In this penultimate week of an awesomely curated game class, something I really appreciated was the game Dys4ia by Anna Anthropy, and the reason I thought this game merited a blog post was that I believed it necessary to commend the diversity of this syllabus. If I hadn’t taken this class, I don’t know if I would have ever touched a game like this––I am so glad I did though, because these kinds of pixelated, disorienting queer games like Dys4ia, Problem Attic, Curtain, etc. totally shifted the way I think about games, and also the potential of gamification.
Tracing my experience with these games, I’ll start with Problem Attic, and to me this game was not very fun––especially since I’d just been playing Braid for a while. I was one of the people who played the game first before reading Liz Ryerson’s article, so it didn’t have much meaning to me at first. But after reading the article, I started seeing the value in the game, and how it was able to prompt all these really interesting and important discussion among our class about transgenderism, being a woman, sexual assault, etc.
Fast forwarding now to Week 9, where the game is Dys4ia, my experience with this one now is different because I actually enjoyed playing this game. It wasn’t uncomfortable to navigate like Problem Attic was, and parts of it were even fun. What is so special about this game though is that, you don’t just leave this game having experienced an enjoyable game. You leave it with an understanding of the journey of sex change surgery for a trans person. That’s where I see the potential for gamification lies. Something a student in class said to me earlier in the course was they didn’t think of Problem Attic as a game but rather as a kind of interactive art. And that’s because fun is, in many of our understandings, an inextricable aspect of a game. But what if Problem Attic were more fun like Dys4ia, and what if Dys4ia were more fun that it is. People would be more incentivized to play these games that provide these unique perspectives. And while I understand that the discomfort of playing Problem Attic is supposed to mimic the discomfort of being a woman that Ryerson was trying to communicate, I still feel like those same messages can be conveyed in a more fun way. I do believe that gamification is an excellent way to communicate information.
(Small note - I don't know if she explicitly mentions surgery? I think it's focused on HRT, hormone replacement therapy). I definitely agree that Dys4ria was much more easy to physically play due to the clarity of the mechanics and "levels", namely the simple instructions and generally clear representations of things like the body, a razor, etc. But I also think that the brightness of it and the ease of gameplay, while definitely making it more straightforward than Problem Attic to play, also works because Dys4ria ends on a more positive note. Dys4ria is also more reliant on text to convey a lot of the negative feelings, whereas Problem Attic relies less on text and more on the discomfort of…
While I agree that maybe a more "fun" approach could get more people to play the game which would lead to the message getting to an even bigger range of people, I fear if the games were not as difficult to master or even sit through, the message may not be taken seriously. With these games, it feels like the creators are trying to get more than just some knowledge of an experience across, they want to get across a feeling as well. If someone were to make a game about sexual assault with a more fun approach, the feeling and in turn the deeper message could be lost. For example, I played Problem Attic before reading the article and…