As I mentioned in class, I am on HRT, so I come to the game with particular “insider” (though notably not transfeminine) experiences dealing with the medical/legal/social/physical frustrations of a medical gender transition in the US. I want to think about the doublespeak within Dys4ia as a trans user.
Dys4ia is aesthetically pleasant and its rhetoric is both playfully instructive and intimate whereas Problem Attic’s entire schema chafes and frustrates. How fabulous, then, to play them together and talk about them together in class, as I imagine that players often find one game after getting introduced to the other. There is something there, too – in playing both games – about the exhausting ‘opportunity’ to come out as trans in any given space. Playing these in the same week gave me two external channels to consider the ever-present strategies I am choosing from when I communicate in non-intimate spaces. I ask myself if I should contort my body or language to be some combination of the affective registers we played inside of: precious, instructive, nonchalant, generous, concise, agitated, cliché, dangerous, protective, elusive, isolated...in this moment of transgender visibility and increased violence, I’m thinking about how particular associated traumas are narrativized for consumption and for whom. More generally I wonder about the pros and cons of approachability in a narrative and how these two games address it differently – how being open to the chafe of Problem Attic can be instructive (though at least for me impossible in practice).
As I played Dys4ia, I ended up sending videos of my playthrough to my trans friends and loved ones because it felt so good to see a unexpectedly resonant story. The diaristic preciousness of the autobiography is partially achieved through the pacing of the narrative. Because I already somewhat guessed what the “bullshit” experiences were going to be, however roughly, my playthrough felt very much like a friend updating me via social media or some other mediated communication about their day. It is not about surprises in the plot or disruption as much as it is about bearing witness and entering into a new affective register.
The interactivity for me mirrored or spoke to the quotidian objects that produce such world-shifting and dangerous “lag” throughout the process of acquiring hormones and changing a body—the detergent container in my room filled with needles, the aftershave I bought prematurely at the Dollar Tree. The arcade objects of the game felt as much to me a reminder of a trans friend IRL fiddling with a remote while sharing their bullshit experience with a therapist as it did playing in an arcade. At the end of each vignette, an 8-bit image from the scene rises from iconic to symbolic, an emoji of sorts—making concrete an affective element to the story. The game felt interactive in the way that listening is interactive. My distance to the voice was in some ways no different than a cisgender user, but it felt familial.
In hearing class comments and thinking about it from an outsider perspective, though, it sounds like some people who played and perhaps were less familiar with trans narratives really received it as informative and differently affectively powerful; perhaps seeing it as more like a tiny, intimately narrated “quest” game where the player is mediated through temporalities to achieve greater understanding about the less spectacular moving parts that make up a medical transition. Certainly Anna Anthropy’s choice to foreground repetition of seemingly less-related or urgent changes in the story (the hairy chest, the blood pressure) offers a perspective that resists a soundbite or universal “trans experience game—itself a political aim. In this imagined perspective, the 8-bit universe perhaps invites a cisgender outsider to hear this story with the gentle familiarity of a nostalgia product – even gesturing to the player to mine their own memories to make sense of the bureaucracy. There is the political angle, too, of styling it as an arcade game to speak to gaming itself and rewrite the history of the genre to include the scores of sensitive and gentle outsiders that made the form of media mainstream decades later.
I wish I had been able to go to Patrick’s close-read of the game, as there’s so much material within the game to close-read. Mainly I am curious about how memoir games offer a different type of depth in interactivity, and how we as players can grow in our capacity to witness and unpack our own proximities to the story through the aesthetics and structure of the games themselves.