The biggest theme I was able to pick out of this reading was “What’s the point of making stuff if it doesn’t come from the most authentic you?”
Karla Zimonja’s idea of an agenda (or a fucking agenda, to use language from the text) jives excellently with everything we’ve been talking about in class. Agendas aren’t commonly found in AAA games, or at least decisive and divisive ones aren’t. But it is common for creators to have one. We often talk about what the point of classical literature is, or what a filmmaker was thinking when they directed a certain piece. But it often seems that the agenda of a big-budget game is to sell copies.
One item on Karla’s agenda is to make portrayals of women more realistic. It’s mentioned that fictional women aren’t allowed to be both flawed and strong, like male protagonists are. For this, and many other reasons, Karla was unable to identify with women characters and media as a whole for the longest time. Unfortunately, I can sympathize.
I think this ties along well with Brendon Chung’s philosophy of making games for people games aren’t normally made for. Not everyone can identify with the World War II heroes from Medal of Honor. Not everyone can identify with children with psychic powers, or Italian mustached plumbers who like to step on things. But these characters are tied as much to their gameplay mechanics as they are their stories. Game characters should be diverse, but these experiences should be diverse as well.
I thought this sentiment carried well into Nina Freeman’s chapter, where Freeman explains the rewards of creating a hyper-personal vignette game about her own life. She claims it’s the only stuff worth making, because the more honest and candid you are with your audience, the easier it is for them to connect. But also, there’s a certain joy in creating this type of experience and forcing someone to feel it the way you did. But this type of force isn’t like the type AAA games do when they force me to play as a character who doesn’t look like me (because he is made to look like the everyman, or at least the idealogical fantasy of the everyman who’s playing the game). It is the type of force that takes a true experience and imposes it and begs you to hear it for what it is over the vast expanses of cookie-cutter experiences on the market. Freeman makes these games for herself, but in the process they reach people who can also identify with these sentiments that are not often explored in larger games. These highly-specific, honest, open games manage to reach people in a way games tailored to reach a wide audience through vagueness and non-committal storytelling cannot.
I want to hear more games like this. I want to make games like this.