Zettel, mit welchen Raten er sich am Kauf beteiligt. Aber das führte nur dazu, dass wir nun ständig schauen mussten, wann genau fünfundvierzig Minuten um sind, die Anrechnung von Pausen diskutierten, Zeitboni verteilten und am Ende doch wieder vor dem Kind standen, um ihm seinen Nintendo 3DS wegzunehmen.

Ist nicht die Firma Nintendo schuld?

Es war wie mit all dem technischen Gerät, das es in unserem Haushalt gab und das die Kinder selbstverständlich mit benutzen. Wir konnten Regeln aufstellen, so viel wir wollten. Wir konnten die Handys mit neuen Zahlencodes versehen, die Laptops mit neuen Passwörter, den Computer mit Kindersicherung, wir konnten uns bei der Anmeldung zu unseren eigenen Geräten vor die Tastatur beugen wie ängstliche Bankkunden vor den Geldautomaten, am Ende kamen wir immer wieder nur darauf zurück, dass wir die Eltern waren und dass wir es selbst regeln mussten.

Nur einmal war ich der Meinung, dass die Schuld für all das in Wahrheit gar nicht bei uns lag sondern nur bei der Firma Nintendo, deren Produkte mir verbotswürdig erschienen wie Drogen. Das war nach einer langen Autofahrt, für die wir unserem Sohn eigens ein neues Spiel gekauft hatten und auf der es einmal keine Zeitbegrenzung geben sollte. In einem Ernährungsbuch hatte ich gelesen, dass man Kindern, die ständig nach Süßigkeiten verlangen, einfach ein paar Tage lang ausschließlich mit Süßem ernähren sollte, mit Süßen und nichts anderem. Der Körper rufe den Wunsch nach dem gesunden Essen, das er sonst gewohnt ist, nach einer Weile von ganz allein wieder in ihnen wach, stand dort. Was aber den Nintendo 3DS betraf, so schien sich der Körper unseres Kindes an das Klettern, das Schwimmen, das Radfahren, Malen, Vorlesen und Erzählen gar nicht mehr erinnern zu können. Dreieinhalb Stunden spielte er ununterbrochen mit dem Gerät, danach war der Akku leer. Als wir im Hotel ankamen, setzte er sich neben die nächste Steckdose und spielte weiter. Selten habe ich einen solchen Hass auf ein technisches Gerät empfunden wie an jenem Tag.

Wo haben wir das Ding versteckt?

Von nun an nahmen wir ihm „das Ding“, wie es bei uns nur noch hieß, so konsequent weg, wie wir eben konnten. Erst ließen wir es immer noch auf dem Tisch liegen, weil uns alles lächerlich vorkam, aber als wir sahen, dass die Aufgabe, nicht wieder an ein Gerät zu gehen, das so offen da lag, für unseren Sohn im Moment zu groß war, versteckten wir es doch in der Wohnung. Wir packten es an immer neue Plätze, von denen einige so sicher waren, dass auch wir nach einer Weile nicht mehr wussten, wo der Nintendo 3DS war. Unglücklicherweise wurde uns das ausgerechnet an jenem Freitagmorgen klar, an dem wir ihm das Gerät wieder in den Schulhort mitgeben wollten, damit er sich mit seinen Freunden verbinden konnte. Aber auch diesen Ärger überstanden wir, und je mehr Tage vergingen, umso seltener fragte unser Sohn nach dem Gerät.

Nur freitags, dem einzigen Tag, an dem er seinen Nintendo 3DS noch bekam, sahen wir sich zärtlich über das Gerät beugen und dessen Plastikhülle streicheln, als sei sie aus Fell.

„Mein lieber DS“, sagte er dann, „mein liebster DS ich hab dich so vermisst.“

An den anderen Tagen aber ging er wieder mit seinem Skateboard hinaus, um mit den Jungs über die Spielplätze zu ziehen, und wenn er zurückkehrte, war ihm immer irgendetwas Lustiges passiert. Er fing wieder an zu malen, er tanzte und sang vor dem Spiegel, wie er das früher getan hatte. Er spielte mit dem Hamster, half beim Essenkochen, freute sich auf die Ausflüge am Wochenende, und auf einmal las er sogar. Ein Freund, mit dem er bisher Nintendo 3DS gespielt hatte und dessen Eltern ihm das Gerät ebenfalls weggenommen hatten, gab ihm ein Buch, das er innerhalb eines Wochenendes durchlas. Wann immer er konnte, nahm er es zur Hand und war am Ende ganz erstaunt darüber, dass er neben allem anderen nun also auch noch einer war, der Spaß am Lesen hatte.

Und was war eigentlich mit uns?

Das eben noch unzertrennliche Band, das ihn über Wochen an seinen Nintendo 3DS gefesselt hatte, war mit einem Mal zerrissen, aber unser Sohn war darüber nicht hilflos oder traurig geworden sondern frei und klar. Er war auf sich selbst zurückgeworfen, aber das brachte ihn wieder mit sich in Kontakt. Die Angst, ohne das Gerät nicht zu wissen, was er machen solle, der Zwang, es immer wieder zur Hand zu nehmen, die Not, es nicht zu dürfen, der Ärger darüber, all das war von ihm genommen, ohne dass ihm etwas fehlte. Ich konnte es kaum glauben und sah im nächsten Moment, wie wenig mir selbst von dieser Freiheit zur Verfügung stand.

Jeden Morgen schaltete ich mein Handy ein, und wann immer ich fürchtete, einmal eine Minute lang unbeschäftigt zu sein, schaute, hörte, las ich etwas nach. Oft hatte ich gleich wieder vergessen, was es gewesen war, so schaute ich noch einmal nach. Unser Sohn hatte immer nur den nächsten Level fertig spielen wollen, ich wollte immer nur den nächsten Artikel lesen, die nächste Mail schreiben, die nächste Sache recherchieren. Aber es war derselbe Zwang, dieselbe Not, dieselbe Angst, ich könnte in die Ruhe, die sonst entstehen würde, hineinfallen wie in ein dunkles Loch. Wie konnte ich verlangen, dass er ohne seinen Nintendo 3DS auskam, wo ich total von meinem iPhone abhängig war?

Vor ein paar Tagen war unser Sohn zu einem Kindergeburtstag eingeladen, bei dem getöpfert wurde. Die anderen Kinder formten Tiere, einen Baum, eine Blume, ein Flugzeug, unser Kind knetete seinen Nintendo 3DS. Als er ihn zu Hause auspackte, brach es uns fast das Herz. Mit den zwei Bildschirmen, dem dicken Steuerknopf und den vier Richtungstasten hatte er das Gerät ganz gut getroffen, sogar an die winzigen Ausgänge der Lautsprecher hatte er gedacht, und dabei war er beim Modellieren ganz auf seine Erinnerung angewiesen, denn er durfte zu diesem Zeitpunkt schon seit Wochen nicht mehr mit ihm spielen. Aber auch daran hatte er gedacht. Auf dem oberen Bildschirm waren tief in den Ton folgende Worte eingeritzt: „Game over“.

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With the Galaxy in Flames, My Video Game Hero Finally Came out of the Closet

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I got my idea to play the sci-fi epic Mass Effect 3 as a closeted male version of the lead character, Commander Shepard, before the game’s creators said the third game in the three-game saga would finally include male same-sex romance.

As someone who did enjoy the series, I wanted to lovingly mock it while pointing out its parallels to the thinking behind such policies as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” But before I could do that, those points became irrelevant: “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is no longer in effect, and there are now options for players to allow Shepard to experience two male same-sex romances.

I still played a closeted Shepard. I named my Shepard “Sebastian” and, as him, saved the galaxy while gathering a crew on my ship, the Normandy. In return, the game’s creators at BioWare inadvertently gave me a story that allowed me to more meaningfully connect to a coming out story than any I have read or seen in books or film.

As early as the first game—a game that ostensibly did not allow the male version of its protagonist to fall in love with any male character—there was a hint of homosocial camaraderie between Shepard and Kaidan, the first male crew member I brought into combat. The tension between them read as awkwardly as many conversations I have had with crushes in real life: heavy pauses between sentences that would touch on topics more intimate than anything that might be said just between casual friends. Whether or not this tension existed, I did want it to be there and could play that cat-and-mouse game of “is he or isn’t he interested in me?” We went, saved galactic civilization as we knew it, and no more than words exchanged between us. Then I died (at the beginning of Mass Effect 2) and came back. Kaidan chastised Shepard for not speaking to him for the two years I was dead. He cared somewhat, at least.

Full size

Kaidan with one version of Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard.

Through the first two Mass Effects I found myself staving off advances by women of varying stripes, from crewmates to my personal assistant. When quietly denying their interest, or taking the conversational option that was more brusque than I would have otherwise chosen, I was left wondering if this would damage friendships. I wondered how this would be perceived, worried about not wanting to reject someone. I wanted my Shepard to be able to say to these ladies: “I’d love to be close friends, though.” I couldn’t say that in my rejections of their advances, however. It wasn’t exactly in the script. Yet I also couldn’t express my love interest in my close friend Kaidan, whom I had chosen to save at the expense of Ashley, another crewmate on board the Normandy.

Through the first two Mass Effects I found myself staving off advances by women of varying stripes.

Kaidan felt guilty about Ashley’s death, and I couldn’t even bring Shepard to say anything about why that decision had been made. I was, perhaps, not the right man for the job. Imposter syndrome seemed entirely plausible for this Shepard, but no one else was going to step into his shoes to make the decisions necessary to fight off the galactic threat of extermination by a synthetic master race. They were at least a good distraction when Shepard was far from Kaidan; something to make sure Shepard did not try to reach Kaidan through drunken extranet messages (which is what experience tells me I would have done in the same shoes).

In Shepard’s world, as shown in the third game, homosexuality does not seem that large of a deal. Indeed, in an interview on BioWare’s blog, Dusty Everman, who wrote the role of Mass Effect 3 pilot Steve Cortez, says: “I believe that by the 22nd century, declaring your gender preference will be about as profound as saying, ‘I like blondes.’ It will just be an accepted part of who we are.” Cortez mentions his husband many times. He is forthright and says it with no sense that he is cunning or testing of the waters. His having a husband is no big statement. It just is.

Unfortunately, prior to Cortez’s comments and the introduction of male romance in Mass Effect 3, I had no way of expressing Sebastian Shepard’s own romantic desires into the game universe in which he found himself, meaning I was internalizing all of it. I was playing from inside the closet, wanting to express my desires, but finding myself unable to actually put those feelings into any form, time and time again. In my mind, Sebastian was penning sober messages to Kaidan, expressing his feelings, and deleting them; practicing for the day he might finally say something.

In my mind, Sebastian was penning sober messages to Kaidan, expressing his feelings, and deleting them; practicing for the day he might finally say something.

While playing the game before me, I was constantly answering the question why: why was I not romancing the options I had? Liara or Tali? Miranda or Jack? In fact, when given the choice between abandoning Ashley or Kaidan, why did I select Ash, whom I knew I could pursue? I could answer that! But it played out as just indifference: not being interested, despite trying to be a comforting friend to many of these women who played significant roles in Sebastian’s life. It probably makes no sense that this Shepard would be closeted in this future world where Cortez can rattle off about his husband’s death without any fear or shame.

Then! It happened. On the Citadel, Kaidan invited me to dinner. I had already seen him nearly killed, and standing in his hospital room, those awkward pauses were back again. He expressed a desire to find someone, and, finally, that tension proved to be real.

I agreed to be his “someone.”

Later, bringing some alcohol to my room, he made a minor note about why this passion was not expressed previously: “You were always so focused on the work back then. The mission was everything.”

It wasn’t. I was an openly gay man playing a character who did not have the tools to properly express his character, and therefore was projecting my own knowledge of what it is like to live a closeted life—the shame, the guilt, and the sheer terror of not knowing how to take that first step. To others it seemed I was apparently just focused on my work, putting out of mind everything else; in reality, the opportunity never presented itself, because the world in which Sebastian lived did not give him that chance until nearly the end of the series. The writers seemed to want to acknowledge the previous inability to romance Kaidan, and he may well have perceived me as a workaholic (saving all life as we know it is a full-time job, I imagine). But Sebastian threw himself into his work in order to distract him from his crush.

[Spoiler about the end of the game]

At the end of the game, I watched Joker and EDI, a couple I had brought together despite the fact that one was human and one was AI, put their arms around each other while staring off into the sun of the planet on which they crashed. I almost teared up watching Kaidan leave that same shuttle. In the game’s last playable scene, Sebastian had sacrificed himself so that organics and synthetics could live together, without fear. Watching Kaidan leave that shuttle behind Joker and EDI, after watching Sebastian give him a goodbye kiss in London, I felt gutted: Sebastian had finally come out, and now I was watching his lover start on a new life without him. It felt like such a momentous occasion in his life that was just as quickly ended.

Sebastian saved the universe by deciding to synthesize organic and synthetic life, a deus ex machina that seemed less important as I found myself at a loss for what that meant for his romance with Kaidan. I, as a person, did not particularly find Kaidan compelling. The romance, on the other hand, felt correct for Sebastian, a man who chased his dreams; whether those dreams were of Kaidan Alenko, or of seeing the galactic community come together and end their hostilities. Ultimately, his sacrifice read as someone who felt so undeserving of that particular love with Kaidan, that he was willing to give himself up. He was willing to sacrifice everything to ensure that other people could continue living without the kind of fear that ruled his life quite firmly for the first two games.

[End of Spoiler]

Given this series’ own evolution of its concept of male same-sex romances, I am not entirely sure how often this phenomenon can be replicated. I would hazard to guess that the politics of our own world influenced Shepard’s romantic interests. As time progressed, so did Mass Effect’s sexual politics. The way it played out, however, I was not merely watching Sebastian come out of the closet, his thoughts echoed my own. His particular journey was a necessity born out of the game’s own options.

Denis Farr writes for the Border House and is an editor at Gay Gamer. Follow him on Twitter or read his blog. Or both!

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"Indie" Gets Tossed Around a lot but What Does it Actually Mean

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In June of 1992 the Journal of Human Evolution published an article by R.I.M Dunbar entitled, “Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates.”

Jargon-filled but widely cited, the scholarship established what is now known as Dunbar’s Number: the amount of people on average that a person can maintain strong social relationships with. Estimates vary, but the standard value is 150. From Facebook to corporations, this is what’s generally considered to be the upward limit on effective organization size.

Dunbar arrived at this number by comparing neocortex volume and group size. Primates with fewer neocortical neurons maintained group sizes that were correspondingly smaller. In other words, our neurobiology predetermines how many people we can meaningfully work with, be friends with, and otherwise socially relate to.

“It’s an inevitable consequence of having something so big. If it takes 100 or 200 people to make it, then it’s just not possible to work in the way that we used to.”

It’s not a terribly big leap then to wonder how development team sizes affect the videogames that are created. How does the number of people working on a game change the final product?

Not always positively, at least according to Free Radical Design co-founder, Steve Ellis. For Ellis, videogame development has become too anonymous. Speaking with Edge Online he said, “It’s an inevitable consequence of having something so big. If it takes 100 or 200 people to make it, then it’s just not possible to work in the way that we used to.”

In contrast, Ellis described his time working on Time Splitters 2. With just over 20 people on the team, “everybody knew everybody, and they all knew what everybody was doing and what they were capable of. It was a really good atmosphere because everyone had a shared vision that was easily understood and communicated without the need for team meetings and documentation and all the other things that bigger companies find themselves having to do in order to try and force this shared vision.”

Development teams have continued to grow in part because of the manpower needed to take full advantage of the graphical opportunities afforded by the most recent generation of videogame consoles. This is one possible reason why “indie” development has gained so much attention over the last few years.

People have always independently tried to make videogames, but the mix of personalities and retro nostalgia we’ve come to associate with titles like Super Meat Boy and Fez is a decidedly recent phenomenon. In this sense, “indie” has become associated with games that cut costs by using elegant but simple presentation in order to spend resources innovating on traditional gameplay tropes instead.

Of course, to limit the “indie” label by associating it with a certain retro art style or gameplay minimalism would exclude games like Journey, Dear Esther, and Minecraft. And yet it’s hard to believe that any single descriptor could include such disparate gaming experiences.

“The indie label doesn’t contribute anything to the discussion except a needless sense of distance”

This problem hasn’t gone unnoticed. As the “indie” moniker has become more prevalent, what exactly it means or refers to has become less clear. This has led some people to argue that we’d be better off dropping the loaded term all together.  Anna Anthropy, designer and author of Rise of the Video Game Zinesters, said as much when she spoke at 2011’s GDC.

“The indie label doesn’t contribute anything to the discussion except a needless sense of distance,” said Anthropy, “calling a game an indie game or an author an indie developer just enforces the illusion that it’s an exclusive club, an inner circle to which most people aren’t admitted.”

In an opinion piece at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Nathan Grayson wrote, “Ultimately, then, ‘indie’ – once a term that stood for freedom of expression and unbridled experimental spirit – has now become a ponderous yolk. In many ways, it limits developers and players alike just as much as labels like ‘triple-A,’ ‘first-person shooter,’ and ‘Zynga employee.’”

Grayson did not pen his critique in a vacuum though. It was inspired by mega publisher EA’s recent adoption of the phrase for its discount bundle. However, despite being peddled by a large corporation, the games included in the bundle like Shank and Warp were independently developed by small teams.

When asked what he thought about the marketing decision, Klei Entertainment technical designer Nels Anderson (involved in both of the Shank and Death Spank series) said, “I guess the problem is that we can say ‘EA,’ but it’s not really a single entity, right? It’s made up of a lot of different people with different perspectives and opinions. That’s kind of the problem with any large, publicly traded company. They’re beholden to all these different interests and it ends up influencing their decisions in ways that I’m not sure are always optimal long term. At least the point where I’d probably never be comfortable working for a publicly traded company.”

Here Anderson gets at something important, something that might yet keep “indie” meaningful and relevant: size.

“Being ‘indie’ frees you from creative or directive forces that aren’t your own.”

“Indie” might apply to games as different as Braid and Rock of Ages, but what titles like these share are small team sizes (as few as two people). It’s Dunbar’s number. It’s what Anderson, Ellis, and others have been talking about: smaller teams mean closer personal relationships, better communication, and a clearer goal. This might not be what “indie” means in film or music, but it’s the most useful way to think about it when it comes to videogames.

Solo developer Greg Lobanov has created nine games and is now working on his tenth. He’s young, still in school, and his upcoming title Phantasmaburbia will be the first one he’s ever attached a price tag to. For Lobanov, “Being ‘indie’ frees you from creative or directive forces that aren’t your own. It’s about making personal, noncommercial games. It’s about making games out of a love for making games, and not much more.”

The problem isn’t just trying to balance corporate goals with creative ones though. It goes deeper than that into the very nature of how organizations function and how they are maintained. As Dunbar’s research made plain, humans only have a finite amount of cognitive energy to go around. More relationships mean weaker ones, and weaker ones mean less clarity and cohesion surrounding a project.

”‘Indie’” to me is pretty synonymous with what used to be called garage developers back in the day.”

Mark Rein might think Epic Games still embodies the “indie spirit,” but “big indie” is a contradiction. Even though Epic is independent from outside influences, the company is still subject to conflicting goals, passions and personalities internally.

As Notch, creator of Minecraft and owner of Mojang, told Nightmare Mode in an email, “‘Indie’” to me is pretty synonymous with what used to be called garage developers back in the day. It’s one person or a very small team that makes games for the sake of making games, and not just to make money.”

Derek Yu, the creator of Aquaria and many other titles, said team size was important as well, “[A] company is indie if it’s small (1-20 members) and independent (not owned or published through another company). Small team size is an important factor that changes the nature of game development and the resulting games significantly. It’s also the quantifiable factor that is behind the more nebulous terms like ‘indie spirit.’”

In each case the point is generally the same: smaller development teams craft videogames whereas larger studios produce them. Team size might seem arbitrary, and the cut-off between indie and non-indie isn’t hard and fast, but there’s clearly a difference in mindset and process between AAA titles produced by large teams, and “indie” titles created by only a few people. If you can fit all of your designers into a regular grade school classroom you might be indie. If you can’t then you’re probably not (sorry Mark Rein).

As with any craft, the more people who are involved the less intimate and authored the final creation will be. Even the creative visions of Ken Levine and Hideo Kojima eventually get funneled through elaborate networks of individuals and processes, and their auteur choices are ultimately contingent upon the intricate production systems they oversee.

Super Meat Boy didn’t come from a system though, just Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes. And while that doesn’t mean their game is necessarily better because of it, it does result in a tangible difference, both for those who created the game, and for those of us who play it. A raw energy and purity results from the intimate relationship that differentiates “indie” games from other ones. Larger teams are no less devoted to their products, but more people do mean more friction. The next time you want to know if a game is “indie,” don’t pay attention to EA’s marketing or a news headline. Instead, look at how many people worked on it. Size isn’t everything, but it does matter.

Post by Ethan Gach

I write about comics, video games and American politics. I fear death above all things. Just below that is waking up in the morning to go to work. You can follow me on Twitter at @ethangach or at my blog, gamingvulture.tumblr.com. And though my opinions aren’t for hire, my virtue is.

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Dinofarm Games » Score in Videogames: Why No One Cares, Why They Should, And How We Can Make Them

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Since I wrote my related post, “On Score“, I’ve come to a lot of new realizations about score and its strange, rocky relationship with digital games.  Our history has been so rife with problems that there are many of us who believe that score is necessarily, inherently irrelevant.  I know people who say that they “don’t care about score in videogames”, without even talking about a specific game.  While I’m certain this is a faulty idea, I feel that I do understand why they feel that way.

Historically, videogames have done a completely awful job of implementing score systems.  I’ll get into exactly why this is a bit later, but for now it should be no surprise that anyone is tempted to dismiss score outright, if they were raised in this time period with scoring systems like that in most Roguelike games or even Tetris.  I can’t think of a single digital game that has a really great scoring system;  probably the best ones are very early games like Galaga, but even they have issues.

It’s worthwhile to recognize that score is an abstract gameplay concept.  It is not a thematic element, and it is (or at least, should be) implemented a bit differently in each game you play.  To “not care about score” is similar to “not caring about position” or “not caring about resources“.  These are abstract elements and whether or not you care about them will be based on what their endogenous meaning inside the system is.

Consider a sport like baseball, or football.  Obviously, if you’re going to play one of these games, you’re going to care about score.  Very, very few people watch a football game with no interest in knowing what the score is.  If you’re going to watch a game, and not care about score, then what keeps you watching?

I’ve heard the argument that this is because those games are multiplayer.  I don’t think that this is the reason, though, because actually, all score-based single-player games are technically multiplayer.  You’re competing to get the new high score – a high score that has been set by another agent.  That other agent may be another human, yourself, or one of those preset ones that NES games came with.  You don’t play against each other at the same moment, but does that mean Golf isn’t multiplayer?

Or boardgames:  surely, people playing The Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne or Ticket to Ride are all caring about score, right?  I mean, if you don’t care about score, these games really end up making very little sense.

So this begs the question:  why?  Why do people generally care about score in every kind of game except digital games?

The Smaller Cause:  “Completion”

I’ve talked about this idea that videogames, at a certain point, started to become “about completion”, not about what games have always been about, which is “pursuing mastery”.  This point was, unsurprisingly, the exact same point at which games started tying their play to a linear story.  Of course, stories fundamentally have beginnings, middles, and ends — they are a sequence of events, by definition — and so it seemed to make sense for games to start having an “end point”, since we were now tying these to stories.

This was a terrible idea that caused all kinds of problems that we’re still struggling with today, but one of the subtler effects was that we started having a lot of games that had both a completion point and a score system.  Games like Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario Brothers.  Every single person I knew was utterly confused by the inclusion of “score systems” in these games.  Who cares about points in these games?  The objective is obviously to get to the end and “beat” the game!

In Super Mario Brothers, the score really was irrelevant.  The game had a completion point, and it was pretty clearly all about reaching that completion point (rescue the princess!).  The game also was not randomized, so it didn’t really make sense to play it over hundreds of times and compete for score.  This series, and hundreds of other early popular games, set the tone for how people would think about score in the future.

The Larger Cause:  Videogames Have Been Doing It Wrong

You don’t care about videogame scores, because videogame scores are simply not well-implemented.  Even without the “completion” element, scores are not built into games in a way that would make us care about them.  The first problem is in the nature of the kinds of numbers videogame scores produce.

Look at a team’s score in baseball:  “4″.  What does that score mean?  Well, it means the team got four runs.  How about a score of “21″ in American football?  Most likely, it means the team got three touchdowns.  Same can be said for basketball, ice hockey, and almost every other sport you can name.

Boardgames are a good bit more complex in general, and they therefore usually have more complex scores, but I know of few boardgames where the scores routinely go well over 100.  A score of over 100 in Dominion is very, very good.  It’s practically unheard of in Puerto Rico.  Ticket to Ride’s score counter on the edge of the board only goes up to 100, and you usually only go a little bit above that in a game, unless one player just dominates.

Now let’s look at some video game scores.  You play a game of Galaga and then it tells you your score was 744,315.  Okay.  You play a game of Pac-Man and get 253,150.  Cool.  You play a game of Civilization and get 1,351,881.  I think my best Dungeon Crawl score was around 33,000.  Well, alright.

These kinds of numbers are extremely hard for people to derive any real sense of meaning from.  I can’t find a link to support this, but I swear I remember reading that the reason Blizzard split up their Starcraft 2 leagues into “Divisions” of 100 people was because after the number 100, humans have a difficult time attributing any meaning.  People don’t have a good innate sense for how much larger 551,365 is from 89,051, but they do have a very good sense of how much larger 70 is from 20 (this may be – and I’m purely speculating here, I haven’t looked this up – because early evolutionary humans traveled in groups of sizes roughly between 20 and 100?  Someone feel free to correct me if not).

Why 10, and not 1?

Careful with the Equations!

Equations are the other reason videogame scores suck.  I often think about my favorite boardgames and how each time I score a point, I take a little victory point chip and put it in a little pile in front of me.  In Through the Desert, I earn VP chips for connecting to oases, for picking up watering holes, and for getting the longest caravan.  I do those things, and BAM, I get a victory point chip.  There are also points you get for territory you control, but that also has a very direct look, and feel to it.  I see that space that I personally carved out with my own actions and decisions, and I count up its size.  Bam, that’s worth 12 points!  I fully understand this feedback that I’m getting here.

Now compare that to a videogame’s scoring system.  Very frequently, there is some weird equation that goes on, adding up tons of arbitrary numbers, and then dividing it by some numbers, and applying a multiplier for this, and so on.  Eventually, a number comes out the other end:  1,135,640.3.  Oh, okay.  I don’t have any feeling of connection to this number.  I can’t really see a direct relationship between my agency and the score I got.  If the score was 500,000 off (that’s 50% larger almost), would I really be able to call it out?  I’d probably go “Oh, okay” either way.

We have to be really careful with equations that have multipliers and division in them.  These serve to disconnect players actions from the feedback they get in the form of score.

Focus the Player On Your Game’s Actual Goal

Too many games are confusing about what their actual goal is.  Team Fortress 2 is one of my favorite digital games, but it’s guilty of this.  Why, when I hit TAB, am I even allowed to see my personal, individual score?  Does this have any bearing on the outcome of the game?  It’s a team game, and only a team can win or lose, yet — and feel free to call me out on this — many if not most TF2 players are probably a bit more concerned about their personal score.  This is because the developer showed information that wasn’t relevant.  The same thing would happen if you had a visible counter that ranked people by “most time they melee’d the floor” — you’d have people meleeing the floor all the time instead of trying to win the match.

In roguelikes or other similar games, the “fake goal” is “getting to a higher (deeper) dungeon level”, which is a vestigial thing from our unfortunate history of tying games and stories together.  The real goal is getting a high score, but I’ve had arguments with many who say that they don’t care, that they really care about getting to a higher dungeon level.

For AURO, our solution is to not even show what dungeon level number you’re at.  Neither during the game, nor at the end of the game, would you see this information.  Why not?  Because it’s irrelevant!  You should just as soon ask that the game display how many times you “canceled a spell” or “walked north”.  It’s not relevant to the goal of the game, and displaying it only confuses players.

Videogames Can (And Must) Do It!

I want to be clear:  it’s not at all due to any inherent property of digital games that they are so bad at score.  Videogames can do it just as well as any other kind of game;  it just requires a little more discipline on the part of a game designer since there are so fewer physical and practical limitations.

I’m not saying that you need to see some digital version of a VP chip fly into some digital bag every time you do something in a game.  Videogames aren’t boardgames, and they aren’t sports.  They are their own animal, and they can afford to be a little bit more complex than either of these things.  But you really have to have serious discipline about it — we’ve been going off the rails with this since the beginning.

Videogames must do this, because single player games require some system of score in order to be endlessly replayable.  And learning to master a game, just like learning a musical instrument or learning to paint or learning any other skill, should be an art that you can explore for the rest of your life.

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Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is – Whatever

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I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon. It’s not that the word “privilege” is incorrect, it’s that it’s not their word. When confronted with “privilege,” they fiddle with the word itself, and haul out the dictionaries and find every possible way to talk about the word but not any of the things the word signifies.

So, the challenge: how to get across the ideas bound up in the word “privilege,” in a way that your average straight white man will get, without freaking out about it?

Being a white guy who likes women, here’s how I would do it:

Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

This means that the default behaviors for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.

Now, once you’ve selected the “Straight White Male” difficulty setting, you still have to create a character, and how many points you get to start — and how they are apportioned — will make a difference. Initially the computer will tell you how many points you get and how they are divided up. If you start with 25 points, and your dump stat is wealth, well, then you may be kind of screwed. If you start with 250 points and your dump stat is charisma, well, then you’re probably fine. Be aware the computer makes it difficult to start with more than 30 points; people on higher difficulty settings generally start with even fewer than that.

As the game progresses, your goal is to gain points, apportion them wisely, and level up. If you start with fewer points and fewer of them in critical stat categories, or choose poorly regarding the skills you decide to level up on, then the game will still be difficult for you. But because you’re playing on the “Straight White Male” setting, gaining points and leveling up will still by default be easier, all other things being equal, than for another player using a higher difficulty setting.

Likewise, it’s certainly possible someone playing at a higher difficulty setting is progressing more quickly than you are, because they had more points initially given to them by the computer and/or their highest stats are wealth, intelligence and constitution and/or simply because they play the game better than you do. It doesn’t change the fact you are still playing on the lowest difficulty setting.

You can lose playing on the lowest difficulty setting. The lowest difficulty setting is still the easiest setting to win on. The player who plays on the “Gay Minority Female” setting? Hardcore.

And maybe at this point you say, hey, I like a challenge, I want to change my difficulty setting! Well, here’s the thing: In The Real World, you don’t unlock any rewards or receive any benefit for playing on higher difficulty settings. The game is just harder, and potentially a lot less fun. And you say, okay, but what if I want to replay the game later on a higher difficulty setting, just to see what it’s like? Well, here’s the other thing about The Real World: You only get to play it once. So why make it more difficult than it has to be? Your goal is to win the game, not make it difficult.

Oh, and one other thing. Remember when I said that you could choose your difficulty setting in The Real World? Well, I lied. In fact, the computer chooses the difficulty setting for you. You don’t get a choice; you just get what gets given to you at the start of the game, and then you have to deal with it.

So that’s “Straight White Male” for you in The Real World (and also, in the real world): The lowest difficulty setting there is. All things being equal, and even when they are not, if the computer — or life — assigns you the “Straight White Male” difficulty setting, then brother, you’ve caught a break.

(Update, 11:07 pm: The comment thread hit 800 comments by 11pm and I’ve turned it off, because now I’m going to sleep and tomorrow I travel, and this is the sort of comment thread that needs to be watched closely. I may turn it back on at some later point, but inasmuch as 800 comments already made it slow to load up, don’t necessarily count on it. But after 800 comments, most of what could be said has been, I think.)

(Update 2: Here’s a follow-up article addressing some common questions/comments regarding this piece.)

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Reality Check Super Collector's Article of the Year Edition

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Reality Check Super Collector’s Article of the Year Edition

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Everything has a special edition these days, so we thought we would get with the times. This is Reality Check: Super Collector’s Article of the Year Edition! We’ve packed a huge amount of bonus content into this feature to continue the Reality Check experience long after you’ve finished reading. Listen to the soundtrack, treat your computer to a makeover with some wallpaper and watch the exclusive ‘Behind the Screens’ video. Thanks for pre-ordering this article… wait. You did pre-order it, right?

A game is no longer special enough without releasing a special edition as well. The Crysis 3 announcement was accompanied by the ‘Hunter Edition’. You mean to tell me that at no point in the development process did someone say: “maybe this content would, you know, be better in everyone’s game?” Special editions aren’t about specialty. They are mere upselling: a con artist selling you extra rubbish you don’t actually need, like a phone ‘screen protector’ that micro-bubbles your screen and makes it more suspectible to scratches. Once, someone tried to sell me DS insurance: I think I will die before my DS does.

By the time you’ve read your Collectors Edition strategy guide (printed on real Egyptian papyrus, embossed cover hand-whittled from mahogany), changed into your pre-order t-shirt and played the iOS tie-in app, you might even have time to play the game as well. All those bonus costumes and avatar items melt away into the digital void: you won’t even remember that you purchased them, and you’ll never lament their absence if they were never there in the first place.

I tried to find where this trend started, but all I could find was an ambiguous list on Wikipedia. There’s nothing wrong with producing a game that’s especially collectable: the first production of The Legend of Zelda came on a gold cartridge, and I own a 10th Anniversary Collectors Edition of Sonic Adventure 2. It used to be the case that you could pre-order a special edition of the game which cost the same as the standard version, like my copy of Doom 3 that has the original Doom included. If you can get a bonus soundtrack or behind the scenes DVD for the same price as the standard game, then go for it.

Yet when everything is ‘special’, nothing is. These special editions are much more expensive than the standard games and offer content that should have been in the game, or plastic rubbish no self-respecting adult would keep on a shelf (and I’ve got a Knuckles the Echidna action figure on mine) and no child’s parents can afford. You can buy Halo 3 Legendary Edition, which comes with a giant Master Chief bust that you can’t wear as a real helmet. Why fill it with discs and art books when you could be filling it with your own head? Or why not splash out on Modern Warfare 2: I Don’t Believe It Actually Comes With Night Vision Goggles Please Tell Me You’re Joking Edition.

My brother buys all this collectors crap: he doesn’t even put it on display, it just litters the upper floor of the house. I know he reads Split Screen, so Paul: stop buying all this junk! Play that copy of Dark Souls I bought you for your birthday instead of reading inconsequential lore or playing with a fake doll from a fake world! I’m worried that after this week’s column is published, I’ll be found dead with an Arkham Asylum Limited Collectors Batarang lodged in my chest.

No discussion of insidious gaming marketing would be complete with mentioning ‘Game of the Year’ re-releases. Game of the Year editions are actually quite good: they’re a great way of bundling downloadable content that would otherwise cost extra. I never got around to playing Red Dead Redemption, but when I do that GotY edition is going to be a sensible purchase.

Yet I object to the use of the term ‘Game of the Year’ for games that are definitely not the best of the year. What’s wrong with ‘Director’s Cut’, ‘Ultimate Edition’ or ‘Platinum’? Looking back at 2011, unless you’re Portal 2, Skyrim or Skyward Sword, you probably weren’t the best game of the year- and that’s OK! Most books I read are not the best book of all time and most albums won’t receive a hallowed five stars in my iTunes library, but I still love them.

Publishers are playing the role of an overachieving parent, making up awards for their children, then demanding we all acknowledge these imaginary accolades. It’s as crass as buying your mum a “Best Mum in the World” card for Mother’s Day when you know that some mothers have died for their children. I’m sure your Mum makes fantastic pancakes, but you need to have some perspective. Whenever a publisher can release Dead Island: Game of the Year Edition with a straight face, you know something is rotten besides the zombies. Are your relatives really going to be fooled when Christmas shopping if every single game claims to be the Game of the Year? Not everyone is getting it wrong: CDProjekt should be commended for The Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition, which not only contains tangible enhancements, but was extended to everyone who had previously bought the game for free.

Publishers need to realise that selling a game is about more than shifting product from a warehouse: they should build a relationship with the player, patch any bugs in their games’ code, and treat the player with respect that’s often lacking. Well-respected developers like Valve, Mojang and CDProjekt give back to their fans, and they are rewarded with repeat business. Larger publishers like Activision, EA and Microsoft increasingly treat their customers with contempt. There are even rumours Microsoft are going to create a third tier of Xbox Live, a second gluttonous layer of icing on the money cake.

It’s just not good enough to call everything ‘special’, dividing pre-order bonuses across multiple retailers, releasing ‘Game of the Year’ editions for mediocre titles and expecting us to swallow it. You know what’s really special? Playing a great game. Those are worth collecting.

Super Collector’s Article of the Year Edition Bonus Content

Download your exclusive signed copy of Reality Check by Reality Check creator Alan Williamson

Download the Reality Check Desktop Wallpaper Pack and send in a screenshot of your desktop for the chance to show off your desktop to the world!

Download the official collector’s edition soundtrack here (4.5mb) or subscribe to our podcast feed in iTunes!

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The best of gaming opinion, editorial and iconoclasm every week on Split Screen: it’s Reality Check.

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Talking About Videogames

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Browsing around Gamasutra this morning and stumbled across this great Brandon Sheffield piece on game preservation and once again found myself wondering whether in ten years time, there’ll be a big black hole where this generation of games lies[1].

I’ll freely admit to enjoying the benefits that this uber connected-always-on world brings us and brings to our gaming. It’s an incredible time to have our hobby with so many things going on right now but more than ever, I find myself thinking that with the race to push the game player further and further towards service based, we’re kinda fucking it up a bit for future generations.

We’re already fairly reliant on piracy for preservation because the software industry is especially volatile, studios open, studios close, studios get sold on, people move on, time and hardware move on at a rapid rate. Companies buy IP but care little about heritage and why should they? They exist to make money not to preserve culture as icky as that is to me. Sure, there’s some money to be made from it in reissues but the amount of games that would be deemed worth reissuing? Not many, methinks.

The measures the industry is taking currently to combat their personal devil slims the chances of these things being easily preserved even further. Of course, it’s not just anti-piracy measures as egregious as those can be, there’s the move towards multiplayer and removing dedicated servers from the equation, there’s reliance on online scoreboards, social networks, all sorts of integrated things where each and every layer makes preserving the experience of a game even more difficult. Every service games get tied to is one more point of failure, one more chance of a server shutdown or service closing taking the game with it. Imagine for a second if we’d tied our games to Friends Reunited or to MySpace…

It wouldn’t surprise me to be looking back in ten years time definitely thinking “man, there’s just a black hole where some of the things we created were”, y’know? “Remember all those games we used to play but now can’t?”

John Anderson talked about a fair few of the issues surrounding the matter in his Where Games Go To Sleep series and the follow up Selecting Save On The Games That We Make, The National Videogame Archive is a thing that exists and that’s a good thing although of course, there always remains the questions of not just how to preserve things but what also. I’m in favour of The Museum Of Computing’s attitude of “all of it” and obviously, if it doesn’t include Williams’ Blaster then it’s all for naught anyway but that’s by the by.

There’s another aspect of preservation though that I’ve been thinking about for quite a while and it’s something that everyone can help in.

As a clue, here’s RR regular @ToreSupra damning himself for all eternity[2] for Save The Videogame. We can all lynch him later, ok.

Over here in the UK, I’ve always found the way we talk about our heritage as a bit, well, fucking embarrassing mainly. This was brought home a few weeks back on the lovely Speccy’s 30th Birthday and rather than stand up and be truly proud of what we had, once again, we drift into the same pathetic arguments over which format was best, the C64 or the Speccy with the obligatory CPC owners looking on a little bit befuddled[3].

I know, I know some of it is mild entertainment and it’s hard not to resist a breadbin dig and they can still be rather funny but I bring this up to make the point that the one thing we’re tremendously good at in the UK is letting our games history become footnotes rather than achievements and milestones.

We’d sooner squabble than celebrate and that’s kind of a shame.

We don’t champion our quirky stuff nearly enough, we don’t champion the stuff that’s distinct, unique or y’know, just bloody fun anywhere near enough. Because we don’t talk loudly enough about our games. And we don’t really discuss them with a critical voice either. How else could we still have people walk the Earth believing that Rick Dangerous was a good thing to happen?

3d Monster Maze becomes a footnote in first person shooters, Ultimate are those guys that went on to make SNES games and Xbox avatars and we’ll talk of Jet Set Willy and Elite and Minter and Chaos but little else. Obviously Retro Gamer magazine puts in fine service on behalf of most formats and most games but it’s an outlier, we don’t talk about our gaming heritage, our gaming history nearly enough and when we do, we talk about the same things.

We’re the ones who grew up with these games, we grew up playing them, we’re the ones who’ll be first to hit up an emulator to play Obscure-o-game X and yet, we do so little to pass this knowledge on. We just don’t talk outside of our little forums and communities, we don’t give these games a chance to be heard or replayed by those who will never otherwise know about them. And that, also, is something that contributes to games disappearing into the mists of time. Because there’s no-one to tell their tale.

Who then, of the next generation of kids, will know about Technician Ted or Rapscallion or Tir Na Nog? How could they know? What are the chances of them stumbling upon any of them when the history of videogames consists of Space Invaders, Elite, Mario and something something something NINTENDO something something PLAYSTATION something something GEN3 APPLE?

You’d never know we had such a rich and diverse history in this country when it comes to videogames because it’s always Elite, it’s always Jet Set Willy and it’s always bloody Chaos or something.

So your task, for today and for the future, is to go out there and talk about the videogames you played and loved. Tell people what you found great about that pocket money game from Mastertronic with no shame[4] because it’s one step closer to keeping these games and our history alive.

Write a blog post, make a youtube video, make a tweet, tell your kids. Shout about it. Talk about these things outside of retro circles, outside of retro meets and outside. Let’s talk about our games, the videogames that are special to us because if we don’t no-one else will.

Let’s talk about videogames. For the future and for the past.

[1] Seriously, if you’re making an XBLIG game, please please please put out a PC version so there’s some chance of it existing in the future, eh?
[2] I’m with Paul Barnett on this one, sorry folks.
[3] Probably because they’ve never seen a game in colour before, only in green
[4] Unless it’s Rick Dangerous then SHAME ON YOU

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The Trouble With Call of Duty's Scary New War of the Future

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The future is black, announces the trailer for Call of Duty: Black Ops II.

The next iteration of the popular first person shooter hardly needs any marketing campaign: immediately after the official announcement, the gaming press diligently started to operate as an extension of Activision’s PR department. Small and big media scrambled to produce the most comprehensive list of features, talking polygons and frame rates, revealing plot fragments, speculating on new gameplay additions that may or may not rejuvenate the trite shooting genre.

Given the predicable hype, it is surprising to see among the promotional material a serious, high-production-value “documentary” about 21st century warfare, touching upon cyberterrorism, robotics and counter-insurgency.

The 6-part video—available here in “interactive” form or here in sequential form—prominently features military commentator P.W. Singer and Oliver North, the key figure of the Iran-Contra scandal that nearly brought down the Reagan administration in the mid ’80s.

Allow me a digression. The Iran-Contra affair is one of those rare cases in Cold War history where it’s absolutely clear who the bad guys are. Oliver North, at the time working for the National Security Council, was involved in the clandestine sale of weapons to Iran (a rather common practice during the Cold War’s proxy conflicts). The proceeds from the sales were then illegally diverted to finance the Contras, a network of CIA-trained guerrilla groups, who opposed the democratically-elected government of Nicaragua. Contras were notorious for their human right abuses such as murder, torture, rape and executions of civilians. They also funded themselves through drug trafficking and it’s been alleged that the CIA was supporting, or at least, tolerating these activities. These last allegations were disproved after an investigation led by, well… the CIA.

The story of how Oliver North went from being a convicted felon for these activities, to Republican candidate for the Senate, best-selling author, news commentator for Fox News and eventually testimonial/media-stuntman for Activision, is a kind of twisted version of the American Dream that I’m not going to tell.

Back to the trailer: it’s quite unusual to see a major game developer contextualizing a title in relation to current, hotly-debated issues; that is, avoiding the notorious “it’s just a game” stance and acknowledging that military-themed games are part of a larger discourse around war. It’s also somewhat gutsy to take a clear political position by hiring a figure like North. I personally would love to see more game companies taking their roles as cultural producers this seriously.

It’s quite unusual to see a major game developer contextualizing a title in relation to current, hotly-debated issues; that is, avoiding the notorious “it’s just a game” stance and acknowledging that military-themed games are part of a larger discourse around war.

As it turns out, it’s hard to sell a shooter about black operations without glorifying the real black operations. The “documentary” feels like a polished piece of propaganda that may have come straight out of the Department of Defense.

I’m talking about a rather new kind of propaganda here. The post-9/11 triumphalist rhetoric of America’s Army, Kuma War or Full Spectrum Warrior (just to mention other games set in contemporary or near-future scenarios) can only sound awkward after the epic failures of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Hence, the militaristic fable has to assume a different tone—in this case, a dark, apocalyptic—and envision scenarios of inconceivable horror to strike an audience desensitized by a decade of continuous war. As Oliver North puts it in the trailer: “I don’t think the average American grasps how violent war is about to become”.

The bulk of the narrative is provided by P.W. Singer, a prominent military expert and fortunate choice for this type of contextualization. His book Wired for War is an outstanding account of robotic warfare (and, by the way, the main source and inspiration for my latest game Unmanned). The treatise describes the state of the art of unmanned systems and examines the political, ethical and legal issues emerging from this ongoing technological revolution. It inevitably raises difficult questions: How does our perception of the frontline changes when we can remotely control a UAV from home? How important is the risk of losing human lives when waging a war? Will robots make us more inclined to use violence in resolution of conflicts? Who is responsible when an autonomous machine kills a human? The personnel who deployed it? The commander of the operation? The engineer? The programmer who made the software?

Of course, all these questions are not even hinted at in the Black Ops II “documentary”. Singer is simply used to tell us that “the future is here” and that robots may have dangerous bugs, while North spins his Fox News-style terror scenario.

How does our perception of the frontline changes when we can remotely control a UAV from home? How important is the risk of losing human lives when waging a war? Will robots make us more inclined to use violence in resolution of conflicts?

Oliver North’s nightmare seems to coincide with the premise of the game: in a imminent future, a supervillain (possibly affiliated with Anonymous) is able to hijack an army of unmanned war machines and attack Los Angeles.

In the game, or in North’s vision (at this point it’s hard to tell) the future of warfare is with black ops. Clandestine Special Forces can be deployed anywhere, in no time, with the most sophisticated weaponry to confront a diffused, unfathomable enemy.

Don’t understand the connection between cyberterrorism and covert operations? Don’t worry, that’s nothing but a non sequitur that serves the purpose of introducing the main themes of Black Ops II. Nevertheless, this kind of nonsense, especially if repeated ad nauseam in news media and pop culture, contributes to the way we think about conflicts and future threats.

I believe there is a twofold process transforming the way we perceive war. On one hand we have a normalization of images of war: in media, in electronic entertainment, even in viral videos showing robotic Big Dogs or other DARPA-funded marvels. On the other hand, we have a massive deployment of “strategies of separation” such as unmanned aerial vehicles or undercover operations that work together to make the material reality of war as distant as possible from our daily lives. Black Ops II will probably end up contributing to both sides of this equation by trivializing war and celebrating the culture of secrecy at the same time.

You may ask: what’s wrong with celebrating black operations anyway?

In the Ramboesque universe of Call of Duty, black ops are presented as an elite force type of operations, carried out in secrecy by modern ninjas. But in reality, what makes certain operations “black” is not that they go undetected by enemy forces—after all, most of military engagements are meant to surprise or deceive the opponent. The peculiarity of black operations is of being untraceable and deniable by the very institutions which finance and conduct them. This secrecy is desirable whenever the operations, if done overtly, would cause popular uproar, diplomatic crisis or legal troubles. It allows the perpetrators to bypass public scrutiny, democratic oversight and the Laws of War, a complex system of liability under which the “proper” military must operate.

Real-world black operations are often indistinguishable from terrorism. The 1985 Beirut car bombing, in which American and British intelligences failed in their attempt to assassinate an Islamic cleric, resulted in the deaths of about 60 civilians, including children leaving school.

Examples of contemporary black operations include the murder of several Iranian nuclear scientists, the virus Stuxnet, the undeclared drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and the Extraordinary Rendition Program that involves the kidnapping of suspected terrorists and their illegal detention and torture in a network of secret prisons operated by the CIA.

Real-world black operations are often indistinguishable from terrorism.

The most paradoxical aspect of black operations is that they are mostly invisible to the public opinion here in the West, but not in the countries where these operations take place. Venezuelan people know and remember vividly that the 2002 coup against their democratically-elected government was funded by Washington. For the families and friends of the thousands of victims of drone strikes in Pakistan, those operations are not that secret anymore. The news that U.S. drones are deliberately targeting rescuers and funerals may be of secondary importance here, but abroad, it fuels an ever growing anti-Western sentiment.

In the West, we live with constant cognitive dissonance because these practices clearly conflict with our supposed moral high ground and the official mission of “exporting democracy”. We deal with it by quickly forgetting troubling events, by buying into sanitized stories such as the ones presented by video games, or by crafting elaborate echo chambers where the only news stories we are exposed to are ones that relate with our hobbies and interests.

It’s entirely possible that Black Ops II may end up telling a fascinating story, the story of a country that achieved such a complete military supremacy that the only thing it fears is its own arsenal. It could also attempt new forms of gameplay to describe the complexities of asymmetrical warfare and the vaporous world of cyberterrorism, but I suspect we’ll end up with a refinement of the same shooter, this time with robotic enemies as targets.

This coming November, you may be one of the millions who will purchase Call of Duty: Black Ops II. Before you start fantasizing about a Los Angeles under drone attack and the undercover soldiers who will save us all, you may want to think about the horrifying history of undercover operations and the actuality of drone wars today.

The future may indeed be black, but the present isn’t bright either.

P.S. If you want to see a real documentary about the robotics revolution in warfare I recommend Remote Control War produced by the CBC. There are many good films about United States’ foreign policy in Latin America. A recent one is John Pilger’s The War on Democracy, available on Netflix. This topic is also central to the seminal educational/strategy game Hidden Agenda by Jim Gasperini.

Paolo Pedercini is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art. As Molleindustria, he develops games addressing issues of social and environmental justice (McDonald’s videogame, Oiligarchy, Phone Story), religion (Faith Fighter), labor and alienation (Every Day the Same Dream, Unmanned).

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Quick-Saves: Player Control Over Narrative & Meaning

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Quick-Saves: Player Control Over Narrative & Meaning

By Jeremy Antley

May 10, 12

Rob Zacny, a freelance writer who often specializes in computer games, recently wrote a piece for the new GameSpy series ‘Command Lines’ titled ‘Quick-Loading Kills Strategy Games‘.  Detailing the practice of using save games and constant re-loads to overcome obstacles found in many strategy games, Zacny states that not only is this practice ruining strategy but also encourages lazier game design.  It’s a good read that asks some interesting questions about the impact player culture has on the larger question of game design and mechanic implementation.  I want to push this analysis a bit further to discuss larger themes of how player culture impacts the actualization of play and how the ‘quick-load’ issue raised by Zacny points to general questions on the interactions between game players and game designers.

Take this quote from Zacny:

“When we start rigging outcomes by reloading after suffering setbacks, we are cheating ourselves.  If the heart of a strategy game is interesting decisions, it is their consequences that give those decisions meaning.”

Zacny goes on to state that strategy games don’t work if players constantly re-load in order to ensure success.  As a long time player of the Civilization franchise, I am certainly guilty of this crime.  My desire to achieve absolute control over the situation means I can’t or won’t tolerate ‘chance’ events that could disrupt my larger play goals.  While I’m trying to build a perfect narrative, I have, in effect, robbed myself of any narrative at all by eliminating the possibility of deviation.  Zacny echoes this sentiment when he states that this ‘perfect narrative’ made possible by re-loading is anything but as the aim of strategy games is to provide interesting decisions- and the consequence of those decisions are what create meaning.

When I tweeted this thought a few weeks ago, Sunny Moraine (@dynamicsymmetry) responded with the following:

This is the larger issue at stake with Zacny’s article- who should have control over the narrative and meaning of play?  Clearly, game designers create AI’s (by which I mean algorithmic intelligence) that attempt to assert total control over the narrative and meaning.  Players who constantly save and re-load could be seen as attempting to reassert control over this narrative and create their own meanings- a prospect not considered in Zacny’s essay.

This last point is made clearer if we briefly leave the world of games and enter the reflective mode about games found in literature.  Steven Belletto does this in his book ‘No Accident Comrade‘ through a discussion on the use of ‘chance’ narratives, linked to the emergence of Game Theory in 1950′s popular culture, as found in American writing.  Analyzing Robert Coover’s novel ‘The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J Henry Waugh, Prop.’, Belletto details a scene in which the narrator, while playing through a fantasy baseball setup of his own design, enacts revenge for having his star player killed by an errant bean ball, produced by the narrators own roll of three ‘ones’, by ‘killing’ the offending pitcher later in the season through a purposeful roll of three ‘ones’.  Belletto states:

“…the results of Waugh’s intervention are paradigm-shifting because a chance roll was converted into a willful strategy. The novel is about the veils between fiction (or myth) and reality: once Waugh intervenes to adjust the dice, the characters in his universe intimate the guiding hand of the Association’s author, and deify the players involved.”

The implications of this ‘willful strategy’ become apparent later on:

“The Universal Baseball Association, baseball functions as a metaphor of both religious control and of the control of game theory: “the canonical form of M,” like the M-Game in Solar Lottery, alludes to minimax, the notion of balance and equilibrium, so that “old strategies, like winning ball games, sensible and proper within the old stochastic or recursive sets, are, under the new circumstances, insane!” (148). In a world in which Waugh has loaded the dice, former normative standards (“old stochastic or recursive sets”) become irrational-”insane”-because the rules of the game are no longer chance governed. While manipulating the dice is a way out of the “loneliness” that came when “pattern dissipated, giving way to mere accident,” this control of accident has religious reverberations, as well as secular ones.”

If we extend this idea to the play-design mechanics found in many strategy games, then we can begin to see why players would embrace constant saving and re-loading as the control these actions provide make the ‘old stochastic or recursive sets’ found in the design of strategy games cease to be normative.  They become, in fact, insane from the players point of view.  Again, Zacny points towards a players comprehension of this insanity when he brings up the ridiculous challenge of attempting to beat the more difficult levels of Panzer Corps or the Total War franchise of games:

“It’s not hard to see that high difficulty settings…are predicated on the expectation that players are reloading to achieve perfect victories, or else are superhuman.”

This is a difficult problem to solve as game designers must balance providing satisfying play through increasing levels of challenge, all the while making sure that the player has the ability to overcome these challenges.  The save game becomes a tool players use to help overcome these challenges- a tool which designers tacitly acknowledge through their design.

Another angle to this player/design-mechanic relationship implied in Zacny’s article, but not stated explicitly, is that ‘quick-loading’ is a phenomena largely found in single-player games.  With multiple players the issue of ‘quick-loading’ largely disappears.  This is because the challenge the AI once provided is now substituted by the most challenging player of all- another human mind.  Zacny suggests that perhaps strategy games could embrace something akin to ‘hardcore’ or ‘iron man’ modes that simply don’t allow saving in the middle of a mission.  Unity of Command, Zacny mentions, accomplishes this task extremely well due mainly to its execution of challenging design through short bursts of play- a level is short enough that trying and failing a few times generally doesn’t discourage the player.  There is another example, a way out of the ‘quick-loading’ problem, that I would like to quickly discuss- that being the design philosophy found in the design of the popular horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

At a GDC Europe 2011 presentation titled ‘Evoking Emotions and Achieving Success by Breaking All the Rules‘, Thomas Grip, the project manager of Frictional Games, detailed the core design choices the Amnesia team made in production.  Essentially, the entire thought behind the choices made centered on the idea that the game shouldn’t punish the player for making a wrong move- it should let the player role-play instead.  For example, while many horror games use the fear of character death as a driving mechanism for creating tension and immersion in their game world, Amnesia specifically does not penalize the player for ‘dying’.  If a player fails to accomplish a ‘chase sequence’ (in which a monster attempts to hunt down the player) or finds difficulty in evading the placement of a particular enemy (brought about by passing a certain point or picking up a particular item) two times in a row, the game will remove that obstacle from the players path and move it to a different part of the game.  The challenge is still present, yet the trial-and-error approach is removed so that even if the player realizes the penalty for dying is very slight (like the quick mission approach embraced in Unity of Command) they still are immersed in the game world and find no need to utilize constant saving/loading to achieve success.

Now I realize the mechanics and design decisions found in horror games differ from the sort of strategy games Zacny describes in his article- yet the fundamental issue of player interaction with the design-mechanics holds true for both genres.  Perhaps the solution to the ‘quick-loading’ issue is to focus on giving the player permission to cede the need for control through mechanics that create deeper immersion and less realization of the trial-and-error process that many strategy games take as a bedrock in their design. The ‘quick-load’ may be killing strategy games, but until designers address the more fundamental issues inherent in player interactions with meaning and narrative in game play, the ‘quick-save/load’ will remain a shortcut towards providing challenges that only partially compensate for the lack of control players feel.

Choice, multiculturalism, and irrevocability in Mass Effect, part 1 (rules of the text 7)

By Roger Travis

May 03, 12

This post contains spoilers about the endings of the three Mass Effect games.

We still don’t know what, if anything, will change either in superficial or in substantive ways, about the ending of the Mass Effect saga. But Mass Effect as it stands demands analysis. Perhaps the practomime is as complete as it will ever be, because any materials added in a revision won’t in fact amount to a substantive change. Perhaps readings of the current version will be of importance in a history of interpretation and critique that shifts with the shifting of the practomime itself.

It does seem clear that the modifications to come in a few months’ time will not in fact make changes that greatly affect our understanding of the trilogy, and thus it seems a good moment to begin what I hope and think will be a very long process of critical engagement with Mass Effect as a deeply inflected (meaning that we can identify an “ending”), through-constructed (meaning that that ending has a relation to a “beginning”) practomime.

This project of a fine-grained critique of the saga as a gamespace dovetails magnificently, in my opinion, with my goal for the “Rules of the Text” series: to argue for the usefulness of the theoretical construct of the Great Chain of Practomime. If that argument has merit, then Mass Effect, as almost certainly the largest through-composed set of performance materials marketed as an example of the medium “digital game,” with perhaps the most obvious transformation of a textual ruleset (call it “key works of science fiction” for now) into what is more recognizably a gamespace, and with a transmedia presence that extends to multiple ludic experiences on multiple platforms, should on the one hand serve as a perfect laboratory for experimenting with and developing the sort of ruleset-critique that the Great Chain of Practomime allows, and on the other demonstrate the usefulness of the construct.

To put it another way, if the ruleset-critique invited by the Great Chain of Practomime works anywhere, it should work here.

Choice is the hallmark of the kind of practomimetic ruleset generally called “game,” as I have discussed previously in this series. Mass Effect has been marketed as the game of choice par excellence–that is, as the game in which “your choices matter.” “Experience the beginning, middle, and end of an emotional story unlike any other, where the decisions you make completely shape your experience and outcome,” proclaims the “Interactive Story” page of BioWare’s Mass Effect materials.

There’s no point in quibbling about the exact valence of the word “completely”: either it’s a throwaway word or it’s a thoughtless one; probably it’s both. It is, however, extraordinarily revealing, because the real trouble with “completely” is that when we remove it, this declaration describes every game, indeed every practomime, including the works of Homer, Austen, GRR Martin, and Cocteau. The choices I make as an audience-member of Game of Thrones, like whether to get up and make popcorn while some bit of eroticism is unfolding on the screen (or, perhaps better, whether I choose to understand Westeros as being like America, or like Europe, in some way), shape my experience and outcome of Game of Thrones as much as the choice of whether to kill the Rachni queen in Mass Effect changes my experience and outcome of Mass Effect.

This is not a small problem, and I want to argue that the cultural effect of Mass Effect–what it means, what it’s about–actually depends on the ambiguity inherent in this problem, an ambiguity Mass Effect exploits really in spite of itself. From the very beginning of a player’s performance, he or she is trapped between the panoply of available choices for his or her Shepard’s background and the limitation of that panoply. To put it very simply: you can play a huge variety of Shepards, but they’re all named Shepard.

This is of course what games do, just as, when we remove the word “completely,” the notorious BioWare marketing formulation describes every game. But I want to suggest as the beginning of this analysis of Mass Effect as a link in the Great Chain of Practomime that this game is at least thus far unique in the way it foregrounds this “trap of choice.” I have argued that BioShock is unique along similar lines, and the contrast between that game and Mass Effect is in my opinion very revealing: whereas BioShock exposes the illusion of choice, Mass Effect insists, and bases its legibility, upon choice not being an illusion despite (paradox coming) all appearances to the contrary.

For this reason, I have come to think that the controversy about the ending of the trilogy is precisely commensurate to the gamespace created by the choices presented in the game’s performance-materials: the apparent lack of choice, the game seeks to persuade its players, is an illusion, and behind that illusion is a kind of choice in which the player must have, yes, faith.

Do you believe in choice, players? Clap your hands!

I write this with a great deal of affection for Mass Effect, but truly the way the game produces its effect is little different than JM Barrie’s famous ludic moment in Peter Pan: choice matters because the player convinces him or herself that it matters; the story can’t proceed unless choice matters, because the story proceeds when the player makes choices.

Shepard is a kind of choice-making machine, just as we ourselves are, and because s/he can make no choices that don’t end in the galaxy uniting behind him, his/her multiculturalism–our multiculturalism–becomes just as irrevocable as his/her appearance and origin-story, which are set in stone, as the game sternly warns the player, at the moment when the player’s performance truly begins. Whether the player destroys the Rachni, whether the player destroys the Geth: the extent to which these choices shape the player’s experience and outcome will always be precisely the same extent as the extent to which the player subjects him or herself to the trap of choice, consciously or unconsciously. To repeat: this machinery of choice works on the same principles as the mechanics of any other game; the difference in Mass Effect is the way the irrevocability of those mechanics is thematized into a multiculturalism that is, I’ll try to demonstrate over the course of this mini-series, messianic and very, very Western.

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In the Zone of Alienation: Tarkovsky as Video Game by Gabriel Winslow-Yost - NYRblog - The New York Review of Books

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In the Zone of Alienation: Tarkovsky as Video Game

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

Jean Gaumy/Magnum Photos

Pripyat, the abandoned city in the “zone of alienation” near Chernobyl, Ukraine, May-June 2008.

Zona, Geoff Dyer’s recent book about Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Stalker, has been much discussed for its almost comically thorough dissection of the stately 1979 film. In an account that combines summary, memoir, meditation, tribute, and citation into a kind of deluxe version of the TV recap, Dyer sets out to convey the hypnotic effect Stalker has had on decades of viewers, and on himself. And yet, after reading the book, I was left feeling that something was missing. In both the book and the deluge of Stalker coverage its release has occasioned, perhaps the most crucial, and most popular, part of the film’s afterlife has gone entirely unremarked: the video game version.

It may at first seem improbable that a decades-old art film in which very little happens could be embellished with firefights and mutant psychics and converted into a violent action game. Adapted from a popular Russian science fiction novel, Stalker depicts three men (“Writer,” “Professor,” and “Stalker,” their guide and the film’s protagonist) journeying into a mysterious, dangerous “Zone,” which supposedly contains “the Room,” capable of granting wishes. This fraught, high-stakes quest consists mainly of the three men walking a couple hundred yards in a grassy, abandoned landscape and talking (with a break for a nap); the film ends after 163 minutes with no wishes apparently made or granted.

But one aspect of Stalker’s enduring fascination has been the way it seems to prefigure the Chernobyl disaster that occurred seven years after its release: the nuclear meltdown created an abandoned, radioactive “zone of alienation”—over a thousand square miles considered too radioactive to enter, though tourists began to be allowed in last year — that to many was eerily similar to the Zone of the film. It is this parallel that inspired a Ukrainian video game developer named GSC Game World to create a series of first-person shooter game adaptations of the film called, respectively, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (Pripyat is the name of the abandoned city built to house Chernobyl workers). The different “levels” or settings in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are detailed (though thoroughly fictionalized) recreations of Pripyat, the cordon itself, and so on. Released between 2007 and 2010, the games have been absurdly successful; Shadow of Chernobyl alone sold several million copies around the world (and, bringing the cycle of adaptation full circle, a series of novelizations based on the game were released in Russia).

GSC Game World

A still from the video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

On the face of it, the games don’t have much in common with the film. A large part of the genius of Tarkovsky’s Stalker was its singular combination of mystical yearning and artistic precision. The actors, even in the midst of weighty metaphysical discussions, always seem like real people, dirty, contradictory, and changeable. Stalker is all anxious faith. The Zone is, he says, the only place he feels at home, and he knows its dangers enough to fear them utterly. Professor moves from phlegmatic commonsense to righteous violence, threatening near the end of the film to destroy the Room with a homemade bomb. While Writer, for his part, begins the film drunk and foolhardy, attempting to bring a floozy along on the expedition, and ends it in anguished, self-loathing sanity. As they move from the grimy city on the edge of the Zone to the verdant Zone itself, the cinematography switches carefully from a rough-hewn sepia to gorgeous, almost overwhelmingly lush color (Tarkovsky sometimes painted the leaves of trees to make them properly green). The soundtrack slides back and forth between an unsettling electronic score and natural sounds, often combining both.

None of this cinematic intensity or psychological depth remains in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, which have subpar graphics, horrid writing, abysmal voice-acting, tasteless menus, and tediously clichéd music. Tarkovsky’s enigmatic title has been turned into a ridiculous acronym (“Scavenger, Trespasser, Adventurer, Loner, Killer, Explorer, Robber,”) and the series is ridden with technical glitches, even after a host of corrective delays and patches.

But it doesn’t really matter. As games, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series are remarkable, the first one especially so (few have much cared for Clear Sky). While they all have the elements of a standard action game—guns, monsters, missions, traps, loot—much of the player’s activity is oddly in keeping with Stalker’s spirit, sometimes even managing to expand upon it. Each game has an overarching plot—you’re a stranded soldier, or an amnesiac with a mission tattooed on your arm—but these are largely beside the point. The focus of the action is simply exploring: skirting battles or fighting in them, completing optional missions from other Zone residents, hunting for hidden treasure.

The Zone in the video games is a beautifully dangerous place, bigger and grimmer than Tarkovsky’s, but somehow still appropriate. There are plenty of long, tense walks through damp weather or empty, creaking tunnels. Packs of dogs wander the landscape, ruined farmhouses give shelter from the rain; here and there the ground ripples strangely. Stalkers gather around campfires, bandits take potshots at passersby, and a man lies wounded in a ditch, begging for help. Watching Stalker, one is occasionally brought up short by remembering that it was not filmed in Chernobyl, so perfect an analogue does that event seem for the film’s images of technology and nature, beauty and danger in strange alliance. The games, at their best, can seem like a sort of miracle: a dead man’s masterpiece, come home at last.

Andrei Tarkovsky

A character in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker inside the Zone.

Yet there is something deeper that sets the series apart. Most video games are designed to unfold entirely around you, the player: everything happens for your benefit; you’re always coming into a room at the most dramatic moment, and only you can complete the mission. In many, if you simply don’t move for a few minutes, the entire world comes to a standstill. The signal new feature of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, in contrast—the source at once of all those delays and bugs, and much of their unique power—was something called “A-Life,” an elaborate artificial intelligence system that populated the world with thousands of creatures and people who go about their business with no special regard for the player’s actions.

A-Life doesn’t really care about you; events take place, whether you see them or not. You’ll spend half an hour defending a friendly group from bandits, only to come back later and find they were overrun by a later attack; or you’ll accept a mission to kill a misbehaving stalker, only to find he’s been killed by a wild dog a mile away. These events—and many more that you may never find out about—emerge from the complex set of goals (find treasure, for instance, or sleep) and behaviors (shoot, trade, wander aimlessly) that A-Life provides for every character and creature throughout the game.

In some ways, the video games are closer to Tarkovsky’s source material than to Tarkovsky. In the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic, the science fiction book on which the movie is loosely based, the stalkers are numerous and mercenary. The elements of the Zone are many, and named, if not quite explained—there’s “Mosquito Mange” and “Burning Fluff,” “Full Empties” and “Black Sprays.” In the film most of these are not present—Tarkovsky leaves in only one, the “meatgrinder,” though his Stalker is clearly terrified of many more. But the video game returns them, and adds more: strange traps known as “anomalies,” that crush, dismember, and electrocute; and “artifacts,” weird little objects with supernatural properties—infinite batteries, death rays, and so on—which are the reason people venture into the Zone. (In Roadside Picnic both the anomalies and the “artifacts” are discarded alien technology; in the games they are somehow the result of the nuclear meltdown.)

GSC Game World

A still from the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

One of the lasting enigmas of Tarkovsky’s film is the odd, intense expression—at once consumed with worry and lit up like a child’s, or a fanatic’s—worn by the actor who plays Stalker. After playing the video game, it suddenly makes a new kind of sense: It’s your face, rapt in front of a screen, playing. The games’ first-person perspective and open-ended structure have a similar effect. You can go more or less where you want, provided you don’t get poisoned by radiation, shot by bandits, or mauled by mutant dogs on the way; it’s just you and your gun, and no one, not even the game, seems to care what happens to you. Eventually the silly central plot kicks in and all this goes by the wayside, but until then, the game’s indifference can seem a kind of grim, bracing rejoinder to the smug exceptionalism that defines American games: in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. you aren’t special, you’re just there.

May 1, 2012, 12:55 p.m.

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Dear Mitu, Dear Emily « « Mitu Khandaker Mitu Khandaker

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Dear Mitu, Dear Emily

“We are young women involved in games industry and culture and despite many encounters, mutual friends, common interests and shared respect for one another, we have never had the opportunity to get to know one another or talk in any depth about our love for videogame form. We have been meaning to have a meaningful dialogue and so have started a correspondence to talk, as women, about women’s issues, and about ourselves, our perspectives, observations and experiences in play and the wider games community.”

This is an exchange between Mitu Khandaker & Emily Flynn-Jones; initiated by Emily, this letter series explores our ‘origin stories’, as well as our feelings about feminism and about our identities as women in games development and/or academia. It is, at times, deeply personal, but has been important to our respective journeys as feminists. This forms a part of our contribution to the Feminists in Games workshop in Toronto, Canada.

Alternatively, you can view/download this exchange as a PDF too.

Letter 1: Dear Mitu (14 March 2012)

Dear Mitu,

So, we are doing this. I’m excited to see what happens.

To begin, a paraphrasing of the Leigh Alexander TIFF NEXUS (approx 10:45 on) keynote excerpt to frame this *thing*. She said she had some conflicting feelings assumptions on the part of others that she would connect or have something in common with other women who were in media, like those two things define them and make them compatible, but that at the same time feeling that we  do share something, things that are not gender and admitting that it is difficult to accept that gender is a legitimate part of what we share.

I thought this was a good point, one that could be easily overlooked in bigger picture discussion, and made me think of you immediately. I remember the first time we met and you commented that a mutual friend had always assumed that we knew one another, because we were girls in/into games. I was probably a little dismissive of that but there is something weird about that assumption, no? Problem is I can’t decide in which way this is weird. Is this my problem or someone else’s?!

US. Our relationship is friendly, respectful and casual. We are really connected by a network of mutual friends (100% male?), mutual interests and the same occupation (that blasted PhD). We end up in the same room often enough and we always check if one another will be there but have still never really hung out or had personal conversations. I can think of 100 hundred reasons why we should connect and not one why we wouldn’t. I like you, you are an interesting and admirable lady and yet we find ourselves separated even when we are together. Yeah, OK that can reasonably happen, we are busy, we go to these things for our jobs, but even in social time we have missed, not dismissed each other. Yeah, there are practical reasons for this, we are busy, we meet places that we go for work and bring legitimate agendas. Totally understandable but I get a nagging feeling that maybe there is something else.

I guess that kinda frames my interest in doing this. There is somehow something uncomfortable with pursuing a connection with someone based on their gender, maybe that is doubly gross when its for the purpose of discussing gender issues. I don’t wanna feel that way and I didn’t until recently notice or real care about being a girl in the games world, but gradually things are seeping through and sinking in. There are numerous things that could be contributors to my change in heart/mind but I feel like I am wanting to engage with these issues when I never even felt like they were MY issues before. I don’t even really know how to enter into this discussion, I feel like an amateur at my own sex and I definitely lack the critical background that I would usually think standard for opinion having in an academic context. BUT, we have the sum of our experiences and I think that is a place to start. That is not abstract or theoretical. That is real and tangible so I hope we can share stories like its not a selfish thing to do and see what the hell is going on.

So I guess I want to start by offering a summary of reasons that I find myself conflict and want to engage with gender issues in games, or HOW I SUDDENLY REALISED I AM A GIRL.

Basically, I’ve been in HE doing games stuff for nearly five years now in different capacities, as aPhD student, a teacher and more recently a researcher, writer and producer at times. The demographic has largely been the same, whether I’m at work or an industry conference, it’s male dominated. I have always been comfortable with that. I was treated equally at my old work, was respected by seniors (mainly guys) and welcomed by strangers at social events. I felt like I was doing this based on merits other than my gender, I still believe that for the most. I’m smart and passionate and that seemed like the ticket. I felt totally safe in the boys club and the “no girls allowed” sign has never applied to me. I have liked this, not as attention seeking (a gross female gender stereotype) but as a sense of belonging maybe there were the underlying wins that I, a girl, infiltrated the gang or some secret pleasure in being one of the few girls.

But lately I don’t feel as securely ‘in the club’ for various reasons. At work I am being directed towards more stereotypically female duties sometimes relegated to event organising despite my title and job description and encouraged to leverage my femininity as a promotional ploy. I was very blunt in my responses but the attitude was persistent. I couldn’t get that my gender was being pointed at and not my nerdery, yes I would rather have identified as a nerd. I have to admit to some overreacting here. What I was in fact being asked to do was repeat a job I had been successful at once and being told that I was a girl in games, and that was ‘rarer’ and that I had an opportunity there. What I thought was coming from a negative place was actually the kick up the ass I needed to come to terms with the fact that I am, like, a girl and that that is, like, ok.

Meanwhile, and maybe because I was becoming more accustom to the idea of ‘girl’, I noticed some other things in my networking circle and activity. Things that made me query the reason i was allowed to play in the first place and I was suddenly aware that my actions and opinions were being interpreted, that I was maybe on the edge of falling into a perceived stereotype and losing favour if I did something ‘female’. Even if I wasn’t doing anything female sometimes my sexuality was an issue, heterosexual female. I wasn’t as comfortable in the same company anymore even though it was the minority making me feel like ‘a girl’ and like that was not ok. Maybe this is jibbing that comes with familiarity, maybe as I am more experienced in this field the seriousness that I want to convey is at a higher risk of not being taken seriously…

Regardless I found myself self self-censoring sometimes even though I was not withholding a gendered opinion/behaviour and I don’t want to do that.

At the end I wonder if this sounds trivial and concerned that I’m not really able to articulate what I have encountered or felt. But hell, this is a warm up. Maybe something resonates? And in closing I guess I ask what spurs you to be interested in being a woman in games these days?

Emily

Letter 2: Dear Emily (19 March 2012)

Dear Emily,

Firstly, I’m glad you wrote to me, and I’m very glad that we’re doing this. I took a good few days to respond, and I’ve been worried that you’d take that as some sort of dismissal. In fact, the opposite is true. It’s taken me a while to reply precisely because this feels so difficult. It’s complicated stuff, and I have a lot to say. If you’d told me, a few years ago, that I’d be able or willing to talk about this stuff at length, I wouldn’t have believed you. My guess is that it feels the same way for you. But, here we are. My hope is, though, that we’ll be able to unpack some of that complication over the course of our correspondence.

The other reason it’s been so difficult is because really, this stuff matters to me.

The curious thing is, until a few years ago, it didn’t matter. It seems it was the same for you too. But my experiences as a woman in games, first as an academic (yes, that blasted PhD!) and now as a developer, have shaped my feelings significantly. I suppose growing and maturing helped, too.

So yes, I love that we should start by discussing our respective journeys of “HOW I REALISED I AM A GIRL”, as you put it. Perhaps it’s telling that neither of us started off thinking that way, yet our experiences have led us both here, somehow.

You bring up a very good point – I very much admire and respect you too, but why haven’t we spoken much, despite often being in the same places at the same time? I vaguely remember that conversation from when we first met, too. Back then, though it was only a few years ago, I felt so much more young and naive. I was still the sort of person who, when thinking about gender disparities in games and the industry, thought there would eventually be some magical equilibrium, without anyone having to think or worry about it too much. Oh, how much I’ve learned since then!

First off, I’d like to highlight some nuance (which, I hope, is how the rest of this discussion will go, as these are nuanced issues): I think there’s some truth to the notion that women in games should not necessarily be obligated to be friends just because they’re women. To think otherwise is to sort of ignore the whole of third-wave feminism, which was a reaction to the previous feminist assumption that all women had a sort of universal experience – being, the experience of upper-middle class white women. We know that isn’t true, of course, because being a woman means so many different things; as Mare Sheppard of Metanet Software said at GDC 2012, “woman is not a culture.” So many different things contribute to who we are as women – to recognise this is to recognise the concept of intersectionality – that is, the way that different parts of our identity – be it class, race, or gender – interact, and shape who we are.

I bring this up for a reason, because I think it sort of informed how I thought about sexism for a very long time. That is, I was lucky enough, while growing up, not to think of it at all. I did, however, think about race, rather a lot. Growing up in a mid-sized english city in the 90s and beyond, I experienced a lot of direct, ugly racist comments. But, perhaps more importantly, there was also, a far more subtle, more uncomfortable, unspoken feeling of always being different. This – race – was my ‘otherness’ while growing up, and being a girl was not. For this reason, I grew up being fairly blind to gender issues.

The other part of my identity that intersects is that I was fortunate enough attend a small private, all-girls school. Whilst no-one else there particularly shared my love of playing video games, this was because it was a ‘cool vs nerd’ thing, rather than a gender issue. (Of course, I realise now that it was partly a gender issue, because the same wouldn’t have been as true for a sample of teenage boys, but it was not obvious to me at the time.) After all, I would go home and play video games with my sisters (I am the eldest of three girls), and dream of one day making these things. At school, I was simply the weird nerd who ‘knows about computers’. That was my identity, and, being such, I didn’t think of sexism at all during this time, because there was no obvious reason to; this is the privilege that comes from being sheltered. I hadn’t realised my blindness, and the reasons for it, until my youngest sister – attending my same school ten years later – told me about how her friends think that Beyonce’s pop-feminist empowered narrative is trite, tiresome, and unnecessary; they thought that women have total equality now, ‘so why go on and on about it?’ It’s jarring how so many women and girls think we live in a post-sexism world. But, they are wrong. I was wrong.

This wrongness was largely responsible for, in my teens and early twenties, my casual shunning of initiatives for girls in technology and such. For example, a few years ago, when Computer Engineering Barbie came on the scene, I felt offended; I hadn’t needed CE Barbie to get my Masters in Computer Engineering, and had not once felt disadvantaged in terms of gender (as I said, race/culture was another issue) as I went from my all-girls education to a mostly-male work environment at IBM, and then onto an all-male university course in Computer Engineering. I simply couldn’t empathize with women who felt threatened by an all-male environment.

I’ve been thinking about what you said about “being part of the club”, and how I too, after starting my PhD, and my early days of attending games networking events and such, I felt welcomed by strangers. Like you, I’d never thought much of it either, attributing it to being passionate about what I do, and, what was, back then, my natural lack of hesitation in speaking to new people. I’d been used to being in male-dominated environments – in tech and ‘pure’ software, rather than games, admittedly, so that didn’t feel like a barrier to me. However, crucially, at no point did I ever feel any desire or achievement in being ‘the only woman’ at such events, but then again, and I was not inclined to think of gender much at all, really.

However, things began to change, with age, and with maturity, and with being open to listening – really listening – to other women’s experiences of discrimination. And then this was also unfortunately cemented by having difficult experiences of my own. It took me a long time to realise that there were people, men and women alike, for whom my gender was actually an issue.  It is important to remember that gender-inclusion issues in the industry can only be solved through collaboration, and work, from both genders.

The thing is, it takes living in the real world to find this stuff out for oneself; once I started getting to know people in the wider industry, beyond my own academic institution – and, of course, getting involved with the games industry through wonders of the internet, I began living in the real world at last.

Of course there are the usual instances of casual dismissal: when I am in a group of people who do not know each other, and they introduce themselves to each other, sometimes, men are often reluctant to shake my hand or ask what I do, assuming I could not possibly be a developer. Then, there have been more open incidences, such as one quite recent incident, in which I was outright accused, by a male associate, of being “a fraud”, and of “not really being a developer”, even after I had explained that I had been working full-time in development for six months by then, with a publishing deal in hand. That incident was particularly painful, and difficult, and made me double guess myself a lot, even though I knew it was massively irrational to do so, given the facts.

I’d also discovered that, far more insidious than women who feel a mild sense of disdain at expecting to automatically befriend other women in the industry, is the small undercurrent of women who are threatened, suspicious, and even hostile, by the presence of other women. This sounds awfully cynical, and I feel bad for reinforcing what is also a horrendous stereotype, but no matter how many amazing, inspiring women I meet, it saddens me deeply to know that this is a thing that can exist. Of course, it we must note that it exists because it is an awful stereotype; it is expected, patriarchal behaviour, which is reinforced by the media, more recently through countless reality television shows. My own experience encountering this began with, (but sadly, has been not limited to), an early experience in which I was pulled aside at an industry party to be asked by a much older woman, in a very unfriendly way, what I was doing there. I found these isolated, rare instances jarring, because I realised I’d actually expected there to be solidarity, so in cases where I found none, I felt lost.

So, basically, there’s been this weird confluence of many factors contributing to my being aware, and interested in, gender issues. Not only were some of my own uncomfortable, gendered experiences a factor, but also, I’d started thinking about womens issues in a global context; I’d started a womens charity in Bangladesh, which also made me start realising that maybe my own life wasn’t as post-sexism as I’d thought.

It took me time to realise that the bubble in which I lived was actually part of a larger picture. Any time I’d previously been casually dismissed, or someone had said something disparaging about me, even when gender was brought into it, I had put it down to some personal failing. I am inclined to do that (another gendered response, I’ve since learned). I also suffer from massive Imposter Syndrome (very common amongst women, and amongst graduate students – an unfortunate positioning in the Venn Diagram for us, then!), so this simply reinforced the latter.

Despite knowing all of this – knowing, and realising, the way in which the industry’s problems with gender – even as a subset of a larger societal social issue – have led to all of these things, I’ve still ended up in a place where, like you, I do self-censor in some regards. It’s automatic, almost. While I have no trouble talking about feminism and gender issues, I’ve developed a sort of paranoia about how it looks if I make new friends, or share a picture of myself online, etc. (As a result, I recently changed my Twitter avatar to no longer be a picture of myself – even though it makes no difference if a man has an avatar of himself, I began feeling tired of people assuming things about me.) I’m simply a lot more hesitant about trusting people, I guess, which perhaps isn’t necessarily a healthy outcome.

I’m sort of at a weird place now, where I am simultaneously both proud of my femininity, and aware that I have to push through these barriers – but also, a tiny part of me sometimes secretly wishing that I were not a woman at all. Then, perhaps, I would not have to double guess so many of my actions. That probably sounds awful to say. But, like I said above, it’s complicated. All of this is.

Actually, a quick aside on that front. I’ve noticed, Emily, that throughout your letter, you referred to yourself repeatedly as ‘a girl’. I’m interested in why you use ‘girl’ instead of ‘woman’; especially as I used to do this myself. It wasn’t until a year or so ago, that I stopped being so uncomfortable with ‘woman’. I used to think it was a personal thing; that I didn’t feel ‘very grown up’, and so, in a sort of semi-self-disparaging way, I was ‘just a girl’. The thing is, the more I’ve grown aware of gender issues, the more I realise how the world systematically infantalises women. It was only upon realising this, it clicked that iit wasn’t just about me any more. I am a woman, and, complicated feelings aside, I am proud of being a woman. You too are a woman, and should not be afraid to call yourself one, even if it feels weird at first.

I realise I covered a lot of ground here (sorry for the rambling!), and I hope some of this made sense. I have several questions for you as a result. Firstly, I’ve shared my ‘origin’ story here, as it were. I’m very keen to hear more of yours, too. What do you think were the reasons, growing up, that you have never felt like being female has been much of an issue for you?

Also, something else I’m keen to know, related to this: given my own progress into “HOW I SUDDENLY REALISED I AM A GIRL”, I became a lot more interested in reading feminist blogs and literature, and educating myself on the wealth of work and thinking done by so many amazing people on the subject so far. As I’ve described previously, feminism was, to me, a weird, unnecessary concept while I was growing up; but I’m very glad I grew to see sense, and can now declare myself a proud feminist. What are your feelings on this? Is feminism, as a concept, something you’ve felt engaged with, and why, or why not?

You specifically asked me what spurs to be interested in being a woman working in games, these days, and in closing, I will finally answer. At the core, it is my passion for the medium itself; that I think games are so important, culturally, as well as personally. I believe that if you love something, if you really care, then it is your responsibility to nurture it and to do what is best for it; even if some parts of that experience are personally difficult, even painful. I care about games, and as such, I want them to be diverse, and inclusive; loved by all. So, then, if not me, then who? That is what motivates me to keep going. Keep going.

Mitu

Letter 3: Dear Mitu (22 March 2012)

Dear Mitu,

Wow. What a first response, it’ll be a hard act to follow. I’ve got to start with a confession re: my first letter. It was brief and little low on the level of discourse and timid, This is a little because I just needed to get it started as a master procrastinator and busy busy bee and a little because I suddenly realised that this required a huge amount of honesty on my part, something that I don’t generally dole out on a personal level with relative strangers. A lot of this exercise for me is about being honest, we’re not going to get anywhere with insensible censoring, and opening up requires some comfort on my part. There is always that potential for being judged, even though I didn’t expect to be by you, but as you say the minority negative encounters do have effect. I don’t want to give the impression that I wasn’t taking this seriously or that I happily defer to others, I’m just a little (a lot, notoriously) guarded when it comes to personal subjects so thank you for an amazing return that not only resonates on so many levels, but challenges some of my thinking whilst also managing to put me rather at ease.

You spoke of your origins and your narrative is perfectly unique. I really enjoyed learning where you came from, are coming from. I don’t think that this offers an easy incite to the complexities of you but you own it, that is clear. For me owning my history has definitely been a huge part of my connection with feminism or female issues.

Much like you I could not relate to feminist issues or sexism, when I came across feminist discourse in my 1st year undergrad I had nothing in my experience to compare that to and other things did resonate with me, things that I still pursue today, so I am comfortable with my early critical decisions to a point but looking back these interests often flirted with feminism without my awareness. I could connect with class issues but most of all I felt a really strong connection to difference, the Weird with a capital ‘W’. To make this story make sense I’m gonna have to backtrack with a wee me narrative, I promise relevance.

I was raised with two substantially older brothers until I was 8 when I came to live with my Dad in the UK and he raised me as a single parent for the most. I am the only female in my direct family. I got my first console of my very own when I was 10 and this was a really significant object that has been crucial to my relationship with my father. That sounds hyperbolic, I will explain. We had never really found a way to connect and I was massively resentful at being made to live with a stranger and depressed by the rather sad circumstances leading to that, my Mom’s passing. But, honestly when we played we could relate, even if only superficially. I’d say this is my strongest evidence to date of the magic of the magic circle.  As I got older gaming gave me and my Dad a way to communicate even for massively loaded arguments, that were not really about missing a collectable item, as I was becoming a teenager, something we had no idea what to do about. Anyway I escaped to uni and we became estranged for a few years and really only re-connected around graduation. To mark this my Dad brought me my first PS2. I was just chuffed at the time but I get it now. That was a really significant gesture he was looking for a way to communicate and relate to me. Games still mediate our relationship, which is much less fraught overall but we still play platform games (his favourite) and talk about games a lot, not just because it’s what I “do” but because its what we do. We can enjoy games and enjoy each other. This leaves me with some really powerful memories and opinions on the possibilities for games that completely drive my interests… returning to this!

I think it’s pretty heavily implied that I never had the conventional female role model or a safe, supportive space to develop as a female. I don’t ever remember being totally uncomfortable with my gender but I wasn’t particular effected/interested either and I never thought about my own story and situation, I thought it was indulgent and kind of a sob story. So, I never talked about it, to this day I don’t think I have discussed this history with some of my closest friends, they know or have an idea but no words have exchanged. I developed a very unhealthy detachment from my history which I definitely has had an impact on the way I constructed identity, because I never did so as ‘female’ and perhaps this is a factor in my casual use of the word ‘girl’. Instead I was totally comfortable in riotous and retrospectively lame rebellious acts of difference. The riot grrl thing was happening, which I didn’t equate with any wave of feminism that I could grasp at the time so I was really just riffing off an empty version of that, I’m going to leave dress and behavior to your imagination. Later at uni I was constantly reading and writing about horror, because this let me explore my interest in difference and alterity, or explore personal feelings without having to admit that’s what I was doing. I was reading the monstrous feminine, about abjection and final girls (it’s too late to change my twitter name) but still somehow logic-ed my way out of understanding the projections and politics of the representations that fascinated me. I’m not dumb, I just still could not find in my actual world a point of reference. Until I did.

I referred to a few instances in my previous letter but there are grander things, there is so little diversity in my classrooms, the teaching agenda leaves no spaces for gender issues (absence is so striking), we teach skill and don’t really foster creativity so there’s no space for express for a female student should they want it, there are an increasing number of women in games that hold my esteem (not that they didn’t before but I can see the gender now), the stories in the press re: inappropriate treatment of women in the workplace and as gamers online don’t seem to be one-offs anymore… There’s too much to for me to even contemplate neutrality anymore. I was missing many possible meanings and pretty much denying something of my own that could contribute to my readings.

Basically what I am trying to illustrate is that I didn’t identify as female and I think my ability to appreciate and increasingly adopt female perspectives has a lot to do with me coming to terms with my gender overall. As I my attitude about my own femininity has changed and I’ve been able to see that my gender is noticeable to others, that Imposter Syndrome is setting in, as though if my perspectives are changing it’s not as valid for me to be interested in the same things. I’ve got to fight that, because it’s just expanding my knowledge and experience and my ability to contribute but there’s that nagging anxiety anyway.

At this point I really only have a set of opinions, observations and some objections to offer but it is a start. Knowing that feminism doesn’t require a dogmatic adherence and that the third wave doesn’t have a particularly cogent agenda is kind of relieving in a way. It’s giving me my space to try things on and see what fits and how I wanna wear it (it seems I am rolling with this analogy). I guess what I am finding most appealing is that feminism is responding to culture and less politics, and as cultural objects games have a place in this discourse. I LOVE videogames. They have meant a great deal to me, I’ve connected with them and they’ve connected me with other people in so many meaningful ways. As texts and facilitators of play I think they are a powerful communication tool, and facilitate a variety of positive interactions for us human types. So, I guess I’m intrigued to consider more deeply where these themes intersect on a textual level, because I’ve never seriously applied such a reading, on a cultural level, on a personal level and implications for pedagogy. That is big stuff, but I don’t like that vastness of my uncarted territory.

God, I must be stopped. Sorry for rambles. The origins are out there and I’m going to battle the urge that I’ve always found to make that irrelevant which brings up my strongest objection to what I’ve found in feminism – essentialising. I’ve been in situations where I have been reprimanded or scoffed at questioning feminist logic, not aggressively but reasonably, validly. I’m accustom to dialogue in a HE setting and even sometimes stronger debate, but I felt peeved that I was expected to agree based on some essential sameness. Maybe if I had not offered them reason I could understand outright dismissal. That I am not okay with and understand it to come from an older form of feminism and politics (I didn’t really know how to phrase that), so there’s some mutual acceptance to be done here too.

Which brings me to a couple of questions for you about experiences with games but please feel free to write what you need. How do you feel about identification in games? Would you play the female character or make yourself a lady avatar? Have you ever had instances where you thought a game had challenging, positive or negative messages for a female player? Are you considering representations and context in the development of your game? These sound basic but I think there are a lot of issues here, most certainly because we neither never felt the female issues when we first came to play.

Gosh. Done. Be well and good luck reading/replying to my madness.

Emily

Letter 4: Dear Emily (29 March 2012)

Dear Emily,

Wow, this was an incredible response. I’ve already sent you a brief note earlier in the week thanking you for writing this, but I want to reiterate that here, too. You mentioned that you have not discussed this story with even some of your closest friends, so I am honoured that you were as open and honest as you were here. I hope writing this was as personally enlightening for you as it was for someone reading about it.

You mentioned my own circumstances being unique, but your story blew me away and moved me more than I expected; I’ve been thinking of it lots, actually. It does such a disservice to us all to assume our own experiences are universal; and even worse, to outrightly assume things about others. This is why I am glad we are taking this; though united by some common goals, we are all such different people with such different stories which shape who we become, and why we think the way we do.

I am so fascinated by the way that we both, in our very different lives, coming late to feminism, still touched upon some (often subtle) varieties of feminist thought at various points, without ever really knowing or understanding it fully. I’m especially taken by your admission that you had logic-ed your way out of understanding the politics of the representations which fascinated you – of ‘final girls’ and such.  I do agree that essentialism gets in the way with helping us ‘get there’, and I agree with you that there is mutual acceptance required those who engage in ‘second-wave’ thinking.

I am going to try to be purposely briefer here, and address those very pertinent questions about how I feel about identification in games, and to tell you the truth, I realize that while growing up playing games, I had not thought too hard about it. Or often, I skirted with thinking about it on some level which I did not understand. Let me explain: I was as happy to play male characters in games as I was to play a blue hedgehog (and I did a lot of the latter) – I did not feel misrepresented. However, looking back, I realise that where a female character was available to play, I would invariably choose her. In those earliest days, I was Chun-Li, or Sonya Blade (much to my own detriment, perhaps, in the case of the latter.)

Indeed, my first brush with realizing that there may be something up with how women are portrayed in games was when it came to Tomb Raider. I know, it’s a trite example, but for me, this was genuinely an important discovery; I played the firstTomb Raider a few years late, after TR2 and TR3 were already out, and TR4 was just being released. At age 14, I absolutelyadored it, and was obsessed with it, and could not wait until I could get hold of TR2. I sought out everything I could find about it online. Of course, on doing this, what I came across was a wealth of stuff which made me realize that perhaps Tomb Raider wasn’t aimed at me at all. The way fans seemed to be discussing Lara was one thing, yet the discernible effort put into Lara’s increasing bust (and all the talk of breast physics, of course) was another. I remember I made a little Yahoo! Group for “female fans of Lara Croft”, explicitly for us “girls who wanted to grow up to be like her.” I think there ended up being 8 members in total during its short-lived run. (Remember, I was around 14, so this is embarrassing, though definitely my first foray into anything resembling feminist action – though, wearing my post-sexism hat at the time, I failed to see this as a wider issue.)

Perhaps more appropriately, much later, when I got into CRPGs and MMORPGs, I definitely went through a phase of trying to create characters which represented me; games in which I am explicitly trying to ‘inhabit’ the character, rather than view them as observer. (Character identification as a general thing is, of course, fairly complex!) I have this memory of the first time I played EverQuest, and I thought I was making a dark-haired, dark-skinned human lady character, and once I loaded in the game, I wondered why it was all so dark in the world. I eventually found the brightness settings, much to my embarassment, and realised they were somehow turned down. On adjusting them, I saw my character was actually blonde and fair-skinned. Oops. (Indeed, there were no other skin colour options for humans; I was disappointed.)

I realise I’m listing slightly into race again, but this underscores the general importance of diversity. Indeed, while I personally grew out of that phase where I was keen to make ‘myself’ in RPGs, I grew more aware of the importance of having that diversity there. After all, I am not everyone. It’s an important fight.

Which brings me to the game which I am currently developing; Redshirt is all about letting you experiment within an open social world, and, as such, is all about the player being free to choose who they are and how they want to play. I’d known from the beginning that I wanted to include a character creation process which would allow for as much diversity as possible, in terms of gender, race, and sexuality. That’s something I’m working on now, so perhaps later in the letter series, I can get back to you on how it’s going!

One relevant issue I’ve dealt with so far in the game’s development however, is what happened with the game’s logo: I’m lucky enough that though the game has a publisher but, moreover, it is another indie developer whose values about game development I share. It was up to me to suggest some concept ideas for the logo, and then the publisher would commission it via outsourced artists. The idea that the logo would feature one character was casually bandied about, and although it wasn’t explicitly stated, I knew that the default would be ‘white male’. However, I wanted to make sure we push for more diversity, and represent more types of people than this.  However, when it came down to it, I suddenly felt this weird, irrational sense of reticence in asking my publisher about it, even though I know he is the sort of smart, understanding person who gets these issues. I’m not sure why that is, other than feeling like making a fuss about these issues would draw undue attention to my own otherness. I guess even I, with my strong ideals on diversity, fall prey to that feeling, sometimes. But ultimately, it came down again, to the question I asked in my last letter: if I don’t push for these things, who will?

I was relieved when we discussed it, and it turned out that he saw my point, and we decided to proceed. The final design ended up featuring a white male character, but also a darker skinned female character. While it doesn’t even begin to encompass the breadth of diversity that it should (I’d also wanted to feature a more gender-ambiguous character), it’s a start, I suppose. I hope the game itself does a better job of that.

So we started off these series talking about our histories – and again, I want to underscore how important that is, even if it feels tempting to shrug it off as irrelevant – but, here we have arrived, quite rightly, at games themselves. You mentioned quite rightly that games, as cultural objects, absolutely have a place in feminist discourse. There is much to say and explore in this regard, but I’ll leave this email by returning the questions you posed to me: how have you regarded character identification in games, with respect to gender? Also, how did you respond to various ‘controversies’ over representation in games over the years? What are your current feelings?

Mitu

Letter 5: Dear Mitu (1 April 2012)

Dear Mitu,

Thanks for your letter. I wanted to start by mirroring your opening sentiments. I too am very glad that we are doing this and think it’s been really interesting to learn where we are coming from as very different ladies and how our histories are really determinant in how we position ourselves and our thinking.

What I found most arresting about your last letter was how apologetic it seems that you feel when it comes to voicing race issues. That is horrifying. I can’t relate to the ugly experiences you said that you have had, but I deeply sympathise and am really proud (almost too patronising a word but I am proud, also inspired) of your conviction when it came to your own game.  You are absolutely right, there is too little diversity in the representations in games and an awareness of that when constructing your representations is the best attitude towards defeating the homogenous, trite and tired stuff we’ve been playing with for too long now. I also like your idea of taking it further with a gender-ambiguous character. I think this could be particularly effective in the context of your game where sci-fi and future themes completely allow you to explore ‘uncomfortable’ difference. I’m not saying that it is ‘comfortable’ that difference/diversity is so often relegated to the realms of fantasy but if this is where we can begin to shape these representations then hopefully there is a platform for diversity to become more acceptable and step out of the fantasy. That is probably optimistic but I think there is something in setting an example regardless. SO DO SET IT PLEASE.

I’ll try and be briefer this time too and stick to the points. When it comes to issues of identification I have long been rejectionist, I am still strongly of the opinion that the avatar is a ‘tool’ and I use it to access the game and perform actions. I too have to be honest, I realise that I am in a privileged position when it comes to critical responses to games. I have studied them a great deal and been exposed to a lot of great thinking that has informed my own opinions and while I don’t think every player identifies deeply, or that we ever really flirt with ‘becoming’ our avatars, but the skin we put our pixels and polygons in does make a difference. Representation is loaded for those who care to read it and so this should be a design, player and critical consideration.

One of the important things about postmodern feminism is that it situates knowledge, knowledge is of the body and imbued on the bodies that we look upon in visual media. However, this is not that liberated utopic virtual body that androids/cyborgs dreamt of, it’s predominantly male generated even if the image is female and the positions that we view them from are powerfully placed, objectifying them from third-person and ‘god’ modes, again privileged male positioning. In this respect the user is also constructed as a male thinker/looker given to objectivity and a preferred and powerful viewing position. Never was this more apparent to me than in the joke scene in the Suda51 game Michigan: Report From Hell, where you disturb a man in the shower and he accuses you of ‘homoerotic intentions’. (I have another Suda51/shopping in CEX anecdote for another time – oh lordy).

Of course this was not ever my reading when I was playing games when I was younger. I didn’t want to play the princess in Mario Kart because I found out that she sucked and her pinkness was not appealing to me, cuteness was appealing to me though, so I’d play the Toad over and over trying to get different results. Definitive madness. Like you, I’d like to think that I didn’t care what body I was playing with but that is not accurate, I’ve played a lot of women and I think it has been a more conscious choice that I would have liked to admit. In Soul Calibur, for example, (I played a lot of the last game) I was not at all interested in the ‘normal male’ characters. I don’t think I ever played them. I did play the girls and the beasts though and it seems to me that maybe they exist on the same level of otherness on the games character selection board.

In this case and in others, I think what I am responding to is the construction of female that is insidious when I think about it. I want to see how these women; scantily clad, exaggeratedly cute or overtly sexual, and otherwise represented as weak; can perform. In other cases, their gender is compromised; it’s stripped from Samus in Metroid (I don’t remember querying gender in this case when I was young, masculine was assumed), they purge emotion, a gross female attribute, to become strong and focused, become outcasts wondering alone to take their revenge.

I think something I am struggling with here is deciding where the power lies. I know often these enhanced females, mechanised, weaponised females are seen as sites of resistance, and for sure they signify empowerment but it seems to come at the cost of femininity. I mean I was a huge fan of Molly Millions and other cyberpunk bad-ass females because they were delightful combinations of sex and strength, and I understand that is about appropriating masculine properties but I wonder somewhat where this leaves us with the representations of ‘norms’ and that pesky ‘diversity’ thing.

Of course, it comes down to nuance again and despite the representation of the girl in Ico, for instance, I would indeed defend this representation of a weak young willowy girl because it allows for one of the most emotive and original mechanics that I have seen in games. This is simply great game design and that representation is beautifully integrated in the design. I can’t take exception to that, it can be a shining exception. Also the Scythian in Sworcery appealed to me. In this case it was not explicit that you were dealing with a girl because of the pixilation of the character, in fact she was stripped of most everything that we would normally employ as characterization, she was silent and only pieces of her history and purpose are revealed slowly to the player. I’m not sure what I am trying to say here, but she is interesting, another exception, and I’m going to have a think on that! I also have not played ALL of the games so I am missing pieces, particularly in terms of RPGs, I can’t stand an intense RPG so I’ve got a knowledge gap when it comes to in-depth characterization.

You also asked about controversies and despite what I have observed and said above, I am rarely offended by a female representation. I find some things tiresome and they might provoke a ‘sigh’ but then I also don’t know how else we get a kick-ass woman in a game, or any form of fiction really. I thought that I would find ‘girl games’ offensive, but actually having picked up a Hello Kitty game as research, it really isn’t what I thought it would be, for example, you go around bashing the hell out of things until they explode in sparkles. It uses the blood ‘gibs’ aesthetic from violent games – ultra-violence in glitter! This is still videogame language, just in another skin. I think it is an offensive branding strategy though, and I resent that implication that these games are not just for me, but my gender.

Anyway, this is getting long(er) so I will cease. To summarise, I am interested in the representation of strong females but I am also not quite on board with it being THE representation. Moving a little out of games again, I have been reading some disturbing things this week about ‘geek girl’ backlash and was wondering about how you feel about the positive/negative connotations of the female geek trope? And indeed any totems for that trope, you mention CE Barbie previously…

Writing this had made me think a lot about razor girls for some reason, I think I need some cyberpunk tonight.

Write me more lovely things soon

Love,

Emily

Letter 6: Dear Emily (6 April 2012)

Dear Emily,

I hope you’ve had a lovely week, and ended up getting your cyberpunk fix!

I’ll cut straight to the chase this time: the brilliant analysis of power and femininity in your last letter has given me a lot to think about these past few days. It has sent me down the rabbit-hole – the the abyss – of gender and what it even means, and I have emerged with no clear answers.

I mean, in part - of course I haven’t, because within the context of academic gender studies, the notion is troubled also. Yet, of all the various theories, the various models for trying to understand gender, many find a model which resonates with them, which they can adopt as their own. At least, this is how it seems to be as an outsider, but I may be wrong. Instead, I feel like I come to this land of critical gender thinking anew, am circling over this new territory, and am feeling increasingly troubled and overwhelmed by what it all means. I have no idea where I should land. Where I should plant my flag, claim my stake.

Maybe I should rewind a bit. Your analysis of gender identity within videogames was fascinating; I had not thought too hard before about the notion that the positions that videogames place us within is male, even if our avatars are presented as ‘female’. I guess this naturally follows as an extension of the theory of ‘gender as performance’ then, which I agree with, in part – within the context where it was brought to my attention (this Gamasutra interview with Dance Central designer Matt Boch: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/39514/Harmonix_on_gender_selfexpression_in_Dance_Central.php) – it makes sense, certainly, as a way of understanding gender ‘in the wild’, as it were. Though, I also find it a bit troubling.

So, what then, if, within games, if our performance is inexorably masculine? In a way, this also reminded me of another thing I read this past week, which intrigued me. An interview with Jenova Chen in Eurogamer, in which he said:

“I believe that very often it’s not really the player that’s an asshole. It’s the game designer that made them an asshole. If you spend every day killing one another how are you going to be a nice guy? All console games are about killing each other, or killing one another together… Don’t you see? It’s our games that make us assholes.”

I can see how this thinking can extend to games making us perform as men. Though, the part of gender as performance which continues to bother me (and this may be down to a misunderstanding of it) is that it seems to continue to perpetuate a certain sort of essentialism, which seems counterintuitive. You noted, for example, that ‘emotions’ are  widely-regarded as female attributes. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

I feel like I’m clutching ineffectually around already deeply-established work, so I will return to my own experience, then. Growing up (and returning to ‘Post-sexism Young Mitu’) I remember it would always irk me when I’d heard certain parts of my behaviour or personality – e.g. my ambition, my technical aptitude, etc – described as typically ‘male’. It is easy to see how feeling like that can lead one to a place of rejecting gender identity altogether; to see gender as this made-up construct, where it is damaging to apply any sort of behaviour to either sex. But then again, is being able to see certain behaviour as gendered crucial to furthering – and thus expanding – our understanding of gender?

Basically, what I am trying to say, is that I am throwing my hands up when it comes to asking: what is ‘femininity’?Because, I’m sure I have no idea. Like you, when I was tiny, I had an aversion to ‘pinkness’, and I didn’t feel nearly as comfortable in dresses as I did slobbing around in jeans. But then again, I did not feel an explicit desire to be anything but female. There is SO much more nuance here, but in conjunction with the other ‘male’ traits of my personality, and my hobbies, I guess I might have understood this as overcoming what was ‘expected’ of me as a girl growing up. As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve re-embraced feminine clothing, reconciling these various parts of myself.

Maybe that’s why I used to be annoyed at Computer Engineering Barbie, then. Although, obviously, she is but a plastic doll, I feel that she is not the sort of woman who went through the same gender journey as I did; I imagine she grew up truly embracing all parts of the performance we know as ‘girly’, whereas I did not. I perhaps, felt a sense of pride in my ability to navigate through to graduating from my own Computer Engineering degree without needing a role model who was explicitly female – and certainly not one who was so feminine, maybe. And, if I am to admit, in the darkest parts of myself, perhaps that is also how I felt about the sorts of girls who would aspire to owning a Computer Engineering Barbie; back then, the notion of wanting to get into computing because of someone and something so feminine, and not for any other (more masculine?) reason, seemed bothersome to me.  There is a lot to unpack there, I’m sure. But, I know I certainly do not think that way anymore.

This certainly ties into the online ‘backlash’ you mentioned about the ‘female geek trope’ over these past couple of weeks; I feel as though at some point in my life, I might have empathised, or even agreed with the things that were suggested within that article. As it happens, my point of view now is very different; I wrote about it actually (http://mitu.nu/2012/04/04/on-fake-geek-girls-and-gendering-of-problems/), prompted by your asking about it in your last letter! My response calls out how we shouldn’t unnecessarily gender certain problematic human behaviours. Though, of course, this thinking leads me back to the questions I was asking above about gender performances vs. essentialism vs. oh-god-what-is-all-of-this-stuff-anyway?

Anyway, I’m not sure if there are specific questions, here – and I’m sorry I’ve veered away from discussing games explicitly, especially after your smart, insightful analysis in the last letter, and into a more generalised conundrum. I was amused and intrigued by your Hello, Kitty anecdote – I’ve never explored such games myself, but I was fascinated to hear about glitter explosions, nonetheless!

I realise I’ve not left with any explicit questions, this time – so I will leave the floor open to you, for now – there’s a lot of ‘general’ gender questions to unpack, I suppose.

I DO, however, want to ask you about your Suda51/CEX anecdote, though!

Be well, and have an excellent weekend.

Mitu

Letter 7: Dear Mitu (13 April 2012)

Dear Mitu,

I hope you are settling into the ring well. I am loathed to distract you with this stuff at such a happy time, but a woman’s work is never done.

I really liked your blog post/response to the Tara Tiger Brown piece and I agree whole-heartedly that there is an unnecessary gendering of issues that is to prevalent and as you point out what she was in fact talking about was a more universal guilt of insincerity, or, I think, perceived insincerity. As the so-called geek culture gains weight and elevates to boarder the mainstream there is a not altogether uncommon reaction. Devotees of any marginalised media and forms have responded similarly to the ‘mainstreaming’ or popularisation of their niche interests. That is not a gender specific thang, not a bit. Boys as well as girls griped and then deserted the punk scene, for example. It seems we are dealing with something as simple as styles cyclical nature, geek chic was bound to come round and it too will fade out and give back the kingdom to those who want to own it. I don’t think this makes the new arrivals that disingenuous either because fandom especially in the extreme, which is how this article and the venn diagram place geek, have always been a little competitive or at least craved a particular ownership. Matt Hills and Henry Jenkins et al describe the way that knowledge, even extra-textual fan-generated knowledge (slash and video edits) are a form of knowledge that serious appreciators prize. In that regard I completely understand how the arrival of the casual game has irked the ‘hardcore’. I don’t agree at all. Casual has invited a wealth of new people to games, both male and female. I would rather see a rich variety of games and players alike; I think that really underpins my affinity for weird, marginal, forgotten and even hated games.

Warning: I had a thought…

You’ve said that you have no idea what femininity is, and I don’t either, but I think I’ve had a breakthrough in this respect. I’ve been reading a lot about ‘taste’ recently in my forays into ‘bad taste’ (I am immensely proud of my poor taste) and Pierre Bourdieu offers this summation on the cultural distinction of taste, I paraphrase because I can’t find the essay… he says something along the lines of: tastes are primarily based on distastes. It seems there is a similar problem in the conceptualisation of gender norms, not only are feminine and masculine held up against one another as oppositions but their supposed common gender attributes and behaviours only really seem to exist in terms of anxieties of being not masculine or feminine. Gendered behaviour and performance is certainly frequently judged as what it is not. Of course this is the product of some seriously structuralist thinking which vexes me some because that is where the essentialising lives and somehow seems a little convenient or obvious, but I’ve not said it out loud before and it still makes sense when I do so I’m filling that observation under ‘achievement’ in my personal process towards a feminism. Though  even that isn’t fair or accurate. It’s a gender things across the board and I think in this respect men are as likely to women to experience some gender-based persecution, that is to say if one is perceptibly effeminate or if they are a stay-at-home dad they are not fulfilling some archaic idea of ‘man’. Whilst in gaming I have observed gentleness to be a perceived weakness in men, this could be a ‘lad’ backlash to the once disdainfully ‘geek’ image or something to do with the competiveness of many games. That is conjecture of course but I mean to illustrate the ways that men are also subject to some negative gendering in games culture also.

Gender is always in negative terms? Kinda… oh fuck!

This is not good, but aligning this ‘standard setting’ for gender with taste kind of completes an equation for me even though I think integers are all fucked up and wrong. I think this also speaks to the problem with the ‘performance of gender’. Is gender performance something we are performing against and not towards? With the Matt Boch example, I am really encouraged that this level of thinking and consideration is informing game design and I will have to pick up Dance Central to see exactly how this idea rolls out. Might even try it on housemates, who are constant victims of my videogame experiments. I also don’t think that this level of R&D is publicised outside of an already existing fan and dev community though. Shouting about this could go a long way towards promoting the popular positive opinion of games as inclusive, innovative, smart products.

Thought over…

Oops, more thoughts…

So, having found myself stumped a little by feminisms and gender and what does it all mean, I decided to look elsewhere to see if things that I know about games and such compliments the process of feminism. Basically, I wondered if I was coming at this wrong. Should I use what I know of feminism and try and accommodate games or the other way round. And I think I may have found a little, tiny, baby something that works for me. It is by no means a resolve, an answer, or even a suggestion but I’m pretty pleased that I think I can marry two things and play on my strengths again and gives me a glimmer of hope that what I have to say may be valuable or at least on track to being so.

I love games. Not all of them, but I just do love them. In that respect, and I think some of your writing reflects, I find it difficult still to conceive of a way to make games more appealing to females, but through games I can think of ways that feminism can be explored, reified, analogised. I’ve been writing a lot about participatory culture alongside this project (and I think feminism is something of a project) and come across Axel Bruns. His concept of the produser (you gets the portmanteau) seems significant but more so when considered alongside his conception of 2.0 culture as palimpsestic. Feminism too is palimpsestic (I’ve clearly learned a new word). What I thought were neat, coherent movements were in fact a small part of a wide discussion. Post-stucturalist feminism wrote over the gender work of its predecessors, that in turn split into numerous groups with as many opinions, there is written of an age of ambivalence too. What I am saying is, feminism is written constantly, under and over written; we add an erase as needed, caveats appear, huge appendixes, there’s scribbles in the margins, love hearts on top of the ‘i’s, spelling errors, mess – whatever. We are working it 2.0 style. As to all this and games, or at least super media literate online culture in which a section of games certainly sit, even those that are not identifying players understand the language of amateur edits and contribution that constitutes 2.0. We all get to have a go, we are used to save-die-retry and repetition until we find the right approach to a puzzle. This is a productive analogy for me at least and having felt like I was floundering for a while (like all this week hence late response) – I’m positive again. This feels more like a welcoming space that I know how to use… I will better apply it next time.

I’m also thinking that letters is so perfect for illustrating feminism as project and always in motion because it captures beautifully how much I feel like not only is the conversation going forward but that we are even making crossing-outs and rewriting as we go.

Sorry, that whole letter is parentheses.  I hope you are enjoying FEZ and making plans for our epic geographical journey as part of this philosophical one. I am struggling to lay down questions this evening, but as I’ve babbled please feel free to return.

Emily

Letter 8: Dear Emily (2 May 2012)

Dear Emily,

Gosh. It’s been a few weeks now since I last wrote to you, and, as happens when one is in  a period in one’s life where one is feeling especially self-reflective, my own feelings have been constantly shifting, changing. These past few weeks have, for me, beenpalimpsestic, even. (Heh, good word indeed!)

I think there is some truth to what you describe, with gender descriptions being shaped by the always-negative. But, for all my ineffectual clasping at what even defines femininity might really be in my last letter, I think I have been working towards a definition of femininity that works for me. I say that in the present tense, of course – because as you insightfully pointed out, this is always a process - but more on that later.

I think my moment of realization that I can be comfortable and empowered in my skin as a woman came when I finally began reading Alan Moore’s graphic novel Promethea. Lo, what’s, I hear you say? A work of supposed ‘low culture’ influencing thought? Surely not?!

Heh sorry, pardon my sarcasm – I guess this literally never-ending debate has been brought up again with respect to games thanks to this (kotaku.com/5906484/most-popular-video-games-are-dumb-can-we-stop-apologizing-for-them-now) Kotaku piece – in the face of those discussions (and I don’t think they’re not useful, for what it’s worth), all I want to do is to continue creating. And, I would love, one day, to make a game that does for another person what Promethea is doing for me. A reminder that any of us who choose to identify as a woman can, at any point, become an ass-kicking magic demi-goddess full of fiery heroism just by writing and thinking. That’s pretty cool, no? Finally, some essentialism I can get behind, heh. (Or, maybe my aspiration towards Alan Moore-esque magical battiness by age 40 is just kicking in early. It is, after all, my 28th birthday today…)

Anyway, that is a massive aside. Just another personal anecdote. I do think there are ties to be made there with what we could achieve through games, too. It makes me feel good about the potential of culture to change thought, and thereby lives. Which is one of the reasons I am doing what I’m doing, after all.

Back to the point you made about feminism as a process; again, you are spot on, and this is also an insight I heard in a talk by fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson a few weeks ago – who, get this – is amazingly just 15 years old. She said:

“One thing that can be very alienating about a misconception of feminism in that girls then think that to be feminists they have to live up to being perfectly consistent in their beliefs, never being insecure, never having doubts, having all the answers… and this is not true and actually recognizing all the contradictions I was feeling became easier once I realized that feminism was not a rulebook but a discussion, a conversation, a process.”

(from http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6osiBvQ-RRg)

I mean - bam. There is one young lady who gets it, and at such a tender age. I wish I’d had one tenth of that insight back then; no doubt it would have made a lot of the journey easier.

I wonder what sort of support might lead to a teenage girl reaching those kind of conclusions by herself at a similar age, or even older (but still younger than ourselves, heh.) Thinking of this, and of our letters as an ongoing conversation made me begin to wonder about whether there is anything that can be done. Positive action, as it were, to support other girls as they go through their own ‘origin stories’. One of the things which this letter series has been underlining for me is the importance of support, and of relating to others. To use the cheesy aphorism, ‘no man (nor woman in games!) is an island”.  I definitely see the value of support-giving initiatives in this regard. (That’s not to say that that isn’t a complicated and fraught territory in itself, of course – Mare Sheppard, in her GDC talk this year, gave a thoughtful account of the potential problems which may therein. Basically, there is no easy answer to any of this stuff. But, it is a process, and, as part of that process, I’d love to keep stumbling towards potential solutions.)

That was a big parenthesis. Anyhow, I’m excited to see whether this adventure continues to lead us, both in the short term, and in the long term.

Feeling oddly positive,

Mitu

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