Gameplay Journal #8
The umbrella term of “activist games” refers to a growing genre in the gaming sphere. As a cultural media, all games convey a representation of some values ranging from incidental to intentional (Flanagan and Nissenbaum, p.181). Activism-focused games in particular aim to represent social, cultural, or political values (Flanagan and Nissenbaum, p.183). This week I played one called Gamer Girl (2019) by RIT’s School of Interactive Games and Media.
In Gamer Girl, the player takes on the role of a female college student attending an all-male programming class. The narrative is conveyed through interactive text and the protagonist’s experiences are influenced by the player’s choices in a similar style to a dating sim. Tag-lined by the developers as “a harassment simulator”, the game aims to raise awareness of commonplace harassment through narrative events directly taken from real-life experiences of women majoring in game design interviewed at the Rochester Institute of Technology (“Gamer Girl”).
I found this game to be very effective at conveying its message. While the game’s introduction starts similarly with every playthrough, experiences become unique when the player must pick a project partner in the class. At first, each character seems to mean well at best and appears overbearing at worst until the player makes active choices to stop bothering with platitudes. Red flags raise with each passing interaction and the player is presented with options to either placate or oppose the project partner. Whether the player engages in conflict or not, all consequences reveal the risks associated with the player’s choices through their dangerous outcomes and in turn, educate them on the spectrum of sexual harassment and more specifically, how seemingly “small” interactions can precursor threatening situations. I believe the game can be used as a useful tool for educating people of all genders on both how to recognize harassment in early stages before critical escalation and how to correct language and behaviors that perpetuate toxic environments for women in tech. Though Gamer Girl may not be a technologically groundbreaking game, I believe it is a solid example of an activist game through its themes of gender equality and awareness.
References
Flanagan, Mary, and Helen Nissenbaum. “A Game Design Methodology to Incorporate Social Activist Themes.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems — CHI ’07, 2007, doi:10.1145/1240624.1240654.
Gamer Girl, www.gamergirl.games/.
