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LITR 4332 American Minority Literature Model Assignments Research Project Submissions 2013 research post 2 |
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Higginbotham, Tom
4/25/2013
Gaymes and Gamers
In
the last research post, we investigated the significance of "coming out" as a
literary device and discovered it to be an important, even central facet of LBGT
literature. Specifically that it is often ideal to not provide a tidy arc of
development for the main character or characters, but rather feature a
significant section of their coming out process, leaving the ending more open to
interpretation, mirroring real-life coming out being a life long ordeal. This
post will narrow its focus specifically to the realm of LBGT literature in video
games, as well as the relationship of game and gamer culture to LBGT issues.
The
first game to cover is Dys4ia, an autobiographical game by solo game
developer Anna Anthropy about her experiences with hormone replacement therapy.
The game divides itself into four levels which, while numbered chronologically,
can be persued in any order. Each level is made up of a series of simple
screens, each adding to the narrative both via text and an interactive, visual
representation. The first screen of the first level, for instance, draws the
player character as a irregular shape, with an arrow pointing to the other side
of the screen. The way through is blocked only by a brick wall with a hole in
it, but due to the way the hole and the player character are shaped, it's
impossible to get through, accompanied by "I feel weird about my body."
Similarly, each screen creates a scenario just like that where players move
through the narration. Because Dys4ia is made up of these smaller,
self-contained screens, or "mini-games" the design relies on simple instruction
or self-evident direction through design, such as mouths shooting projectiles at
the player character, now a shield, or the player character flying through the
air past hoops they need to jump through. Through these simple, wordless design
choices, as well as visually, the game plants itself deep in the roots of retro
gaming, adopting a graphical style similar to atari-era graphics, a very simple,
almost monochrome style with basic shapes and even more basic animation.
What
stands out right away from a construction aspect is that Dys4ia draws on
many common concepts of game design, usually in an effort to subvert them. Case
in point, the prior mentioned wall scene which, in any other game, would have a
win condition, a requirement to be met which would count the player as
"victorious" and move to the next challenge. Dys4ia is not a game about
challenge, however, as much as it doesn't have a win state it doesn't have a
lose state either. Rather, it is a game about telling a story in an interactive
way; the narrator feels "Weird" about her body and in the same way, the player
is made to feel weird about the form given to them and, just as the narrator
doesn't have an immediate solution to her puzzle, the player isn't allowed to
solve theirs.
Significantly, while not being a coming out story in the strictest sense, level
4, "It Gets Better?" does not end the game totally resolved in much the same way
as other LBGT coming out literature. While undeniably upbeat, the narration does
acknowlege the story's incompleteness as well as problems yet unmet, such as the
looming spectre of health issues due to the therapies and continuing resistance
from outside forces, one of the last screens featuring a pixelated butterfly
ascending towards the sun with the words "It's a small thing, but I feel like
I've taken the first step towards something TREMENDOUS." Followed by a similar
image to the wall scene, only this time with the player character's shape
changing randomly, the player not being able to try to make it through the hole
before the screen flashes to "The End" which is moments later replaced by "Just
the Beginning."
The
second game A Closed World, developed by Singapore-based Gambit Game Lab,
is much more traditional, both in the sense of being a game and being a
coming out story. The game opens with text on a black screen; "Has it ever
occurred to you just how much of our lives is affected by the answer to a very
simple sounding question? The words we use...The clothes we wear . . . Even who we
fall in love with" before the game itself asks you, the player, "Are you male or
female?" The game doesn't allow the player to choose their orientation, merely
their gender, likely being a very subtle play on the idea that orientation
isn't selected, though I can't cofirm or deny that as a design choice. The
game itself forms around the traditional turn-based RPG (or Role-Playing Game)
formula of gameplay, using the well-established genre of game as a platform from
which to give the narrative. Unlike Dys4ia, A Closed World does,
in fact, have a win and lose state, the instruction menu telling the player to
"Seek out the demons in the forest. Defeat them or wander amongst the trees
forever." What the game doesn't tell you is that the demons in question are not
hellspawn, but friends, family members, your lover, and even yourself, and that
the forest is both an actual forest and an extended metaphor for the messy
business of coming out.
The
actual gameplay takes place partly in an "overworld" where the player explores
the forest, examines clues, and uncovers demons and in a turn-based format, both
you and the "demons" taking turns selecting an attack in the form of either a
Passionate appeal, a Logical argument, or an Ethical claim, adopting pathos,
logos, and ethos into a rock-paper-scissors-style mechanic. Health bars in this
game give way to a "composure" meter, losing composure meaning losing the
argument. The reasoning behind the design may not be apparent at first, and
indeed, I can't imagine someone who isn't familiar with at least this kind of
game understanding the significance of the chosen genre at all, but with a
little bit of digging, it's there.
I can
think of two reasons why the turn-based RPG format was chosen for this game.
One, it's a very light-skill, mechanics-heavy style of game, meaning that
players, regardless of skill, can take the game at their own pace, spending more
time manipulating the mechanics slowly rather than the player character quickly,
allowing much more in the way of story, narration, and exposition without
breaking up flow too badly. Two, games of this variety are normally very
high-stakes, narrative-wise. A major cliche in this genre is to cast the player
in the role of a "Chosen One" off on a world-spanning journey to save the planet
from an ambigious but omnipresent evil. Fights are implied to be big, spells
powerful, and monsters terrifying, and to bring that sort of scale into a single
boy or girl dealing with their family says a lot for the perspective of a person
staring down that kind of challenge. This sort of "adjusted perspective" comes
through in the visual design of the demons themselves who don't look like family
members but vaguely human monsters, often several times larger than the player
character.
Each
of the demons takes its own form, but probably most interesting is the form of
the lover, seen as a beautiful, white, long-necked beast caught halfway in the
mud of the ground. It becomes revealed through the battle that the lover chose
not to accompany the player character into the forest, as seemed to be their
plan earlier. The visual metaphor, a pure creature trapped in the mire is quite
possibly the most striking of the entire game.
After
clearing the forest, the player enters a fog "The words thou'st heard cannot be
unheard things / The things thou'st seen cannot be unseen / The emotions thou'st
felt cannot be erased . . . were it not for such suffereing, where wouldst thou
stand now?" and much like Dys4ia ends on a positive, if completely
open-ended note, both acknowleging the hardships faced and not dismissing those
yet to come, but also relishing in the step taken forward.
The
third game we'll be looking at is almost staggeringly more literary than the
prior two and also my personal favorite of the three. The game is titled
Personal Trip to the Moon: a video game about dysphoria and astronauts,
designed by another solo developer publicly known only as "VoEC." The game is
similar to Dys4ia in the sense that it is both also about gender
dysphoria and it doesn't have a traditional win/lose state, but rather uses
foundations of game design as a vehicle to create the experience of the
narrative.
Personal Trip to the Moon spends most of its time manipulating
classical femenine symbols, such as mirrors and the moon itself, to give an
emotional account of gender dysphoria. The game begins with quiet somber music
and the (male) player, lacking other options, walks stage right to a mirror. His
reflection proving both quite femenine and quite sentient, asks the player to
find the missing piece to the broken mirror, the crack for which is roughly
groin-level to both the player character and his reflection. To simplify this
thought, a man followed by unhappy music approaches a mirror--again, a classical
femenine symbol-- to speak to his female reflection who asks him to replace her
missing piece around the groin area. To be absolutely clear, none of this is
outright stated, all of the implications are entirely interpretive, and that is
the kind of level that Trip to the Moon is working on; a deeply symbolic
interrogation of gender dysphoria which isn't so much trying to tell a story or
make a point as much as it is exploring an emotion or idea. If I were a
professor teaching a class on the literature of games, I would lecture on this
game.
I'll
save the more in-depth description I gave the other two games because there
really is too much layered to adequately cover it all, so instead let me simply
give an example of what is possibly the best moment in the game. Shortly after
the mirror scene, the player walks to the edge of a rooftop and, having lost
control a few feet ago, steps to the very edge. On-screen instructions appear
"Press Space to Fly" and, upon doing so, the player character closes their eyes
and stretches out their arms. At this point it seems entirely likely that the
player character is about to commit suicide and it seems like an intentional
lead-on considering the still-somber tone of the game so far but it's not long
after the music begins to crecendo that the game keeps its promise and the
player flies high into space where they're given a quest to fetch five items to
repair a lunar lander and save a handful of astronaunts. What's interesting
isn't that, though, but the fact that if you go back down to Earth and try to fly
down the same building you thought you might jump off of earlier, the game lets
you fly down for eternity, looping the same background over and over, never
letting you reach an end. When the player finally gives up and starts to fly
spaceward again, they'll find that they didn't spend nearly as much time flying
up as they did flying down; no matter how long they spent flying towards the
ground—or perhaps more accurately, away from the moon where the reflection is
found—they never ultimately made any progress at all. When a game is so fraught
with interpretive potential that even the optional testing of the boundaries can
have meaning, it deserves its own paper.
Now
of the three games I've covered so far, there's been a trend: all three have
been very small, independant affairs, exclusively free and browser-based and
never more than about a maximum of ten minutes long and there's a reason for
that. By and large, LBGT themes have not made it, or are only just making it,
into the mainstream of gaming. Historically, games and LBGT haven't gotten along
famously, many games—especially japanese games—portraying specifically gay men
as excessively flamboyant and femenine such as the 2006 Clover Studio game, God
Hand, where the first boss was a duo “Mr. Gold and Mr. Silver” an astronomically
gay set of twins, each wearing nearly-not-there outfits with peacock feathers.
Or Streets of Rate 3 where another sub-boss named “Ash” appears what
approaches bondage gear, pirouetting across the screen.
Surprisingly, one Japanese company to buck this trend has been Nintendo which
has had not one, but two transgender characters in its games, one dating back to
1987. The two characters, Birdo and Vivian are both Male-to-Female transgender
characters, confirmed by Nintendo on both counts. What's more, neither character
is particularly defined by their transgenderdism, though that may be
giving Nintendo a bit too much credit as, at least in the case of Birdo, there
isn't an overabundance of character development around them.
While
games in history, even recent history, have had a sort of sketchy past with LBGT
themes, particularly homosexuality, there does appear to be a positive trend.
One such leader of that trend is developer Bioware which has gone out of its way
to portray LBGT persons as normal human beings, even including gay or lesbian
romance options in many of their games. When one player complained loudly on the
official forum that Bioware was ignoring their core demographic of the “Straight
Male Gamer” by including these romance options, Bioware developer David Gaiter
went so far as to publicly respond, “The romances in the game are not for “'the
straight male gamer,'” they're for everyone. We have a lot of fans, many of whom
are neither straight nor male, and they deserve no less attention.”
While
there may appear to be a positive trend insofar attitudes are concerned, gaming
culture still has one other major hurdle to cross where LBGT themes are
concerned: Nobody seems to want to talk about it. Nobody seems to want to talk
about sexuality at all. Of all the games currently in circulation, only a
fraction of them want to handle sexuality in anything approaching a mature way
and of those, barely a fraction even touch on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or
Transgendered relationships. There are big names in that ring such as Bioware
and we're seeing more big names throw their hats in as the topic becomes more
fashionable, but one still has to make considerable effort to search for a game
which even includes an LBGT character, let alone discusses the idea.
So
what have we learned from our entirely-too-long adventure through gay gamingdom?
From a literary standpoint that games can be just as thoughtful and informative
as any other literary medium, and in some cases more so. Games are entirely
capable of examing the same themes as a novel and can often use the visual,
interactive “language” of game design to get a point across without words at
all. From a cultural standpoint, that the conversation of LBGT themes in video
games is happening, the conversation just hasn't gone especially far yet,
as a majority of gaming culture seems to still be adjusting to the idea. No
surprise there, though. Gamers can't even be trusted to draw a woman without
some kind of contrivance to show as much bust as possible, lord only knows how
long it'll be before the mainstream of gaming can move beyond gay stereotypes.
Bibliography
Anna
Anthropy. Dis4ia. 2012. Newgrounds.com Flash-based
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/591565
Gambit Game Lab. A Closed World. 2012. Flash-based
http://gambit.mit.edu/loadgame/summer2011/aclosedworld_play.php
VoEC.
Personal Trip to the Moon: a story about gender dysphoria and
astronauts. Kongregate.com, 2012http://www.kongregate.com/games/voec/personal-trip-to-the-moon
Nintendo. Super Mario Bros. 2. Nintendo. 1987. Nintendo Entertainment
System
Nintendo. Paper Mario: The
Thousand Year Door. Nintendo. 2004.
Gamecube
Walker, John. "Dragon Age Writer on
Characters' Bisexuality." Rock Paper Shotgun. Rock Paper Shotgun, 25 Mar.
2011. Web. 25 Apr. 2013. <http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/03/25/dragon-age-writer-on-characters-bisexuality/>.
