From the moment I opened the file, Problem Attic left an impression on me. The games aesthetic design is striking, with a vivid green that draws the eye, contrasting with multi-colored space-invader like shapes which make up the hub world of the game. Though it is simplistic in style, it somehow manages to find a way to be confusing as well. So, I played the game and got frustrated at a puzzle that I couldn’t complete after 5 minutes of trial and error. At this point, I went and read “The Other Side of Braid by the game’s developer, Liz Ryerson, and, like many others in this class, it completely re-contextualized the gameplay mechanics and the meaning of the difficulty. Unlike many games, the aesthetic of this game deliberately makes it more inaccessible to the player, and in this post I hope to engage in a wider discussion of Problem Attic’s visual design choices.
The fist piece of aesthetic design that I would like to examine is the background/foreground. Once you hit a puzzle piece and enter the level the aesthetic changes to encompass squares of various colors overlapping one another. It is not clear which pieces you can land on, and some serve to completely obscure vision of your character while others simply form part of the background. This is confusing as hell. One one level, my character jumped onto a platform while completely obscured by a square of brown. I had no idea I had landed and, only after multiple failed jumps, did I realize that I was indeed on a platform and not just obscured while falling back to the ground.
The second point, which I find important to discuss both because of the designer’s identity and because it was not discussed in class, is the design of the player character. When playing the game, I noticed a piece of design that initially struck me as odd and funny. The player character is very simply designed, made up of a number of black pixels arranged to form your classic T-post stick figure. However, there are two pixels which are different. One is red, and is located on the top of the head, indicating that this is likely a stand in for eyes. The other is grey, and is located between the legs by the hips, clearly a stand-in for genitals. There is no specific gender implied by these design choices, instead rendering a relatively simple and generic figure.
Now, to discuss both of these points, and bring them into a wider conversation surrounding trans identity. This is no easy task, and as someone who is comfortable with his sex which was assigned-at-birth I am definitely no expert on the lived experiences of people in this community and I do not seek to imply that my opinion is right (though I will still express it for the sake of the course and to generate wider discussion). Problem Attic itself contains little narrative content, and we are left to infer the game’s meaning from its design choices and knowledge about the life of the developer. As such, I can’t help but seeing the decision to occlude the player character as some sort of commentary regarding trans visibility. For the sake of this post, this is defined as the societal perception of trans people and the tendency for them to be excluded from cultural norms. Looking at the design from this perspective, the choices I previously discussed take on an entirely new meaning. The necessity of jumping on an occluded block could be seen as a commentary on how institutional and cultural structures make it more difficult for trans people to navigate everyday life – forcing them to take leaps of faith without knowing the response that they will receive. It could also simply detail the feeling of being trans, and how you may not feel truly seen and accepted by those around you and society at large, and thusly feel hidden in the background of the larger global scenescape. Additionally, it is interesting that one of the few visible features of the play character is the genitals, and this could be seen as a similar sort of commentary. Though we know nothing about the character – their origins, desires, or personhood – we are still able to see that they have genitals. Speaking as a non-trans person, gender dysphoria, which leads to many people undergoing transition, is centered around discomfort about one’s perceived gender. The play character is nude and their gender is clearly on display (though not clearly defined). They are stripped down and may be completely judged on face value without knowing their true identity, something which seems to be an integral part of the trans experience. In this way, the aesthetic decisions of the developer serve to reinforce the game’s mechanical structures and provide a clear snapshot of what it feels like to be a trans person in America.
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This second section of the blog post is unrelated from the first, but I wanted to briefly take a moment to address some discussion which occurred at the end of our Thursday lecture, as there was not enough time to have a real conversation about Nakamura’s article entitled Queer Female of Color: The Highest Difficulty Setting There Is? Gaming Rhetoric as Gender Capital. One student stated that he believed the article to not be valuable and that it did not contribute much to the discussion of gamer culture other than stating that white men have a tendency to monopolize the space and be exclusionary - which is already known. Personally, I found this take to be inaccurate and devaluing of the content of the article for two major reasons.
Firstly, this simply is not the thrust of the article. I feel that arriving at this interpretation of the article implies a misunderstanding of its content. To me, the thrust of the article as not to demonize white males and point out that the community is exclusionary (though I will talk more about this later). Nakamura is more trying to talk about how discussions of social justice issues are handled within the wider gamer community, especially by members of the so-called “in-group”. This is why the article is structured as a response to a piece by Scalzi and a critique of his attempt to discuss progressive politics while using the rhetorical language of video games. This is a fundamentally different point, and includes discussion of how using the language of “game mechanics” is inadequate to discuss structures of power which are actively participated in by members of the general public (be that via an active role or simple complacency). Though the article does contain discussion of the community’s response to the references article, which itself is written by a white male, the core of the article deals with the way in which issues of social justice are presented to the community and the sort of discourse which occurs. To me, this is certainly a significant contribution to the discussion and only fuels further (necessary) conversation about how we talk about such issues, especially in communities which have historically been impervious to their effects.
My second point may appear a bit more dismissive, but I still feel it is important to say. For the sake of this point, I will suppose that my prior argument holds no water and that I totally misread the point of the article. Even with this being said, I think that there is nothing wrong with calling out bad behavior when you see it. Even if this takes the shape of writing similar articles again and again, calling out the same toxic masculinity which pervades the community of video games, it is still worth doing. The only way to make people realize that their opinions are actively harmful and exclusionary (assuming that such people are even open to changing their minds, which I am generally not convinced that they are) is to call them out as such and try to explain why their societal position influences their perceptions. So, whenever there is a new controversy with “gamers” acting poorly towards women or people of color, it is important to call it out or one risks being complacent in the prejudiced system itself.
This said, I do believe that the article goes further than a simple callout post and does provide an interesting discussion of how these issues are and ought to be discussed within the videogame community. Personally, I found the article to be great, and a very thoughtful critique of both the reactionary nature of the community and those who are attempting to reform the minds of such individuals through well-intentioned, if slightly inadequate, means. I believe that the only way to make the community more inclusive is to clearly illustrate how its not, and propose concrete ways of modifying it so that it is accepting to all. Though this article limits its scope to doing this by critiquing how gamers discuss social issues, I believe it to be a valuable reading and interesting contribution to the conversations we have in this course.
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