We talked a decent bit in class about the variety of avatars used in Dys4ia to represent Anna Anthropy's experience as a trans woman. There's a huge variety to the perspectives and metaform kind of avatars you play as in the minigames, but what I wanted to focus on was how the art style really contributed to the effect of the body part avatars.
Dys4ia has a very clear visual aesthetic to it, with bright colors and vague outlines of avatars playing on the evocative memory of players and their experiences with old video games. But the representations of body - particularly body parts - tends to deviate from that. Minigames like needing to place the pill under the tongue feature weirdly detailed focuses on body parts that don't look quite right. Their weird look makes sense given the pixel-based format/art style of the game. However, the amount of detail (and thus focus) on, and I would arguably intentional weird look to these avatars works so well with the pixelated style to capture a specific aspect of dysphoria. By definition there's a disconnect between one's body and one's identity, but at least from my peripheral knowledge of trans experiences there are a lot of small, specific features that really come to focus. "Small" details like lipstick or finger/hand shape can trigger huge senses of dysphoria because they're not quite right, even if it's something no one else finds "wrong."
Nice observations! I had to replay the game to see what you were talking about, and yeah I totally agree. And I think it’s really important that the game does that because it’s those little things that mean so much. Especially when you’ve been forced to live your life as not feeling authentically yourself for so long, those little things really do matter because you really want to feel whole after feeling so uncomfortable.
I think your point about small details is very important and is precisely why the avatars become smaller parts of the body at times. Having the player switch from a humanoid avatar to a very detailed body part becomes a way to generate a similar feeling of dysphoria even if the player has no relation or knowledge to the trans experience. To suddenly be simplified to or have all of your attention focused on a minute detail of the body is something this game is great at replicating to get more than just the knowledge but also the feeling of this experience across.
Thanks for the interesting post! I hadn't really thought about how the details of the pixelated body parts could add to the game's message of conveying the dysphoria trans individuals experience by deviating from what we consider normal representations. Have you heard about the "uncanny valley" effect? It was coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970 to describe the uneasiness some people experienced when viewing robots that were created with certain human anatomy characteristics. I believe this could be related to what you experienced when playing Dys4ia. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-uncanny-valley-human-look-alikes-put-us-on-edge/