Gameplay Journal #8
I’m writing this entry in two parts, first before playing the game and then after. I just wanted to get my initial impressions down based on the concept before I played it to compare with how it executes it. The game I’m playing is called “A Closed World” made by the Singapore MIT Gambit Game Lab. Based on its description it appears to be a game based around the idea of portraying the challenges and tribulations that are associated with belonging to the LGBTQ community in modern life. Though interestingly it appears that they’re going for a more abstract portrayal rather than a literal 1 to 1 translation of the experiences, as the game seems to take the form of a JRPG with the player character exploring a strange forest and encountering monsters.
I always feel that taking more abstract approaches to these kinds of topics can help people who are normally outside of the sphere of influence of topics that the game wants to cover, better relate to the events happening. While I certainly have nothing against the community, as a straight male I also don’t exactly have a lot of interest in playing a game that would try to represent these challenges in a more literal sense. But by taking this approach, before having even played the game I am already far more interested in the premise.
Plus I feel that using allegory like this can help ‘lighten the mood’ in a sense when it comes to these kinds of serious topics. That’s not to say a game can’t be serious. But for example there was once a game known as “That Dragon Cancer” that was well, about the trials of going through cancer. And unsurprisingly it ended up not doing so well because no matter how good the portrayal is, in my opinion people probably just didn’t want to play a downer of a game about how bad cancer is, especially with how up front the game was about it in even the title alone. To get more interest in these kinds of serious topics, I think that you need a hook to actually draw players in so that they can get invested in the material before you start dropping the heavy stuff on them, and as I’ve been saying, I think that A Closed World does this well right off the bat with the premise I’ve already described.
Without further ado I’ll now actually play the game and see how well it manages to expand on that initial Hook. here’s a link to the game below:
So right off the bat the game starts with a monologue that started to get worryingly preachy. Again, not that I have anything against the message being said, it’s just that this is how one could start losing interest. However it ended up having a fairly strong payoff that I enjoyed how it put a sort of twist on a classic RPG trope. Essentially the point of the monologue was to help put more emphasis on the weight of the classic question you see at the start of so many games like Pokemon: “Are you a boy or a girl?” which of course makes sense considering that a large part of the game is about gender identity and the like. And of course I think that the message is strengthened by the fact that, at least up to the point that I’ve played so far, this seems to have no actual impact on the game.
Now onto the gameplay itself. As Flanagan states, there is a “tension in two of the central goals of this work: one, to promote a particular group of values (i.e. gender equity, cooperation, etc.), the other, to develop VAP, a systematic approach to taking values into consideration in the context of games’ design.” (188) I personally think that the ideas behind the game’s mechanics are quite solid. The ‘combat’ system has the player fighting against bigoted arguments using either Logic, Passion, or Ethical arguments in return in a sort of rock-paper-scissors hierarchy. So the gameplay is about trying to deconstruct the monster’s argument against you and reply with an appropriate counter to weaken their argument.
I will say that while it is an interesting idea, I feel that there are a couple of shortcomings to it. For one I feel that the arguments the monsters make are a bit short, making it difficult to actually deduce what kind of argument they’re making. Resulting in most of my gameplay coming down to just guessing what would work against them. Though I feel like that kind of works for the message that they might be going for, as arguing with someone isn’t exactly a precise science. But as Flanagan says, it plays to a tension between the gameplay and the message, as it makes the gameplay rather repetitive and basic at the end of the day. And while being ambiguous may work for the message, perhaps the arguments the monsters made could have been at least a few words or maybe an entire sentence longer to give the player a little more to work with.
Flanagan, Mary and Helen Nissenbaum, “A Game Design Methodology to Incorporate Social Activist Themes” CHI 2007 Proceedings, Politics & Activism, 181–190.
