Ikezawa Hanako, the Otaku Exotic

You’re a male student who has the pick of five high school girls with disabilities to date and sleep with. Yes, Katawa Shoujo has a sensationalist premise promising for something to go horribly wrong. The main character, Nakai Hisao, transfers to a private school that accommodates students with disabilities and health issues that require the need of an around the clock medical staff. As he wrestles with his disability and how that involves his identity, attractive girls with their own problems whom he can romance complicate things further. One of the story paths Hisao can take is to involve himself with Ikezawa Hanako, a burn victim with scars covering half her body, and crippling social anxiety as a result. There is a case for Hanako being the standard romance, or the one made in mind of the audience that would play this game, despite having the most unconventional look of all the romances.

With its sexual connotation, the scars exotify Hanako. Without them, she would be a very typical Japanese schoolgirl who is extremely shy, tries to cook, hides in the library… Would anything be interesting about Hanako if it wasn’t for her accident? The mental side of her disability is actually emphasized traits of what we think of woman nerds: dislikes social interaction except with those who earn her affection, hypersensitive to her preferences of where they can go, and enjoying anything that makes them a relative shut-in. All wrapped in traditional Japanese beauty and given scarring to make her unique. Many of the other girls have personality quirks that involve their disability but don’t rely on it to make them unique. Hanako, on the other hand, enables the typical men’s fantasy traits; by rousing Hisao’s white knight tendencies and being an extreme stereotype of a geek or nerd, she is the most palatable choice for the typical consumer visual novels and dating sims. Having this social anxiety forces the player to invest their own protective tendencies, but in a way that won’t backlash at them. In a way, the player won’t feel their own social ineptitude or inability to read people to be a hindrance because Hanako is such an extreme case.

The conclusion of her storyline is pretty telling; you can only get the perfect run through if you respect her independence and allow her to start doing things on her own without Hisao hovering over her. Because this is a fantasy, her new stake in autonomy happens right at the end of the game, so the player doesn’t have to experience a complicated relationship. Instead, Hanako provided the chase and the emotions of caretaking and resolved her character arc without disrupting these feelings. So when players look back at their time with Hanako, they will remember holding a glass figurine rather than the first step to being a woman she makes at the end of the game. It is a strange convention of these high school dating sims to end the game when the relationship officially starts, which is typically after a sex scene. Because players will remember the dutiful, quiet Hanako that provided sex because she wanted to be close, and not the potentially threatening social and secure Hanako that happens after the story’s end.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Review

Art has had its periods of depicting reality as plainly as possible, an emphasis on painting or writing exactly the actual object or scene. At those times, gone were hyperbole, mythic interventions, and patchy brushstrokes. One such moment was the advent of Naturalism, whose practitioners usually told stories of characters faring harsh environmental situations and struggling with the uncaring figure of nature. Sound a little familiar? Skyrim is a revitalization of Naturalism as its graphic achievements added a new layer to The Elder Scrolls series.

But it isn’t just being pretty that makes Skyrim feel like a Jack London story but instead its philosophy of striving for a photorealistic depiction of a reality. Bethesda didn’t choose to go with a static cut-scene or interface-heavy opening, they had the player observe the world as that world ‘happened’ around them. This is a set-up for the rest of the game, in which you’ll do a lot of pausing, looking around, and feeling, oh, so very small.

The minutiae that Skyrim keeps and throws away in respect to its predecessors aims to pull down as much of the barrier that exists between the player and the world of Skyrim. The player will quickly unlearn their habit of picking up everything that they can touch and that stealing and killing have consequences. There is a logical consistency to the world’s physicality and social norms; there isn’t magic or dragons in reality, but Skyrim presents a good guess at how such things might look. The ability to look out at the picturesque landscape and know that you could also see it up close in fine detail adds to the feeling of being in another world.

Skyrim benefits from its many mountains and plains, which give the scene a depth lacking in past games. The sheer amount of things in Skyrim are equal parts boring and exciting—and random. The player expects to find many dull items in caves and houses because, well, that’s most likely how it is in reality. The distribution of random events that frustrate or help the player feel brutally honest within an uncaring system.

Bethesda’s changes to the interface of The Elder Scrolls and having its character creation communicated during gameplay suggests an ideal situation for the player to participate more in the world and not in the meta-game of menus. It serves a utilitarian role, mostly to update your character’s skills and assign favorites, a contrast to the information-heavy and cluttered feel of past games. This is, in part, due to a character creation system that moves the non-superficial choices out of the beginning of the game and allows for a more long term, active role in how a player molds their character. Instead of ordaining a strict role from the beginning through numbers and attributes, there is a strong focus on the skills that the player uses determining character development.

The skills and roles themselves aren’t innovative at all, in fact, the player will most likely be choosing to do the same exact things done in Morrowind in Skyrim. The active development of character skills allows the player to react to the world instead of being constrained to the choices that they made in the beginning, involving the player more with the world than the ‘game.’

Photorealism sets a high bar for graphical fidelity, as it’s easy to see imperfections and slip into the uncanny valley when the game misses the bullseye. Characters are vapid and openly show their artifice with stock lines and a small cast of voice actors. Your companions, especially Lydia, remind you that they are a traveling AI inventory instead of characters with their own thoughts and interests. In a world meant to be explored, the character population that makes the locale interesting in the first place should also be worth investigation. Skyrim shows that nature and society are inescapable, but actual people are easy to ignore.

The large amount of critical bugs in the game break Skyrim’s illusion of another world, as frustration builds from starting the game over so often. I restarted over five times on the PS3 version, not counting the bugs that I just rolled with. The attempt to provide such a real world is undermined by the technical consequences involved with making it. While Bethesda’s fanbase excuses glitches based on its other merits, its reliance on mods and post-release patches force the player to be aware of the actual game itself when Skyrim’s design philosophy seems to imply otherwise.

Skyrim is a natural progression of the series, fine tuning mechanics that reach for an ideal Naturalism. Players still write about losing hours of their time to navigating its landscapes and describe the surprise, chance events that they encounter. The system, acting as nature, demonstrates the harsh reality of an adventurer’s time spent traveling across tundra and valleys but also causes the player to be made aware of their own body with the reminder that they are playing a flawed game. Nevertheless, its differences from the rest of the series show a welcome effort at further involving the player completely in a world, and Skyrim’s success shows that Bethesda is on the right path to do so.

Mass Appeal vs. Accessibility in Video Games

There is a difference between “mass appeal” and “accessibility,” though some word-slingers and comment fanatics find the terms interchangeable. Who uses them determines a large part of their meaning, as a lot of gaming discussion also determines who belongs to the “in group” and who belongs to the “out group.” Games striving for mass appeal tend to come from a series or lineage of some sort that include conventions that appeal to hardcore gamers but also attempt to broaden their audience by watering down complex features. The phrase is used pejoratively, devaluing other gaming styles while calling out developers with their eye on gaining more customers. Accessibility is a design philosophy that opens up games to more people without changing the experience for the original audience. It also aims to value a plurality of gaming styles instead of “one over all others,” such as higher difficulties being the ultimate vision or true version of a game.

Arguments concerning mass appeal and accessibility frequently occur over RPGs, a genre going through an identity crisis by trying to satisfy the old guard while fighting stagnation by expanding into new territory (the purgatory of the “give us something new but keep everything the same” demand of gamers). A focus on stats or numbers in general is often included in many gamers’ definitions of what an RPG is, but the focus on micromanaging numbers is the only one way to express character progression. It is far more likely that statistical progression is a given and that a game is built around such progression rather than an organic component of what it means to be an RPG.

Assigning numerical values to attributes at character creation, adding points as you level up, the chance that the player can find their character build irreparably flawed well into the game—all of these tie into the feeling that we get playing RPGs, which is centered around character progression. However, these qualities are not necessary for a successful game of this sort. Consider the shift away from traditional character creation in The Elder Scrolls (in which all of the decisions dealing with numbers are translated into different mechanics in the game). Many called foul at this change and journalists still see Bethesda’s games as primed more for mass consumption but very little actually changed.

The focus on player input in the series involves a larger amount of people managing their character’s progression without being inundated with extraneous information. Anyone who has played earlier Elder Scrolls games will find themselves doing the same exact things with a similar amount if not more flexibility in Skyrim. This is because deciding 5-point differences between Charisma and Intelligence is simply one way to influence skills that panders to the tastes to a particular set of people, while it isn’t a loss of experience to simply pick pockets to become better at it and it allows enjoying perks if you want to specialize.

Styles of play remain the same without traditional specializations, with abilities and the game-world funneling players into the usual warrior, rogue, and mage trifecta while allowing for some experimentation if players want the challenge. On the other end of the RPG spectrum, you have games like Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II that maintain a standard set of statistics with little benefit. With numbered requirements for skills and equipment, the player is doing work that the computer could be doing instead and the system offers little in terms of flexibility.

Putting points into attributes doesn’t offer some players much in terms of game interaction, such stats exist only for those who enjoy watching the numerical value of attack values and armor points rise and fall. For RPGs that show some of the strongest concentration on character development through narrative development, the old draping of D&D character sheets are anachronistic. This is only the start of a conversation about some of the Final Fantasy games, which would remain largely unaffected as gaming experiences if you took away the status screens showing the party members described in numbers.

The tension between “hardcore” players and a wider audience echoes the politics of the relationship that developers and gamers have with game design. The diversity of RPG styles doesn’t match the increasing range of identities in the player base, which is important because of how much interaction is necessary for enjoying games. The backlash that social minorities are combating in gaming is similar to the resistance to valuing other experiences besides the simulation or abstraction of technical skills in gaming culture, and the demographics that represent each side aren’t too different. Video games reflect themes and skills found in boys’ styles of play as children, and any introduction of qualities that are different from that (especially if tagged as feminine) are cast out as inferior “casual” games. The movement of making games accessible gives designers the opportunity to boil down what works without the trappings of conventions that exist “just because they’ve always been there” and establish new ways of interacting that would be unavailable in generic RPGs.

Numbers and stats in RPGs don’t have to go away forever but probably deserve to be more niche than they are currently. Taking the lead from Skyrim and Dragon Age II, there are other directions that the core idea of character progression can go that don’t involve a superficial process that blocks enjoyment for the current “out group.” As the genre and all of gaming struggles with its identity and direction, a critical look at how we resort to convention and whose convention is valued will reveal roadblocks once assumed to be essential mainstays of the medium.

Werner Herzog, the Power Fantasy

A current struggle in the gaming community is a call for more common and better-realized depictions of minority characters, from women to people of color to the LGBT. We still wrestle with questions on what would be different about games if minorities populated more casts and, eventually, what a game with only minorities would look like. Absolute Obedience attempts at this, giving the player two gay men as a main characters, both secret agents who do strange espionage-esque work in what seems to be post-World War II Germany. They are each given a unique set of assignments to complete (that the player is graded on) that typically include seducing the target, all who are men. It’s a meld between typical dating sims and visual novels, where you have a roster of romantic interests to pursue, but there are few choices and the main appeal lies in the narration. If you choose agent Louise Hardwich, you can pick up a mission that has you seducing the heir to a mafia family, Werner Herzog, renown as arrogant, hyper-masculine playboy. Louise’s client is a famous female prostitute Werner frequents, who frames this mission as a prank to undo the hyperbolic manly image Werner shows off.

It’s easy to write this off as a stereotype; gay men are over-sexed deviants who pine for straight guys to give them at once chance to switch teams. However, we need to look at the intended audience Absolute Obedience. While this game is categorized as a Boy Love (BL) or yaoi game, these are ultimately under the otome genre, which are games aimed specifically at heterosexual women. Looking to the history of fanfiction, which is arguably the progenitor of visual novels, yaoi and slash were centered around a community of straight women, not gay men. Louise’s pursuit to “turn” Werner is a sublimation of straight women’s desire for men that cannot happen between heterosexual couples. We can see themes of power, equity, ambiguity, and identity, all issues related to gender politics women have gone through, and which some argue straight men haven’t yet. Absolute Obedience misses the mark on depicting admirable gay male protagonists by serving an audience rarely pandered to in games. The player can see this in Werner’s gendered behavior in the game; while he is extremely affectionate and giving to all the prostitutes he sleeps with (while also advocating against human trafficking), he only sees men as intelligent and capable business partners and worth respecting. Even though he’s straight when Louise meets him, the woman player needs to take the role of a man to explore his character.

Louise approaches his objective to bed Werner by playing his ego against him, a familiar trope from advice columns for women that adopts a calculating mentality to tear a man down from his self-ordained pedestal. The choices you need to get an ‘A’ rating tell you clearly that you must never submit to Werner, never allow him to understand what’s on Louise’s mind and never give him the chance to be dominant. Werner eventually slips, referring to Louise as beautiful and talking to him as if to a woman, while mentally respecting the personality attributes he associates with men. When Louise eventually gets Werner to a bedroom, the scene takes on ambiguous rape qualities that are commonly found in pornography, where one participant starts out unwilling and eventually begins to enjoy what’s going on. Unaware that he would be bottoming (being penetrated) for Louise, Werner begins to struggle (oh, did I forget to mention that Louise carries around a whip with him at all times?) against what he perceived as humiliation, as his masculine persona avoided being treated like a woman at all costs. Even though this is a sexually explicit scene, it’s the action of feminizing a heterosexual man that’s erotic. As women’s gender is allowed more flexibility in expression of masculine traits, society still doesn’t allow men that same ambiguity and other men are typically the ones to bully each other into acting “like a man.” This scene is a forbidden fruit of sorts, revealing the aspect straight men try their hardest to avoid expressing and setting it up as sexually satisfying for straight women.

Making the correct choices, Louise’s cold and manipulative exterior eventually gives way to Werner, and starts to fall in love. There are many times Werner will try to flip the roles back to what they are “supposed” to be, but this results in a low score for the mission. It’s not until he accepts his new, ambiguous identity and performs with skill bottoming during sex that Louise realizes he’s grown affectionate for him. The true ending depicts a scene where Werner leaves behind a group of women escorting him to an upper-class party to join Louise instead, the first instance Werner shows affection for another man in public. This follows the erotic arc of queering a heterosexual man’s sexual identity, by an open announcement of his taboo lover. Werner serves as an example as a latent sexual tension surrounding straight men in relation to their sexuality to other identities, as well as revealing the politics of depicting male homosexuality for a audience of women.

Those Games Left Off of the “Game of the Year” Lists

“Game of the Year” lists. Everybody’s got one, and they all tend to look the same. This year’s blockbuster hits, sequels to long-standing series, new projects created by popular development teams. After some reflection, I realized there were many gaming experiences that I excluded from my own list because I had some presuppositions of what “should” be on such a list. We expect high profile games that cost us $60, typically rewarding games that improve a formula instead of taking risks. If the recent presence of the indie development scene tells us anything, it’s that high end production and price tags aren’t necessary for making a successful game. What about the free games or the extremely niche titles? I decided to put together a small list in the spirit of rewarding some 2011 games that are unlikely to be featured elsewhere but deserve recognition for the risk taking that they took to advance the medium.

Don’t take it personally, babe, it just ain’t your story by Christine Love

Visual novels are about as niche as digital media comes; very few genres suffer the stigma that they do. Many don’t see them as games or find the strong influence of anime fandom to be off putting. Needless to say, the market for visual novels outside of Japan is sparse, making the decision to create one a unique decision in itself. Don’t take it personally, babe… tackles many social issues and presents them within internet culture. It comments on how the internet influences our lives, while also managing the melodrama of teenagers exploring their identities. This is probably the first time that I’ve seen a gay couple treated with maturity in a game, and there’s two here!

To the Moon by Freebird Games

For a game cited as having made so many people cry, it’s a surprise that To the Moon is rarely discussed outside of indie-focused publications. The writing in the game is some of the best this year, balancing humor alongside serious moments. Music is also a very powerful aspect of the game’s aesthetic, as you move through a dying man’s memories to make his wish come true. Be prepared, most of the game is meant to make you think, reflect, and reevaluate your humanity, not to present you with detached puzzles to solve and strategies to formulate. Most people overlook games that appear to have been created by something like RPG Maker, but To the Moon proves you don’t have to have the resources of a AAA studio to make an emotionally compelling game.

TRAUMA by Krystian Majewski

Many hesitate to call TRAUMA a game but that might be a part of what makes it special. It is reminiscent of adventure games that focus on exploration of an environment. The scenes in the game depict a woman’s struggles after an accident, prompting the player to treat their exploration of the game as a process of working through psychological distress. Interactivity and discovery are key to TRAUMA, reaching beyond the game level and into the thematic vein of the narrative. On a first run through, the player might feel like they are clicking through pictures, but once the act of exploring is tied to sorting through emotions and uncomfortable feelings, the game takes on a powerful meaning.

Sweatshop by Littleloud

How often do you see a flash game on a “top games of the year” list? Sweatshop is part tower defense, part adorable, and part socially aware. One of the main critiques of the idea of “games as art” is their lack of relevance to current events and real-life problems. These kinds of games are a tough sell to players that want their games to be mostly about fun, but Sweatshop gets it right. Its version of a tower defense games actually helps the player gain empathy for the workers being exploited through free trade agreements, speaking through both the mechanics and the intermission screens that are filled with fun facts. It’s a game that handles a serious, current problem well without lecturing the player, which is much more than most AAA games can claim.

Choice of Intrigues by Choice of Games

A sequel to a romantic, political, dramatic Choose Your Own Adventure-inspired stat-building game? Yes, please! Choice of Intrigues continues the great writing and character drama found in its predecessor, Choice of Romance but raises the stakes as you defend your reputation and the power that you have established. With a boom of interest surrounding the romance systems of later additions to the Persona series and BioWare games, it’s nice to have a game that focuses mostly on relationships and explores these topics and problems from a design level. This series is a continuation of Choice of Games’s attempt to create games that are inclusive by allowing relationships between any gender and managing details of the story world expertly, so that it makes sense in their fantasy setting.

Most of the games on this list are free and the priciest is under $12. They aren’t multiplayer and probably won’t be featured on major gaming sites but that doesn’t discount their successes. Here’s to including more than big budget games in 2012!

An Escape of One’s Own

(Trigger warning for the recounting of sensitive transgender-related experiences)

Around the turn into the 20th Century, there were many questions about women. One of them was “Why aren’t there many women writers?” The typical answers ranged from men’s predisposition to artistic ability to women being too fragile and unintelligent to push through the rigor needed to be a writer. Writers are usually men, in a male artistic culture, and that’s just how it was; any woman who became notable was seen as performing something masculine.

A certain rabble-rouser, a woman writer, provided a different answer. She said in a society that didn’t send women to school, had them rely on men for financial survival, and often didn’t allow their own private space was the reason. The few women who wrote didn’t need to rely on anyone else; they had education, an income, and a room of their own to write. Her example was imagining if Shakespeare had a sister who possessed the same innate genius as he did. Because of customs and expectations of the time, Shakespeare would be encouraged to write after being sent to school and given opportunity to earn his own money and establish a career. This sister, however, would always be a part of a family unit and not sent to school. She would constantly be pressured to focus on getting married and putting her energy to raising a household, leaving no time or privacy for writing that her brother would have. So, in contemporary times, why aren’t there as many women and other minorities in gaming compared to the main demographic of straight, white men?

I’m often asked why I have to drag identity labels into gaming discussions. Why does it matter that I’m a multi-racial, polysexual, possibly polyamorous, able-bodied transgender woman? Must I trumpet this everywhere I go? There’s an assumption that games have nothing to do with gender, sexuality, and other politics, just FUN. That’s the real reason we’re here, right? Part of identifying as a ‘gamer’ is treating games like an escape. To leave reality for a bit to forget about the troubles and limitations that plagues our lives.

The problem is games aren’t an escape for everyone looking for one. In fact, they provide an escape for a very particular identity that only sometimes overlaps with others’. As children, we didn’t really notice this dissonance, but growing up as a gamer, you notice something doesn’t feel quite right. This is evident by the demographic of those who would self-identify as a gamer and the image the industry continues to portray to attract and distance certain identities. The way our community is structured, games will often jolt minorities out of their escape and back into the reality they wanted a break from. This isn’t only from the offensive and dismissive depictions of minority identities in games, but also from gaming journalism and social gatherings. How could this be? Shouldn’t everyone be used to it by now? We all know everyone isn’t an 18-24-year-old straight guy, so just ignore it and look to the content we do enjoy.

Wrong.

Material that perpetuates the hegemonic culture of gaming does so by putting down the alternative. Content that is often a battlefield for being sexist or racist aren’t just ignorable or benign fan-service. This can boil down to an argument about offensive language, the idea that a person chooses to be offended by words and it isn’t the fault of the speaker/writer. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Ever heard of the Stroop Test? It looks like this:

Stroop-Test

You are asked to quickly go through the list, naming the color of the font of each word. In this example, you would have to read aloud “Green, Yellow, Red, Green” and so on. The results of this test show that we cannot disassociate the word from what we are “supposed” to see. If we chose to be affected by those words, a person could go through this test without preparation flawlessly. Needless to say, that doesn’t happen. We are affected by what we see and cannot control what it makes us think. In the Stroop test, what is offensive would be the printed word, and the idea that it’s a joke or means something less serious would be the font color. For that reason, when someone writes or speaks offensive or triggering material, they are actually forcing the subject to feel whatever they associate with those words. Speaking homophobic language to someone who has received any negative feelings for said words makes them relive those emotions, whether it’s pain, disgust, or inferiority. There is no absolution from using words and writing content that perpetuate the discriminatory attitudes of gaming culture. That isn’t being true to gaming, that isn’t providing an escape. You’re the ones dragging the ugly from reality into our sacred space, not the minorities.

This relates to my own experience, both with advocating for diversity in games and a recent realization I exhibit qualities similar to someone who has posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in relation to my transgender identity. The best way I can describe it is having an instant flashback to an extremely uncomfortable experience where I feel the same intense emotions I did at the time, be it embarrassment, shame, anxiety, depression, the list goes on. These flashbacks are triggered from simple association; I’ll be thinking of something that is similar to my experience, my mind will link it, and the thoughts overwhelm me. To the point where I have to verbally tell myself to stop thinking. And sometimes I can’t do this, because I’m in a public setting and I don’t want people to worry or think there’s something wrong with me. There are events in the gaming community that triggers these experiences for me, especially the overwhelming hopelessness of under-representation. I have to wrestle with many feelings as I try to enjoy games in a culture that panders to an identity that only sexualizes women and doesn’t encourage many other depictions other than ridiculous proportions to serve as eye candy. When I see the women and sexuality of Mass Effect 2 and Catherine, I am reminded of how I’m treated as an exotic sex object as a transgender woman. How I endure messages from dating sites curious about my body, left frustrated from first dates that try to grope me in their cars without my permission, cried when someone tried to pay me for what I thought was finally the first time I’d get into a relationship. When journalists, developers, and average gamers tell me gaming is for just for people who play games, looking for that escape, what they are actually doing is requesting me to settle for someone else’s escape, where I am still marginalized. They are telling me to sacrifice my enjoyment and my safe place for the hedonism of others. I know journalists, writers, and developers are reading this: can you still tell me everything is just fine?

So, what do we do? Where can we find an escape of our own? Places like The Border House and Gay Gamer are a start, by distilling what we get from gaming and what we still need. As a recent event shows us, there’s still progress to be had in creating safe places for minority groups to actual naturally and forget about reality. This isn’t discrimination against white straight men because the hegemonic identity is still accepted into these spaces, and encouraged to contribute and participate. But we can’t stay in our corners forever, we need to learn what works and take it back to the main gaming community. And those who claim to be allies of minorities should welcome us and our experience instead of paralyzing progressive movement with red tape. I understand people need to make money, but I hope those people also understand they are willingly preserving a gaming community that doesn’t include me. When you all go back to your Excell sheets and Word documents, remember what you’re designing and writing had an original goal. To create that safe escape for people who need a break from life, to foster a community that mediates their interaction with reality through games. Now do that for everyone.

Tsukuba Muneshige, the Meta-Samurai

Dating sims defy a lot of logic. Describing them to someone who’s never heard of them would paint them as a game aimed for girls; relationship focused, sappy, a social simulator. But as every other genre and the medium of video games itself, the main demographic consists of men while women are associated with a sub-genre. Yo-Jin-Bo is an otome game, a genre visual novels and dating sims made for women to play, or at least have a female playable character. From what I can tell, these are what the gaming industry thinks women want in a dating sim as they continue to apply conventions based on a male demographic. Tuskuba Muneshige fits that bill, blending tropes of “the nice guy” and “the stalwart protector” in a typical shoujo anime motif. Your character, Sayori, is a typical high school girl who finds a magical artifact that transports her to a feudal Japan-like world, caught in a life-threatening situation and ends up guarded by an Unwanted Harem of attractive men. All of these men vie for her affection and vow with their lives to protect her; every girl’s dream, right?

Except this isn’t just an attempt to create a game, or genre, for women’s wish fulfillment, but also men’s. I chose Muneshige mostly because I felt sorry for him. He was the guy in the movies passed over because he wasn’t as exciting, or enough of a jerk. Always waiting for the main woman to come to her senses and realize she’s been in love with him the entire time. I wanted to reward that, and maybe even appreciate a little of that myself. In most dating sims, you learn to like your chosen object of affection because you spend your time and actions pleasing them, or trying to figure out how to get them to like you more. The choices of how to manage your day, what to buy, what to say, create an emotional investment that the player expects a return on. However, Yo-Jin-Bo doesn’t have this mechanic; rather, the choices and variants seem to rest mostly on whom to end up with, not how. This creates a one-sided dynamic where the player doesn’t learn to like their romance options, but the characters develop and pursue their relationship with Sayori. Muneshige’s persistence on protecting the player and controlling his sexual drive (making note of it instead of keeping it to himself) reflects the “white knight” mentality that “should” be valued in reality. Instead of learning that he has this type of personality and whether you like him, the question becomes can you reject him, knowing you shouldn’t. Sayori’s thoughts turn to what some do and don’t deserve rather than figuring out her own feelings, making the game a strange reverse otome. Since the player character doesn’t really change throughout the story, the focus is on the men’s intentions, leaving room for men players to identify more with the game than women.

Yo-Jin-Bo also accommodates men by breaking the fourth wall for comedic effect. It’s constantly reminding you that this is a game, and not to take it too seriously. All of the romance options are well aware they are in a dating sim and struggle to be with the player in the end. Each character has their own way of doing so, and Muneshige’s is telling terrible puns on subject matter that exists in contemporary reality and doesn’t exist in his world. This is what contrasts this character with the others; he’s absorbed in pleasing Sayori despite how bad he is at it while the other men call on erotic tropes from anime fandom to interact with the player. The game also enjoys putting the male characters into yaoi-tropey situations, and Muneshige is one of the few that plays up this sort of fan-service for women. His scene is purely comical and innocent in its result; it portrays him as sensitive, open-minded, and willing to please while evoking the awkwardness in trying to appear attractive to your love interest. This changes in group settings, where the respectful boy-next-door joins in on gawking and begging for varying degrees of sexual interaction. Whenever the game starts to get romantic, the tone breaks and releases the tension where heterosexual men might feel uncomfortable playing.

This game isn’t obviously marketed to men or as something of universal experience, but the predominate presence of men in visual novel and dating sim culture only allows an otome game to go so far. Yo-Jin-Bo is a hyperbole of a very small genre; there are many games where the same tropes are subtle and easy to miss if you’re not analyzing it. Maybe this game hints at changing the structure in an attempt to figure out what women want in a dating sim? On the other hand, perhaps it’s a serendipitous product that shifts the agency and game away from the player in favor of the suitors? Either way, this prompts an exploration as to how dating in games would differ for women, or if the current method is appropriate for all genders.

Arianna Bell-Essai, the Teacher’s Vixen

Ah, dating a minor. Your student even! The beauty and tragedy of visual novels is the chance to engage in relationships you wouldn’t have considered, or don’t have access to. Dangerous territory doesn’t begin to describe the experience available to us that maybe we shouldn’t, like Arianna. When you first meet her, she seems so… unremarkable. Not the prettiest, or smartest, but nice enough. Drop her in a setting where you’re her teacher who can watch all of her private interactions, and she becomes anxiety incarnate. You see, Don’t take it personally, babe, it just ain’t your story takes place in the near future, where students interact on Amie, a Facebook-like social service, where the main character, Mr. John Rook, can view the private messages between his students. Mr. Rook watches Arianna gush over him in private, spinning dreams about a romance everyone knows is a bad idea.

The rational thing to do would be to turn her down, and it’s pretty easy. It’s almost as if the game expects you to reject her advances. I felt kinda bad, but she fades into the scenery and is that secret you wish you never knew. However, it’s when you choose to date Arianna that you learn something about her, and yourself. Let’s not lie to ourselves, we’re gamers; if a choice exists, we’re going to play it. And that’s what a good game would encourage. I wanted to know, well, what would happen if I did date her. Will I be reprimanded? Is this just for naughty pictures at the end? Am I a horrible human being?

For now, yes, and I should feel terrible. I squirmed giving into the morbid curiosity of what it’s like to date a teenaged student of mine. If I didn’t feel like a complete creep, the game’s message would be lost on me. Mr. Rook is similar to Vincent from Catherine, but handled a lot more deftly. Both are immature and emphasize traits appropriated by their gender role in society. However, you learn Rook is a flawed character by actively looking through his students’ personal lives and not concentrating on his job. I couldn’t relate to Rook when he felt aroused by Arianna, and I was glad the game wasn’t forcing me to do so.

You know whom I do relate to? Arianna.

I was Arianna once. So “my” relationship with her had a particular insight. It was strange to be on the other end of the situation, to read the thoughts of the teacher instead of the student. The trope paints characters like Arianna as the predator, the seductress that grips at a man’s weakness so that he can’t control himself. Mr. Rook shows us that convention teaches us that the young, nubile vixen is the one in control, and men are hapless victims to the forbidden fruit of their sex drives. No – that’s not the whole story. I was young and unprofessional, and like Arianna, naïve enough to think I could accomplish anything I tried hard at, clandestine relationships with my superiors included. Relationships like these are romanticized, right? I thought I had to search out the older, more mature types, that I was beyond the boys my age. I thought of my teachers the same way I thought about Trowa Barton and Seifer; I was lonely and wanted to chase a fantasy. So did Arianna. She felt inexperienced, alone, and left out with most of her classmates dating each other.

This doesn’t amount to Arianna being a manipulative sex kitten, but a young, immature girl. And it takes an immature adult to date someone where there’s a conflict of interest. These teacher-student relationships show there is still a fascination with “deflowering” a girl, both in reality and in games. The game’s title says it all; it isn’t the player’s story, or Rook’s story, but students’. Both Rook and I treated them like objects to interact with, to game. He did whatever made his life the most interesting, and I assumed invading their privacy would clue me in on their intentions. Arianna fooled us both at the end when she used Amie as a part of her fantasy.

Don’t take it personally, babe… doesn’t exotify Rook’s romance with Arianna, but it does make it incredibly uncomfortable and dissonant so the player feels like something wrong is happening. While you feel better ignoring her, the story receives an added layer of depth if you explore Arianna’s character. You’ll feel like crap doing it, but few games give you morally ambiguous situations to navigate and duly punish your character for their questionable actions.

Storyline? In Skyrim? No Thanks!

When a game has many players who ignore the main quests and journey off to create their own stories, one should question the value of its embedded narrative. Does a game like Skyrim need a main storyline? The writing and character voice acting were okay and forgettable, just there for when I was in the area rather than being something of interest. I venture to say that the presence of a main story that you would find in other RPGs that don’t have such an open world is dissonant with how The Elder Scrolls series tells stories best.

There are actually multiple narrative structures in conflict with one another in Skyrim—and arguably in Morrowind and Oblivion as well. The presence of fate as a central concern grows stronger in each installment, with Skyrim sometimes going as far as to control your character’s movement for you. The concept of fate is antithetical to the type of play that The Elder Scrolls promotes, which is player-focused and controlled. However, we’re so used to convention that we expect cutscenes and epic storylines to unfold before us. We’re not used to the idea of “This is my story” unless it’s a Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress that we are experiencing. Skyrim doesn’t need a storyline for the player to experience their own.

It wasn’t until the Jarl of Windhelm told me that I couldn’t ignore the summons of the Greybeards (and I promptly did) that I realized that the only support for a “fate” determining the protagonist’s actions in the game was the existence of a main story. A player will question being determined by the storyline a lot less in a Final Fantasy because there aren’t tools to exercise freedom from the main action. But when serendipitous events such as a dragon attack or a king’s assassination frame the reasoning for your freedom, something just doesn’t feel right. The series already exists in tension with the realistic aesthetic that it attempts to adhere to, and its dependence on the player believing that they are fated to enact certain deeds undermines the spirit of the games.

Skyrim’s stronger narrative structure is found in the small details of a grand landscape. The locations and items themselves are the plot points and characters for the player to read. The focus on player initiative is also paramount to the narrative; the only way to speak of these stories from the game is to recount an anecdotal experience. The stories that my character encountered were finding out what the people of Skyrim hid in their homes, dungeons, and pockets. What’s this guy doing with a Ring of Pickpocketing? Who is experimenting on these vampires? Do I even want to know what “The Lusty Argonian Maid” is doing here? There are little stories waiting for discovery, not forced on the player through exposition or instruction. I found a witch’s letter detailing an interest in starting a coven with her daughter, a maid in a fortress constantly under attack. Those people weren’t telling the story; I created one in my mind. The narrative rests in the relationship between the environment and the items found in it, specifically placed for the player to find and create an explanation of them.

My response? Abandon quests altogether for future Elder Scrolls games. Skyrim is at a place in its evolution where the series can’t rationalize holding onto several RPG conventions for convention’s sake. There is no reason that we need to go into Skyrim expecting quests to guide us along everywhere because the point of the game is to explore with player-driven volition. I can see a Skyrim that has no quests that are explicitly given to the player but only offers rumors and clues along with different ways of obtaining them. My first time in Riverwood, I was looting the general store on the top floor and happened to overhear some siblings arguing over finding something called the golden claw. Just that knowledge should have empowered me to go find it, but Skyrim relies on the quest-giving model and its explicitly defined objectives, which are all created by developers instead of the player. This is especially problematic when you get the claw back from the bandit who holds it. Your game journal tells you to explore the barrow further. My decision to keep going into the ruins or to get the claw back to the store would be more meaningful if I came to that decision on my own, as hints were already there to do so.

I left Skyrim feeling that this was it. There’s nowhere else to progress given the trajectory the series has found for itself. It’s the same ol’ fantasy with the same ol’ combat, the same “epic” story that I have seen before. A stronger focus on helping the player tell their stories through the method that The Elder Scrolls has established would shed the necessity that binds the series in its RPG conventions. As recent RPG developers have found, the usual ways that the genre tells stories isn’t working anymore, and there’s little progress in designing something players haven’t seen before. The narrative is in the play. Let me play.

Derek Nevine, The Anti-Gamer

Derek Nevine is the star. Best player on the basketball team, hottest guy on campus, and even has the coolest theme music! We all know someone like Derek, that guy who effortlessly has the world revolve around him and gets what he wants. Even though he was just event triggers and art on my screen, I still felt a little intimidated by him. I was skeptical when he resorted to flattery so quickly and asked me out. Or asked the protagonist, Merui; it’s difficult to guess whose emotions are really involved in the romantic parts of visual novels. However, there is one thing that is clear from the design of the game:

You’re supposed to hate him.

He’s supposed to awaken those awkward feelings of inferiority and ineptitude gamers feel from those socially successful in high school, or any environment we’re forced to be social in. Merui’s other potential lovers sneer at him and his reputation, warning you of his false appearances and playboy attitude. Gaining his affection reinforces the stereotype of hyperbolized femininity: you must buy Merui the sexy outfits at the store, ignore her studies in favor of watching TV and going to the mall, and make Merui play hard to get to retain his interest. The real sting comes at the end when you find out he’s Alistair, a jerk who trolls Merui in the MMO all the characters play. He’s the title character, and the only reason there’s a story to play. He gets to be a gamer AND the popular guy at school? Something doesn’t feel right!

While it’s unsettling to see someone like him is a gamer too, it makes sense that he’s representative of the kind of people we don’t like online. I wasn’t surprised when the bonus scene revealed he was the least liked datable character in fan polls. If the player didn’t get Merui’s stats just right and played a perfect game to get Derek’s special ending, he reveals his trick and dumps them. This is unlike the other characters who have been looking out for Merui, trying to protect her the entire game and will date her indefinitely. She is punished for pursing the popular guy and ignoring the advances of her fellow nerds.

Confession time: Derek was my favorite.

Yes, yes, he’s a total ass and I should have known better, but that’s what I like about his character. He felt the most human because he was the most complicated. Unlike the other characters, he doesn’t force Merui to drudge through his baggage or suffer through insults until he sees the light and falls in love. What the player might not catch when romancing Derek is how he actually listens to Merui: when Merui wants to pay for her own ice cream, she damn well does. She tells him to stop acting like the white knight, because she can walk on her own feet, thanks. There is an equity that is missing in the other relationships. My experience with Derek made me feel that is was okay to indulge in stereotypically feminine activities, that splurging my lunch money on a hot dress doesn’t make me a bad person, and it doesn’t make him a bad person either.

While I found the process of attaining his affections extremely problematic, they also existed in lesser degrees for the other boys. All the guys preferred you to wear certain clothes, Derek just happened to like the typical expensive and sexy ones. On a game design level, all of your love interests are rather similar, and this informs our interpretation of Merui’s romantic situation. After making the right choices, you find out that Derek uses games as an escape as well. His problems seem trite to the underdog characters, but so real to him that he needs games to vent. Just like everyone else. Merui’s predicament with attracting these guys reflects women gamers’ tightrope act of managing their presence in the gaming community. Women who appear to spend too much time on their appearance and stereotypically feminine activities are shamed unless they are doing it in a geek-appropriate manner. Dress as nice as you are smart. Act as a defenseless damsel as much as you shoot zombies.

What interests me the most is how easy it is to miss this. It’s doesn’t feel good at all to win Derek’s affection, especially when you know he’s Alistair. The gamer in me to see all the possible endings defied what felt right by going through Derek’s romance, but his “perfect” ending really tied things into perspective. Besides the gag-worthy amount of sap inherent to visual novels, these simulated relationships teach us something about ourselves. Dating sim games for men far outnumber the ones for women, offering rare glimpses of our side of the affair. Even rarer is the honesty from an experience of a woman gamer, and Re: Alistair++ provides a starting point for that conversation.

Girl with a Heart of Review

There is something to how a game describes itself. A “2-D interactive narrative” straddles the ‘is this a game or not?’ fence, encouraging the player (reader? participant?) to develop their ideas about both. I see Bent Spoon Games’ Girl with a Heart of within the history of games drawing upon the aesthetic and mechanics of 90s adventure games. It mixes nostalgia with trope flipping, dialogue trees, fetch quests, a world governed by the elements made fresh by practicing philosophy and describing a world where darkness isn’t evil. As well, there aren’t many games that you play as a young girl in a mature situation. Girl with a Heart of is simple and honest in its intent to be engaging, with a title that acknowledges your role in completing it. The aesthetics follow this mentality: brief music pieces accompany characters and scenery changes as if recalling a memory, and visual details highlight the verisimilitude of this fantasy location.

The contention that exists between the character dramas and the exercise of philosophical rationality sets this adventure apart from others. Girl with a Heart of places the player in a crisis similar to many other games, but provides choices different in nature. Typically, a player would be thinking about which weapons and abilities to fight and enemy with or the nuances of strategy in battle. The progression of Girl with a Heart of doesn’t focus on the combat that you do prepare for, but what values you take to save the world. The player learns a few lessons in rationality, boiling decisions down to numbers, but also interacts with a cast of characters that inspire you with their personal problems. Reinforced by separating the experience into days, the player watches the progression of the mental states of those around them. Struggling with morals is the main part of the game, and the ending of your quest rests on what moral decision you arrive at. While there does seem to be a ‘right’ answer, Girl with a Heart of finds meaning in the process of deciding what to do, not necessarily in choice itself.

This leads to my main criticism of Girl with the Heart of. While the game had me question myself, it handled choices much like mainstream games. Playing through multiple times to get different endings, I found many choices yielded very similar results. It would work if the nuances built upon each other, but ultimately the characters came to the same conclusions and acted the same way. I feel if a game provides a player with choices, there should be meaning behind the results that necessitate those choices. I didn’t find extra perspective playing the game multiple times, much like other games, and felt I should be rewarded with discovering new things by taking a different path from my prior playthroughs. The choices at the end are the most important because they influence what kind of ending the player gets more than anything else does. Furthermore, these endings are anti-climatic text explanations of your protagonist’s future that offer little incentive to play another round.

Interpreting Girl with a Heart of as a game or just an interactive narrative can complicate things. It does have some stats, fighting sequences, and the usual trappings of a certain niche of games, but I’m not sure what the goal was other than to complete the story. This goes for all games that associate the success state with the story—because you can say the same for other mediums. For books and movies, the goal is to finish them. While you do a lot more in adventure games and RPGs, the success state is the same. Girl with a Heart of exposes this complication without answering for it. It relies on the conventions of story heavy video game genres, but doesn’t address why those genres are much less of a force in contemporary gaming than they were in the 90s. There’s research, talk, and general musings on how to involve narrative elements through interactivity that remain unused, so I wonder why Bent Spoon Games chose such a retro method to explore the complex issue that it wants to handle.

In a time of multiple remakes of the same game and HD updates to classics, it’s nice to have a contemporary example of what we loved about in an era that we probably won’t recreate. However, the game doesn’t reflect on the fall of the adventure genre and suffers from the same issues as previous titles of this sort. Girl with a Heart of ponders what an interactive narrative is as opposed to a game and how to exercise philosophy no matter what medium it is, but it forgets that we’ve moved on from the tools it currently uses.

On Men’s Sexualization in Video Games

Sexuality in games is a contentious topic. Few see video games as open or mature enough to express ideas and create experiences concerning sexuality for players to explore. It’s also rarely pleasant to talk about the topic, usually any arguments settle on the accusation of games as serving as wish fulfillment for heterosexual men and the more vocal of said demographic replying with a “So what?” What’s often overlooked is the possibility of the sexualization of men, as if it’s not an option.

My title is misleading; games don’t usually sexualize men. As frequently suggested when discussing the Male Gaze theory in film studies and neatly tied into relevancy for our purposes by Kate Cox in “The Gamer’s Gaze,” men are not sexualized in most media (“The Gamer Gaze, part 1”, Your Critic is in Another Castle, 20 June 2011). Because there is a large presence of the heterosexual man’s identity in the development process and in gaming’s audience, the perceived “neutral” vision of game design takes on the influence of the socially appropriate interests specific to straight men. The lack of men’s sexualization is a product of the average straight guy’s impulse to avoid appearing or feeling gay. Men have a fig leaf of sorts when it comes to camera work and character design, while women get more attention and exposure. What sexual bits we do see are “safe” for heterosexual men to view without feeling like they’re watching something “gay,” such as muscular arms or exposed torsos. A common counter-argument concerns the issue of men’s impossible body image in games, which is definitely important, but mostly a different discussion to tackle. The aesthetic of muscles denote strength, agency, and power for the assumed male player to relate to, while emphasis on T&A when viewing women only serves as fan-service. Both rely on problematic ideals, but there is still a power relation present in this representation that favors men.

There are a couple of games that are often cited as examples of sexualizing men, namely Masaya’s Cho Aniki and Namco Bandai Games’s Muscle March. Both games have muscular men in barely any clothing, often viewed in risqué, homoerotic poses. While sexualization is afoot in these titles, these games don’t violate the Gamer Gaze because the men presented in the games are also presented through a completely absurd aesthetic. The design of the game creates a silly context that the player doesn’t take seriously; instead, they laugh at the men and see the nudity as off-the-wall humor. These games don’t give the player room to fantasize or a roving eye to admire the characters’ bodies.

What we consider sexual body parts and how we cover or expose them in media helps us figure out how to depict sexualized men. Women’s breasts are seen as sexual in many cultures (to varying degrees), and along with that, come laws forbidding women from exposing them in public. If men’s chests and arms evoked the same kind of sexual focus, they would find themselves in a similar situation. We should note, however, that it is legal and often expected that women partially expose their breasts despite their sexual connotation, effectively always leaving themselves on display. This is the launching point for women’s sexualization in general media by emphasizing what is illegal/improper to show in public without crossing a line. Because the only area that is taboo on men is below the belt, men’s chests and arms don’t threaten anyone’s sexuality. Sexualizing men would involve drawing focus and emphasis to their goods in a manner similar to how we currently do with women: by featuring them in low-rise pants and underwear, tight jeans to emphasis their bulge and butt shape, etc. Because it violates the prevailing Male Gaze ingrained in all of us, this can seem like an uncomfortable idea. However, media geared towards gay men already uses and exploits this technique. Because men’s sexualization primarily appears in a homoerotic context, it’s not surprise why it’s relatively absent in games.

While clothing is a large part of women’s sexualization in games, the camera plays a role by directing the player’s attention to their bodies. Cox provides a video of Madison’s shower scene in Heavy Rain, in which the camera “checks her out” by gliding up and down to view the different angles of her body. Compare this scene to an earlier one when a fellow protagonist, Ethan, takes a shower as well. This scene is shorter, and the movement is more about avoiding looking at him directly than checking him out. The camera provides a few glimpses of his chest and backside, but you feel that you’re watching something that you shouldn’t be rather than experiencing any form of interest or arousal. Examples like these link the cinematography of games (and arguably all media) to pornography, a genre that the distilled Male Gaze calls home. The player crosses into something pornographic when watching Madison but into something awkward when seeing Ethan. However, the further away (and more aware) that a player is from the straight male identity, the more clearly these moments stand out. Because pornography typically has straight male consumption in mind, its politics leak into games by highlighting how they look at women and other men in porn. We would have to look to pornography made for women and gay men and apply how the camera looks at the performers for a holistic approach to sexualizing characters.

There is resistance to sexualizing anyone, but the true issue lies in who sexualized characters are for and how often this happens. In essence, recognizing how we sexualize people equips us with tools to even out the playing field, creating more women who aren’t on screen for a man’s viewing pleasure and allowing players to enjoy the male figure every once in a while. Coupled with an awareness of body image politics and encouraging more character models that stray from Aphrodite and the Adonis, video games can become a more egalitarian medium for expression.

Why I Don’t Feel Welcome at Kotaku

Tamagotchi. Remember those?

They became popular when I was in 4th grade. Sometimes my mother took me to a nearby Target to pick a toy- she told me it was for good grades, but I knew it was because I got bullied often at school. One of these times, I raced to find a Tamagotchi, as all of my friends were getting them. I liked the idea of something with me at all times, to take care of it and make me feel like something needed me.

And there it was, a whole wall of glittering purple eggs. I remember that exact, uncreative display panel to this day, and my mother stopping me. She told me to wait, that my aunt wanted to get that for my birthday when she visited. I protested, but the answer was the same: be patient, you’ll get it soon enough. We went a week later and all of them were gone, sold out from every toy store in our area. For some reason that memory is lodged in my brain. I brought it up to my mother recently, but she’s forgotten.

The stray times I visit Kotaku, it’s like I’m seeing an empty panel that the reward for my sitting, smiling, and internalizing should be. I was supposed to find somewhere to escape to, maybe even a place that needed me a little. You told me to wait, and I did. Where’s my Tamagotchi?

There is only a wrong way to go about this. So let’s just get to why I’m here:

Me too.

I’m part of the gaming community, but Kotaku doesn’t see me as a gamer. No, instead I’m a multi-racial transgender who-knows-sexual possibly-feminist woman gamer. A boogie monster. Someone who uses too many –isms and –ists in their daily tweets to actually enjoy anything. I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone ask what it’s like to be me in this pocket of society.

You know that invisible ink in detective movies? If you could get an internet lighter, you’d find “This site is for heterosexual white American men gamers.” Kotaku will never include me until it’s figured out that “gamers” is skewed to one identity and asks me to deal with that. No. Me too.

Gamer culture isn’t Kotaku’s fault. That skewing Japan as a land of weirdoes is humorous. That gamers like to look at galleries made up of T&A shots of women in cosplay. So what if someone like me doesn’t fit in with typical gamers? The editors are just providing what gamers want, how is that a bad thing? Are you using that lighter?

When I wasn’t bullied as a child, I was creating games. My favorite thing to do was to give my friends superpowers based on their personalities. When we played, they were empowered to be themselves. It was always fun because each one of us mattered. I mattered. Ever since, I knew I wanted to be involved with games, maybe even make them. I contemplate what I would say to kid-me now that I figured out what a gamer is. What kind of treatment I would receive if I ever got into the industry. Would it be more humane to convince my past self I didn’t actually matter?

I’ve turned away from Kotaku because it doesn’t like my answers. There’s a reason I can’t find you bountiful resources of sexually liberated cosplayers not posing for straight guys. Why there’s a scant amount of criticism of manchild culture. How the LGBT community is still the elephant in the room. We haven’t thought of what a gamer community that assumes diversity instead of homophobic adolescent dudes looks like. There are plenty of stats of who the “average” gamer is, what the actual demographics are. However, the image in our mind hasn’t changed in decades.

There’s a taboo against saying that. Me too. It’s radical liberal talk, an attempt to kill everyone’s fun. The common denominator response is “Why won’t you just go somewhere else?” I usually do. This attitude polarizes the community between large, mean-spirited marches of “the old guard” and a few impenetrable bastions of rigid but progressive niche philosophies. I’ve run to places like The Border House because “me too” isn’t deliberated upon, it’s the law. I turn away because Kotaku doesn’t ask me “Why are you leaving?”

Me too.

I’ve stared at those two words and deleted them often enough that I forget what they mean. I can’t say those words here without preparing myself for the sling-fest, and some days I just can’t summon the strength. This is after I go through my life dealing with crap society presents me just because I exist. And you know what sucks? That many times, my words are shrugged off, or given the fatal “I’ll think about it.” That isn’t inclusivity. Being benign doesn’t help. Letting commenters spew toxic isn’t inviting. Looking to defend yourselves doesn’t solve anything when it’s so obvious there’s a problem. I’m not looking to shame you, I just want to set things right.

Must I be a martyr? Must you be a machine? Are our only choices to become symbols and lose our humanity? Do you understand what you’re asking of me when you tell me to be patient? Do you know how long I’ve been waiting?

The games I play now won’t let me be myself. No game dares to feature a transgender character that isn’t on the wrong end of a joke. Sometimes I pretend that my party members know, but are too scared to ask. God, I don’t even know if most actual people know what it means to be transgender. Or multi-racial. Or anything other than what they are. I don’t know if they know it’s okay to ask. Then maybe we could figure out what a gamer really is. Halfway isn’t enough, but I will accompany you on the journey.

I wish Kotaku would tell me “We don’t want you to go away.” You’ll have to scroll down a bit to see if that comes true.

Me too.

Speaking in Accents and the American Ethnocentrism in Video Games

Voice acting has become a staple in gaming that helps flesh out characters and setting. Abandoning the text-box provided a more intimate way for the game to connect to the player by expressing emotion and ideas in a way that they are more familiar with. The quality of voice acting in games is, of course, an area of contention, but when done properly, it adds brushstrokes to the aesthetics of the game. This is especially true for settings that benefit from characters having accents to imply nationality. The cultural politics that voice acting implies, however, often escape analysis. The default English accent is General American and deviations from this tap into a subtext that assumes an American player. How accents communicate information to the player exposes the subliminal effects of American ethnocentrism.

Looking at the voices chosen for the later Final Fantasy games reveal how conscious the video game industry is in having voiceover resonate with American players. There is critique about American culture in the very idea in how a foreign country would choose to best translate their characters. Exotification of both real-world cultures and in-game characters surfaces through the series’ presentation of accents. Final Fantasy XII and XIII use accents to imply regional differences rather than what normally would, the face. In Final Fantasy XII, most of the party has a General American accent, with florid vocabulary to make the setting reminiscent of “olde” times in Europe. This associates the American accent with the player, assumed as the default. Fran is the exception, but she is so in many respects: she’s the only non-human character in the party, the only non-white character, and also the most sexualized. Her odd Bjork-esque accent adds to her exotic characterization, though one could make a strong argument that Fran has the least personality of all of the party members in the game. With the Empire sporting England’s Received Pronunciation accent and while Rozzaria’s Al-Cid speaks with a Spanish one to match his exaggerated mannerisms, the player’s experience adds context to the notion that the politics of foreign countries decide the fate of their own if that player is American. This also takes place in Final Fantasy XIII, in which Fang and Vanille have Australian accents to designate their nationality, while Americans voice the rest of the cast. Along with their tribal inspired clothing and the uncultivated depiction of their home world, the Australian accent gives the American (and possibly other) players the subtext of the characters being wild and exotic. In a game that trumpets the theme of protecting the homeland from foreigners, the emphasized difference between the American- and Australian-voiced characters adds to the drama of the situation. This is absent for those who share the same stereotypical views that the US has about other cultures.

The Dragon Age series reappropriates accent dynamics for the assumed American player. Taking place in a fantasy setting, the dominant accent is the English Received Pronunciation. With this as the default, the other accents gain meaning through their interaction with the English: the Dalish speaking with Welsh accents, Orlesians are French, and Antivans Spanish. The treatment of these groups coincides with the stereotyping of their accents rather than their own in-game culture. This is especially true of Orlesians, as their voice acting is sometimes incomprehensible and usually humorous in its deprecating manner. What is surprising is the usage of American accents. City elves, dwarves, and the Qunari do not represent the default. Instead, American accents are a neutral sound because there doesn’t need to be any differentiation within these groups. This makes the American accent invisible so the player can focus on something other than their regional heritage. It uncovers what the developers wanted the audience to focus on with these groups: the classism of the dwarves, the absolute philosophical theocracy in Qunari culture, and how the city elves deal with racism (however there is little commentary on how humans are casually discriminatory towards them). In the cases of the humans and the Dalish, their regional differences are a core part of their story, so they receive European accents to illustrate their relationship to one another. Logically, American accents should sound out of place, as the continent remained undiscovered in the medieval Europe setting the series calls upon as its influence, but they actually do not as American accents are now what players in general have grown accustomed to as the default for video games.

The accents found in games don’t merely represent other people outside of the US, though but also groups within the country. Starcraft and games that use the “space marine aesthetic” often use American Southern accents to depict their characters, relying on many stereotypes of the South as unrefined and conservative. It’s no accident the game provides supplementary US Civil War Confederacy imagery to frame the context of their characters. Southern accents allow the player to understand the military of the future by having them relate to the usual trash-talking and attitudes assumed to be emblematic of those in the US’ current one. Instead of exploring the complexities of a Southern identity, the Starcraft series shows Southerners as unwanted and expendable. Players overlook this because the marines are like the outspoken bumpkins that American society at large has come to laugh at without reprimand. The player will rarely find wise, respected characters with Southern accents in their games; the General American accent or one of the many Northeastern ones allow for that role.

Realizing that development teams assume an American player as their audience can help diversify the setting and cast in video games. Accents can be more than flavor for a game’s aesthetics but also communicate cultural subtext that adds to the overall meaning of the game. Currently, games rely on an American perspective for characterization in a medium that is experienced internationally, and it’s time to question why this is. And as a community, move games into more of a shared global space.

An Open Letter to Kotaku’s Joel Johnson

I just finished reading your article on Kotaku, “The Equal Opportunity Perversion of Kotaku,” a lengthier response than the one you gave me previously. In case you don’t recognize me, we had a conversation on Twitter about Dan Bruno’s recanting of his praise for the progressive development of the site. Your last paragraph originated from our discussion, and because you decided to take it to a public forum, I figured I would as well.

There is a reason I’m posting this at The Border House. A large part of our readership feels alienated by the content produced on Kotaku and deserves to have access to a dialogue with you that doesn’t require bearing the hostility your site is known for. To be fair, most gaming websites are hostile towards those who point out diversity related issues, and it’s easy to criticize you and Kotaku because you seem to know better. It’s a sucky position to be in, I empathize.

I remember the post that made me unsubscribe from Kotaku, before the good stuff started to roll in. Another gallery of naked women covered in video game accessories. It wasn’t because that post was SO offensive to me, but because I was TIRED of seeing articles like that over and over again. Seeing sexualized women isn’t bothersome to me unless I’m in a space that assumes I’m a heterosexual man, which is very, very often. Almost always when I check out my gaming sites.

What I am hopeful about is your willingness to discuss this issue. If there is something I’ve promised to my editors, it is a proactive outlook on solving the issues multiple identities have in the gaming community. However, I found both our conversation and your article little more than hand waving the issue, trying to be sympathetic while not actually committing to act upon the ideals you say to have.

Let me be clear, to both you and readers at The Border House: I don’t think censorship is a solution, I don’t think Kotaku has a civic responsibility if it doesn’t want one, and I’m completely fine with the expression of sexuality. What is problematic is the dissonance between what you describe as your ideals. The thing is, it’s actually NOT okay to have your cake and eat it too when it’s hypocritical to do as such. If you know that you’re adding to the misogyny and homophobia of a community that is extremely primed for it, how is that okay? You recognize that the columns about Japan rely on the “Asians are WEIRD” trope that is unhealthy, but you’re fine with it because it’s funny. The Male Gaze is mentioned and dismissed in the same breath, showing that you are aware it exists yet neglect to apply it to the kind of content Kotaku produces to explain why minority groups are turned off by the site. I don’t think you or any other writers are deliberately trying to offend anyone, but the intent to be generally open-minded to diversity doesn’t mean what actually happens is as well. How do you reconcile this? How do you tell people reading this at The Border House things are fine when you understand what’s going on is contradictory to what you know should be?

And what stung, both in our conversation and your article, was how you absolved yourself and Kotaku from doing anything by passing the buck to those who feel marginalized. Instead of aiming to produce a staff culture that shows their awareness and support for diversity issues through their content, you leave it up to those who feel unsatisfied to create that content for Kotaku. I don’t know how this is reasonable in any way. It sounds like Kotaku’s staff doesn’t want to do anything different, but still wish to come off as the good guys. That is having your cake and eating it, which is definitely not okay.

The problem is that Kotaku isn’t “equal opportunity” anything. You acknowledge that your staff tends to write towards one demographic and looks for content that falls into stereotypical expectations for what you’d find on a gaming. It’s the easiest thing to do, and doesn’t take nearly as much thinking as keeping in mind that there are more than the assumed immature young straight guy to pander for. That’s not equal opportunity. Equal opportunity would mean there is as much of a chance to produce content appealing for heterosexual men as it is for everyone else. And that’s not even recognizing the different expressions of sexuality for straight guys, just the mainstream one valorized by gaming sites such as Kotaku.

You misinterpreted me before; I don’t want to tag you with responsibility you didn’t agree to. However, it would show that you are a decent person when you are responsible for your own words and actions. If you “unabashedly” want to promote the voices and presence of minority identities in your community, then unabashedly do so. It’s fine if you don’t want to, but just say that.

I hope you can write back to me about this, and involve as many people as you can in this conversation. I would like to subscribe to Kotaku again, especially if more diversity-aware content becomes available. No ill will, just honesty with a wish for genuine, proactive change.

~Mattie