The only “walking simulator” I had played and liked before Gone Home for this class was What Remains of Edith Finch (which was phenomenal). It was always hard for that genre to impress me, and Mrs. Finch was the first to show me that the storytelling potential of this genre was immense. At first, Gone Home did not impress me. I felt like it was thoroughly average and didn’t give it much more thought. Then I read this article, titled On Gone Home by Merrit Kopas. It was interesting to see such a different perspective on the game and it brought light to certain things that I was ignorant about. Now I see this game in a slightly different manner. I still don’t personally love this game and don’t think I ever will, since the content in it is something that I simply do not connect with. However, I now recognize just how important this is to people who relate with these issues. To me, Gone Home was just an average story about adolescence and coming of age at first. To the people that felt connected to it, however, it was something far greater than I could understand.

Even with this, the one part of Gone Home that I was able to relate to was the nostalgia and a desire to go back to the past. This part of the game is undeniably brilliant. You play as an older college student who is returning to home from her studies. While wandering around the house, you see all these things reminiscent of a person growing up. It creates a sense of longing. For both innocence and the past. To see someone catalog their experiences with their first love, writing their own stupid short stories, making their own awful grunge knock off music, etc.. Despite the rather adolescent themes present in the game, it does feel like a game that is made moreso for people in their 20’s. It seems like it is meant to be a flashback for these people who are older in their age. Looking at two people who grew up in the same household through at two different points in time.

This relates to the paragraph at the end of the article. “I don’t want to be Katie anymore. I want to be Sam. I want to be present in my youth.” I never realized exactly how much my childhood represented until I looked back one day and realized it was suddenly over. No more sitting around for 8 hours a day playing World of Warcraft or League of Legends. I just woke up one day to find that I had changed, and the things I had wanted before weren’t working for me anymore. I still find pieces of my past, such as an old journal I would write random stuff in, around the house from time to time when cleaning up. That was the feeling Gone Home invoked for me.

I really don’t have a specific thing to point out with this. It’s just some random thoughts I threw down.

Mohammad Farraj

DMS 448

Blog Post

Growing up, the idea of sexual orientation within video games was not brought to light until game developers was faced with criticism from the gaming community. The lack of representation in sexualities that aren’t heterosexual related made true gamers within the LBTGQ demand more from the same gaming companies that they invest in. Reflecting to previous classroom discussions, in which the break down of harassment and cyber bullying of LBTGQ streamers and gamers. Writers such as Brianna Dym, Jed Brubaker, Casey Fiesler and Merritt Kopas, explore this issue in their writings. Therefore, with the support of the gaming community, game developers will invest the time to accurately represent both the identity of a member of the LBTGQ community and life.

             Game developers in the game “Gone Home” have received feedback from the gaming community and managed to incorporate the internal struggles of an individual who is learning more about her own sexual preference. In the game itself, the player experiences an ominous and uneasy feeling while experiencing the game. In terms of the game mechanics, players use the mouse to look around and interact with their environment. On the same note of environment, based off of previous let’s play from classroom discussions, the game sets the ominous tone/feeling  like previously stated. Luckily, Kopas breaks this down as well as “expectations” of a character who is depicted as a member of the LBTGQ community. Kopas states how as a player, “you’re kind of on edge because the lights are flickering and every once in a while the house creaks in the storm and you don’t know what’s going to come first, the beginnings of a lesbian tragedy suicide sequence or something jumping out at you from a dark corner” (pg. 146 Kopas). What this shows is that, expectations of a jump scare, acts of violence or fear inflicting images are in place due to the score and overall setting of the game. When in actuality (based off of the in class gameplay), the player just searches a big empty house for clues and reveals the thoughts in her head. This is key to recognize because it breaks the social expectation of a tragic death of a member of a LBTGQ community who is in her teenage/adolescent years. Therefore, thanks to members of the gaming community such as Kopas, game developers can accurately represent members within the LBTGQ community in video games.

            Members of the gaming community voice their concern of characters within games not being represented equally. In the text, “They’re all trans Sharon: Authoring Gender in Video Game Fan Fiction” by Brianna Dym, Jed Brubaker, Casey Fiesler, states how the terminology of “queer” doesn’t equally benefit or even represent individual identities that are queer. In the text, the writers state, “does not benefit all queer identities equally… in society, the use of “queer” to refer to non-straight sexualities and non-cisgender identities…to clarify, we need to distinguish between the two as “queer sexualities” and “non-cisgender identities” — the former represented more often within games” (they’re all trans sharon: Authoring Gender in Video Game Fan Fiction, 2018). What this shows is that, in video games, the identities of queer character are shown to be treated and portrayed unequally. To prove this even further, this quote proves that society needs to understand the individuals who believe their physical bodies doesn’t match their sexuality and be represented more accurately. None the less, members of the gaming community have voiced their concerns and provided feedback for gaming companies to work off of.

                                                            Work Cited Page

Dym, Brianna, et al. “Game Studies.” Game Studies – “Theyre All Trans Sharon”: Authoring Gender in Video Game Fan Fiction, gamestudies.org/1803/articles/brubaker_dym_fiesler.

Kopas, Merritt. On Gone Home.

This week’s class was about the representation of the trans experience in video games.  Further than that, this week surrounded the idea of underrepresentation in its many forms.  It is extremely disappointing that the LGBTQIA community is often overlooked in video games.  In many cases, the representation of that community is vastly inaccurate and disrespectful.  Within the article “’They’re all trans Sharon’: Authoring Gender in Video Game Fan Fiction” by Brianna Dym, Jed Brubaker, and Casey Fiesler, it is said that “Underrepresented fans of media, such as women, members of the LGBTQIA community, and other marginalized people use fan fiction (new narratives constructed from elements of existing media) to critique and recraft their representation in media” (Dym, Brubaker, Fiesler). Before this week, I haven’t really cared much for fan fiction or have taken it too seriously. I see now that fan fiction can be one of the best ways to express different experiences, point of views, and accurate representations of communities. This is because content is being created by those who are being represented in these fan fictions.  It is a way of spreading and sharing new creative ideas and experiences with others.

Much like the LGBTQIA community, those with mental illness are also grossly misrepresented and stereotyped in video games.  For my research project, I am focusing on the game Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. The main character is a woman warrior who has psychosis.  While doing my research I found many cases in which mental illness was seen as something evil.  Words to describe characters in video games who had some form of mental illness were “crazy, dysfunctional, evil, insane” etc.  In many video games that have mental illness, it is often associated with the bad guys or unimportant “crazy” encounters with characters that aren’t important to the story. Within past classes we have talked about how the LGBTQIA falls victim to the same representation in games. Where they are too seen as the “bad” guys.

These representations are all too common and make games such as Gone Home stand out.  One of the positive things about the game is that it doesn’t have a bad ending. It is relatable for those who are aren’t a part of the LGBTQIA community also.  I think that this ties into the reason why fan fiction is so important.  It gives people the change to write the happier endings for themselves.  With certain fan fiction being seen by others, it can encourage people to be more comfortable with who they are because they have more things they can relate to.  People wouldn’t have to stay subject to those gross misrepresentations of their community by people who don’t take the time to understand it.  This stands for gender, disability, weight, illness.

Works Cited

Dym, Brianna, et al. “‘Theyre All Trans Sharon’: Authoring Gender in Video Game Fan Fiction.” Game Studies, 2018.

 

This week in Games, Gender and Culture, we spent the week focusing on our individual projects. This week I got familiar with the app called Tabletop Simulator on Steam. Eli, my partner for the project, and I  spent a few hours in Virtual Reality planning out our game in the Sandbox Simulator for Table Top games. When we first began, things were a little hard to understand, but after some work we figured out how to import our own games and create a game within a game. The idea of working in Virtual Reality has tantalized me for a long time and I have been dying to try and do something collaboratively in Virtual Reality. When I picked up the game, the first thing I did was play chess with someone else, just to get a feel for the controls. It was impressive. Within the game there are many preset boards which you can use to create your own game, and this can be done both on desktop and in VR. The first thing Eli and I discussed about our project was the way that we would present our game board, which we hoped to make multi-layered, and we had difficulty figuring this out in VR. In the coming weeks we hope to import our own game board model into the game with photoshop, and continue trying to work out how this game will look. 

But for now I will discuss my immersive experience. There were a variety of games to play in Tabletop Simulators, from Dungeons and Dragons to Chutes and Ladders, and when I went into the list of servers I also noticed that creating your own game was not uncommon amongst the community. Most people seemed to have private servers in which they would make games for the vast majority of people to play and try out, making this game a very portable asset for game design in the future, maybe if only for table top games and less for digitally intensive games.

According to Steam, there is a massive assortment of players who are creating content for Tabletop Simulator, which makes having assets easier to manage. This not only helps us keep track of our things better, but also makes the mess to deal with after playing the game much easier to handle. Last year in Game Design Eli and I worked on a project with many different assets that had many different categories, which made keeping everything in the right spot difficult to do, but in Tabletop Simulator this entire problem is solved with a 3D cut and paste mechanism that makes keeping the game organized a breeze.

This program ended up being one of the biggest blessings for me and Eli during this quarantine, as much of the back end of our logistics about the game were complete, but we had no place to collaborate and create. Having the time to figure this out helped us land on Tabletop Simulator to write our program in. I’m glad that we were able to find it because it will make it easier to do our project. 

A part of living is finding out who we are. Our personality, interests, and goals eventually come to define us — but how much of ‘us’ results from social perceptions? Bound within the constructs of our society, it seems that the freedom to choose then becomes questionable and full of constraints.

The game Dys4ia displays this idea built from the author’s experience with gender dysphoria and hormone replacement therapy. She wanted to relay her personal journey moving forward as a trans person and, most importantly, how societal perceptions influenced her. Through a series of symbolic mini-games, she reveals her struggles in transforming to a person she came to be.

At first glance, the use of retro bright colors and pixelated art is apparent; it seems to illustrate a period of time the author felt was difficult and overwhelmed with emotions. She confides this with four simple levels of game play. The first describing embarrassment with her appearance: (1) Using a Brick Breaker layout, she shows that she has to constantly defend herself from feminists rejecting the author’s gender (2) Correct others addressing her with the masculine pronoun (3) Get cut by razors while shaving her mustache and (4) Secretly make her way through the Women’s bathroom stalls like a spy. Everything was dark and cloudy to her, until she realized she should go on hormones.

This brings us to the next level, where some amount of frustration is shown. The first mini-game encountered is the search for a ‘good’ clinic. Using a magnifying class, the player will move it around the circle of clinics until a flashing purple on one clinic indicates that it is the correct one. This is followed by the next mini-game, in which she demonstrates the difference between the clinic she chose and the others. She does this so that the player understands what it is like to go for a medical review and not feel insulted by having her gender questioned all the time.

However, this doesn’t mean that everything will go as smoothly. Now she must battle between the prescriptions she has to take and the toll it takes on her body. The sensitivity, mood swings, and physical changes all made her feel strange and alien-like. But she had a girlfriend and family to support her, and after awhile things seemed to be getting better. She felt like she could be addressed as a female and her confidence out shined the negativity of her haters. She could finally be ‘pink’ as symbolized in the last level.

By choosing a game as an outlet rather than a book, the author is able to converse her thoughts in a way that can be easily visualized and understood. She did not need an avatar with a face or clothes, because we often have stereotypes of what a trans person would look like and we don’t want to focus on the person them self but their experiences. As a result, her mannerism in which she expresses her feelings empathizes with the player no matter which gender they identify with.

In class we played through Dys4ia. It focused on a character’s experience with gender dysmorphia and the struggles throughout transitioning. Interestingly, the game never shows the character with a face. It allows the audience to empathize better as the character has no inherent race or body. Sometimes the character is a shield or sometimes a strange blob, which we play through many minigames with. The uniqueness of this game is that it is inclusive and also quite aged in a sense. The old school feel is interesting and allows the previously mentioned blob to be easily implemented because the game doesn’t have the normal extremely detailed graphics or style that is used today. The topic of diversity transitions well with the article from class.  “they’re all trans sharon” talks about minorities and their use of fanfictions to re-express themselves into video games. Although we can find games like Dys4ia, which directly displays a minority, many modern games don’t include minorities as protagonists nor do they create intensely diverse environments. Normally, the protagonist is the generic straight male. 

So, people find new ways to represent themselves within those games. I’m familiar with Undertale and its very expressive community, where there are side characters who are already lesbian and are written about quite often. This is mostly in the realm of shipping, which is seen in more than just games. In shows like Doctor Who, Sherlock and Supernatural, it is common to see male characters paired with each other, regardless of their actual sexuality. Its hard to tell though if this is just fetishizing gay men or lesbian women. I´ve never heard of men publicly writing stories of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson together. It’s obvious that many women like to combine male characters. In the same way, men like to put two female characters in a relationship together. Would this be actually inclusive or are we just creating a new problem? It’s not new news that people enjoy drama and romance. If someone likes men, why wouldn’t they want to see their favorite male characters together in a romance? “Fan fiction provides an opportunity to critique a game by rewriting or expanding on its different elements (Dym, Brubaker, Fiesler).” This is the positive way to look at it, but then again everything might have some sort of drawback. Another thing to note is the writers uses of tags to critique the failing of companies to include more diverse characters. Many tags focus on the idea that everyone in the world is trans or some specific sexuality or characteristic that is not within societal norms. This is definitely more in the realm of what the article had in mind, but it is essential to note that not all fanfictions are overall positive.

In general, Dys4ia is the example of a game without the stereotypical video game protagonist. It is a step above fanfiction. However, the fanfiction is capable of expressing personal experiences like Dys4ia. It does not just fight for equality. It has some negatives as characters are paired for fetishing and not due to diversity. However, how does one pinpoint a fetish versus diversity? It is a topic I hope to understand more about.

Work Cited

“Game Studies.” Game Studies – “They’re All Trans Sharon”: Authoring Gender in Video Game Fan Fiction, gamestudies.org/1803/articles/brubaker_dym_fiesler.

Although I do not have too many experiences with playing trans games, I do know that there are many people who have fought really hard for the representation surrounding these games. For week nine of this course, we read a piece from Queer Game Studies titled, “On Gone Home”, by Merritt Kopas. Reading this piece made me remember when we played Gone Home in class. As opposed to the game, I think that this article gives an in-depth analysis about the struggles the trans group faces when it comes to being represented appropriately in games.

First off, one aspect of the article that I enjoyed surfaces around the way that the author described the game scenes. I think that Kopas did a great job describing the scenes during game play and how it affected their emotions and overall appeal of the game. For example, they state, “And you’re kind of on edge because the lights are flickering and every once in a while, the house creaks in the storm and you don’t know what’s going to come…” (146). I think that this quote demonstrates the way that a majority of us felt in the classroom back when we played the game. Kopas is trying to prove that this game, which can be considered a trans game, is a game that is appealing for different groups of people. What they like the most about the game is the fact that it is not predictable. On a personal standpoint, I think that predictability in games matters a lot. Some games can become boring and repetitive if the players are able to predict what comes next. This could also mean that the creators did not do a good job with throwing curveballs at the audience. On a more positive note, predictability in games can satisfy some audience members, especially people who enjoy bragging that they knew something was ahead.

Another great point that the author gets to is where they draw a comparison of relating to one of the games characters. Kopas goes on to say, “Katie isn’t so much a character in Gone Home. She’s the camera” (148). What I take away from the argument of the author here is that gender can be challenging. It is not easy to find someone who is like you and who can relate to you in every way. It is also hard to find a balance when in such a situation. With Kopas stating that Katie is like a camera, it made me realize that people go through many phases in their lives, especially when it comes to beliefs. Sometimes they go through a phase where they do not really want to be active somewhere, but they do want to capture events and make life long memories. The author goes on to say that they want to be Sam now. We mentioned in our class discussion this week the role that nostalgia plays, particularly in this part of the article. I think that representation in games is something that allows people to look over their personal lives and make a comparison. Sometimes the comparison works for the better and sometimes it works for the worse. Either way, games allow for people to compare what their lives are like vs the lives they played out in a game. To sum it up, this demonstrates one of the main benefits of playing video games, the ability to judge and relate to the characters and their lives.

Overall, trans games may take a lot of backlash, but I feel that everyone should have the ability to feel like a game was made for them, much like how Kopas felt towards Gone Home. It is not easy to predict what can happen next in a game, but when we can, some people use it as a form of accomplishment, which is acceptable. Lastly, relating to games is something that everyone should try to do. Ask yourself; What was your favorite game in your childhood years? Are you like a character in that game today or are you someone completely different? Are you proud of who you are? In the eyes of Kopas, these are all questions that we should ask ourselves when we draw comparisons between our real lives and the ones that we play out in video games for characters.

-Andy Kissoon

In class this week, we played a game called Dys4ia, which highlighted the trans developer’s experiences with gender dysphoria, how their interactions with others are affected by their identity, and their transitioning process. 

What strikes me the most about this game is that it plays out in four phases of the developer’s experience, with each phase allowing the player to play through a similar series minigames with some variation in terms of tone or difficulty, with many being symbolic of the protagonist’s emotions and view of themselves. The graphics used throughout the game are pixelated and simplistic, with the protagonist in question being anonymous. This allows the game to focus more on the raw feelings of the individual rather than the identity of the individual. The use of minigames seems to emphasize the fact that the protagonist sees many of her daily activities as things that are constantly in need of her undivided attention and has severe consequences if she “loses.” There is also a lot of chaos in the aesthetic, using bright colors and flashing imagery to highlight the struggles the developer goes through during this time of her life. 

The developer of the game created Dys4ia to illustrate a period in her life where she was going through hormone replacement therapy. In class, we discussed how this game gained a bit of traction and increased the public’s visibility on the trans community. However, this turned out to be a double edged sword as many mistakenly see the game as a representation of all trans experiences. I think that it is important when developers make games based on their experiences, that one sees the representation of the developer as an individual, and not as a person part of a larger group.

We also discussed LGBTQ content within fanworks of different media, particularly in game media, and the higher presence of LGBTQ themes within fan content than there are in the canon content that the fan content is based off of. In my experiences of browsing fanfiction and fanart, there is generally a high percentage of works where characters are part of the LGBTQ community. I think that in a lot of fan content for game media, it can be easier to headcanon a character as someone who is part of the LGBTQ community because of the fact that many games emphasize player agency within a story, and for player characters to be a representation of the player themselves. For many members of the LGBTQ community, the writing of fanworks can be an outlet for their desire for representation in canon media. I think that a higher presence of LGBTQ themes within the canon media also encourages more LGBTQ fan media due to the nature of the fact that fans will usually start off with more material to work with from canon in terms of LGBTQ representation. I think that fanfiction and fanart serve as an interesting footnote in terms of fictional media as it is a derivative form where the creators can change and manipulate the original story. It is almost like in games where players are able to have some agency in how the story of a game plays out.

Sources:

Anthropy, Anna. “dys4ia.” Kbhgames, kbhgames.com/game/dys4ia.Dym

Brianna, et al. “Game Studies.” “They’re All Trans Sharon”: Authoring Gender in Video Game Fan Fiction, gamestudies.org/1803/articles/brubaker_dym_fiesler.

With the recent quarantine and distanced learning requirements that the government has declared everyone is found with a lack of social intercourse. For many individuals, they rely on there schooling and work to provide the social interactions that we as humans require as a species. This has become painfully obvious when having to interact with your family for the next 2 months with no escape.

Now as a gamer, and introvert in most circumstances, this quarantine does not feel as impactful as it may for the extroverted individuals. One aspect that has felt impacted is the constant hovering of family members in my personal circle. Much of my daily life consists of playing games in a discord call or doing work in a discord call, pretty much I am always in a discord call. Normally this is enough socializing to make me feel adequate, but lately it has felt like I spend to much time sitting in my chair just moving my fingers to type or click a mouse.

This is where Virtual Reality comes in. Recently I have gone back to playing VRChat which offers infinitely customizable avatars as long as you can model it in Blender or Unity. For many this is some Anime Cat girl or Popular internet meme made 3D. You can do almost anything in the game from Playing mini games with friends to watching movies or just chilling in front of a mirror. The game offers several different maps made by creators to accommodate any activity from Bars, Dance Clubs and even a Bowling Alley. Playing the game feels like going out and partying with some friends.

Recently some larger streamers such as Chance “Sodapoppin” Morris and Felix “XQC” Lengyel have taken to playing this game on stream making it gain more exposure which has seemed to bring more and more users of the twitch culture to the player base. Even if you don’t have any online friends you could easily enter a lobby in the game and find someone to join within minutes even as a mute if you are using a vr headset.

https://vrchat.com/

From the notice of a friend, I was notified of a humble bundle for COVID-19. In the bundle had Hollow Knight, Undertale, Jackbox 2, Superhot and many other games. I decided to buy the bundle as I had never gotten a humble bundle before, and figured it was supporting a good cause. The second reason is that I had never played Hollow Knight nor Undertale and figured it would be a good opportunity to pick them up and add them into my collection. Now the senseable person might think that I would have started with one of the games I wanted right of the bat, but instead I was drawn to a game called A Mortcian’s Tale. Now out of the 30 games you might be wondering why such a small little indie game? Well I thought I was getting into a game that was completely different from what I ended up playing.

Before I move forward the game itself covers death, and more specifically the preparation of dead bodies. If this isn’t your cup of tea then I suggest moving onward to a different post.  Also I will be spoiling the game so if you want to play the game, also move onward.

Anyway, when you load the game you get an initial message from the funeral home director. She welcomes you to the family. From there you can read other messages, or go to the message from the director. In the message she asks you to start preparation for a body. You are only given an automated response as the player, and must proceed onward with the preparations. For each type of ceremony (open casket, closed casket, or crematory) you will have different steps to take to prepare each body. Open casket I found overall being the most tedious as you have to preserve the body from rotting and show it off to the family members. The only time you are given a choice for an option is when the body you would have prepared died due to suicide. You can choose to either handle the body or prepare a different body. Other than that, you are given automated responses for everything else.

Once preparations are completed you then go out to visit family members and friends of the deceased. There you can either choose to ignore all of them, and only pay respects to the deceased, or choose to talk to the people. In my play through I choose to talk to everyone, as I wanted to see what people would say about the ceremony. Many comments were about how they missed the deceased. Other comments talked about how they didn’t like x or y in the venue.

As the game progresses, the funeral home is bought out by a large company. Your coworkers start to notice this shift and soon decide to leave the company. The comments of the funeral goers also change once the policies change over to the larger company. They try to upsell and include food during the ceremony so that “you won’t have to worry about a thing”. Eventually you leave the funeral home to start you home and do green burials.

For me, the thing I thought the most about while playing this game was mostly the death of my family members. More particularly I remember going to the funeral home to see my grandmother in the open casket. It brought back a nostalgia of wanting to go back to a past. A past where my family was alive. This game made me wonder how my family members went through this process themselves. I have experience being the mourning person but never experienced handling a dead body.

As we discussed in class, having nostalgia for a past you never experienced. For me, the past would be growing up with a grandmother and getting to see her during holidays. I lost her at a young age and never got to meet any of my other grandparents. As I grew up, I had and still do loan for a childhood experience of being able to visit my grandparents. But it is and experience I was only able to get for a short amount of time.

I have linked both the game on steam itself and the humble bundle. Note that the humble bundle only has a few days left before it goes away.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/578720/A_Morticians_Tale/

https://www.humblebundle.com/conquer-covid19-bundle?hmb_source=humble_home&hmb_medium=product_tile&hmb_campaign=mosaic_section_1_layout_index_1_layout_type_twos_tile_index_1_c_conquercovid_bundle