The beginning of the game

The beginning of the game is a game about rigid binaries and the limitations they place on the concept of self. You, the player, are one character in this game. The other character is the Character Creation Helper (think of her as clippy, but gay). She walks you through a series of questions to determine what your character in the game will be. Is your hair short or long? Are you tall or short? Skinny or fat? Boy or girl?

The idea behind this game was to criticize the common trend of character creators in games (and also literally anything else where you have to describe your gender) to Female or Male, boobs or no boobs, bikini armor or normal armor. All other character creator options, like hair, eyes, or height, have 6, 7, 8, maybe even a hundred different options, but for gender, you get to choose either damsel or prince. 

This game’s narrative is about the game looking at you, reading your responses, and realizing that she can think outside of the “binary” (it’s a computer pun and its about the cisnormative heteronormative ideals of our culture, two for the price of one).

This game is also trying to play with perspective on queer stories, similarly to how Gone Home does. In having the player be Kate in that game, you are a blank slate for the player to project themselves onto. In this game, the player character goes beyond just having a blank slate avatar, and the player avatar is literally just You, The Player. You answer the questions as yourself. There is no level of roleplaying involved, in an attempt to encourage the player to engage in the game in a much more vulnerable way.

There is also a portion of the story where you are viewing a queer individual through the lens of the default text in some javascript fillable forms. Again, drawing inspiration from Gone Home, which used various scraps of paper and the placement of objects in the 3D space to convey a complex story, I decided to put parts of my story in a place where narrative isn’t usually found, and in a place where you literally have to delete the narrative to play the game for yourself.

Drawing from our reading of “Not Gay as in Happy: Queer Resistance and Video Games (Introduction)”, I am trying to address the idea of radical acceptance in this game. After the period in which the Character Creator Helper realizes that you aren’t able to give fully correct answers to the quiz with only two options per question, she tries to reimagine it in such a way that questions can be answered by typing whatever you want to questions like “What is your Gender?”, and “What color is your sexual attraction?”, “Where does your happiness live?”. As Bonnie Ruberg and Amanda Philips wrote, “it is crucial to resist games themselves, at least as we know them today: the ways they have been traditionally imagined, the communities they have commonly hailed, the problematic politics and values they often embody.” With this game, I’m resisting the idea that your character creator should be all about your character’s physical appearance, their numerical statistics, or their historical background. This game wants to know what your character feels, what your character loves, and who, at their core, your character is.