For Me to Poupon

Thank you! I’ve got a ways to go before I’m good enough to do anything with the models I’m learning to make.

I actually am making a game with comrade Cyberstrike as my wrangler for when I get scared by lightning and wander out of the pasture, but it’s a 2D Dating Sim! I haven’t posted any art for it lately because I am stuck in background hell—which is actually why I started to teach myself 3D, to make backgrounds easier—so I haven’t posted much work from it lately. Check out the Genre High tag for some (almost all rejected by now) bits character art and blather about the writing.

Ugh, that reminds me that I need to make a masterpost about the project, soon.

I’m taking great pains to keep the player character’s gender ambiguous. When the player is referred to, it’s never by pronoun… well, never intentionally. Players will be called by a user-defined name or nickname that can be earned during gameplay. There is no default name and therefore no default and therefore no implied gender—though there are Easter eggs for picking certain names, like copies of existing character’s names, “Sephiroth” and “Fuck”. It’s about accessibility, and accounting for players who do not fit in a binary and resent being confronted with this even in entertainment media.

Now seems a good time to talk about this aspect of the game since I haven’t really spoke about the actual material at anything beyond a surface level. I’ve got some p. ambitious goals for the writing of this game that are not readily apparent from the concepts I’ve shared so far, but actually make up a large part of the point of the game. SO LET’S START WITH ACCESSIBILITY 

The goal is to offer a game that is as accessible as I can make it, though I recognize that it’s impossible to offer a game that will not alienate someone.  As you read, that’s the meat of the reason for the complete subjectivity of the sex/gender of the main character, but that guiding principle also is informing decisions about characters other than the user defined one. I’m very consciously including more than just token minorities with comfortingly sanitized, vague ethnic backgrounds. While I do not want to make the majority of the characters white because the majority of people aren’t white, I do not want to just include characters that are just there to fill a shallow diversity quota. I want to offer a group of characters that represent not just media, but also the people who consume it. Obviously there’s no way to present a paper mirror for every player, but I don’t believe there should be a default for fictional characters. Meaning not all floofy princesses should default to white Madonna, not all action leads should default to white muscle dudes. There’s enough defaulting in the public personas of the characters themselves, really.

In fact the witchy redesign of Fantasy and the alien redesign of Sci-Fi are mostly to make the game more conscious of the misrepresented demographics in most works of fiction; the alien is  on some weird alien gender continuum which might not exist at all,  and the witch is green and has racially ambiguous facial features. Given that fantasy stories often take place in worlds that are analogous but not directly reflective  of our own,  this is more appropriate to the spirit and potential of the genre, if not convention. 

Anyway, Green people are way under-represented in our society. Sometimes you get blue people, but not many positive portrayals of green ones. The Jolly Green giant does not count because he is a plant and plants are all racist.

Genre High is supposed to be a fun, frivolous seeming game which can be enjoyed on a surface level, but I want to include material that stands up to scrutiny, that even invites it. It will include commentary on both the state of modern fiction by both subverting and playing straight genre conventions.  The social/media commentary is meant to exist into the game at even the broadest conceptual levels, but should be well enough integrated to never take the player out of the experience. Player experience, engagement and character writing will always come first. I’m not trying to make the game into a didactic or prescriptive after school special, and I do not wish to editorialize or proselytize. The goal is to offer commentary, not necessarily judgement or condemnation, and to not call attention to itself while it does so.

CASE IN POINT: Remember that sequence in Metal Gear Solid 4 where Big Momma goes on this massive tirade about children being developmentally stunted and desensitized to violence due to video games? Remember how dumb that was? Hideo Kojima likes to remind the player that they are playing a game, but there are more subtle ways to do it than condemning video games in the middle of a video game. That’s what I don’t want to do.

SOUNDS EASY, RIGHT? R, right.