Do you have an opinion on whether video games should:

1) Represent the world as it is.
2) Represent the world as it should be.
3) Present dystopian versions of the world.
4) Call out undesirable aspect of the world as it is.
5) Satire existing prejudices and representations.

?
-Jesper

As for EDTSD, the whole *point* of the game is to depict a black and white world of absurd, unfair, arbitrary, and artificial social constraints. Isn’t it fair to say that AMONG THESE is precisely the gender role that Mary wants to critique? Everyone is miserable in this game. And on that topic, what of the ACTUAL role of the woman in the game, which ought to invite some sort of an interpretation, beyond what it is not?

Procedural bias is something I’ve been engaged with for some time…Thanks for bringing it up in this discussion Paolo. It stretches beyond representation, and this makes it tricky to define (yet one of the central ideas behind the critical play approach and the values at play project).

I do think though that the “stock character that everybody (in the West) associate to a bundle of values” *can* be replaced without a wishy washy sense of neutrality… existentialist critique can happen in other ways…

Most folks have seen this research in the values arena, but thinking about stock or stereotypical representations (and procedures) is a vast, important, and necessary area of reflection.

After the above conversation, I think it might be nice to take a look at the psychology research about stereotypes… for example, research has shown that stereotypes actually reinforce the status quo, http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/ob_stereotypes.shtml. ‘Stereotype threat’ is a phenomenon that occurs when someone grouped into a particular negative stereotype is demonstrably, negatively affected in performance, esteem, and social status, even at unconscious levels. http://www.reducingstereotypethreat.org/

Getting at *what our stereotypes are* is another related topic. There is an experimental method called the Implicit Association Test (IAT) within social psychology designed to measure the strength of automatic associations between images, concepts, and words. In short, it unpacks unconscious responses by participant (players, in fact) of this game like test.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to make a game framed on this set of literature?

Your comments about Passage are particularly interesting – it would be quite a different game if your partner got to lead you around half the time, or if you got to “play” as the woman and end up dragged around by the guy.

In my own Book and Volume, I tried to toy with the matter of the PC’s gender a bit. The game “detects” the PC’s gender based on the first name that the player enters – maybe getting it wrong. There are then a few very subtle differences in descriptive text which probably no one has noticed. But for the most part the game follows the tradition of the PC being “genderless,” at least as far as explicit references to gender are concerned. I’m not sure it improves on that or the “choose-your-own-(irrelevant)-gender” model.

I don’t think the author’s intentions are relevant for the reading of a text in general but I’ll write a couple of lines for the sake of discussion.

As I wrote in the oneliner description, EDTSD is a variation on a theme that has been tackled uncountable times in movies, literature or music (see two of my favorite songs: Disaffected by Piano Magic and Ghost of corporate future by Regina Spektor) but not in games as far as I know. The game is actually an adaptation of a short comic I made almost 10 years ago (links below) and it’s more like an exercise in “expressive” game design.

In this sense the guy with tie and case is nothing but a stock character that everybody (in the West) associate to a bundle of values: the productive imperative, the dead-end suburban dream, the Norm etc. The nuclear/patriarchal family is definitely a part of it and it’s indirectly object of the critique.
All the other white guys in the office are instances of the same prototypical character and the player can see it as projections of the main guy, that’s left intentionally open to interpretation.

About the gender choice. I could get it away simply saying that the time limit of 7 days for the Experimental Gameplay Project didn’t allow me to make interchangeable characters and, being XY myself, I tend to default to XY. That’s actually true but there’s another simple reason that deals with the conceptual economy of the game. A female white collar, substantial deviation from the trope, would have been interpreted as some kind of statement about gender, which was not the goal of the game. I’ve been addressing that kind of issue in past works as “queer power”, “orgasm simulator” and more laterally in “Ergon/Logos”, so that wouldn’t have been an unlikely interpretation. It’s simply about keeping the meaning distilled in compliance with the minimalist approach of the whole game.

In more general terms, male dominance in game representations is an old, well-known and extremely strategic issue, but it can’t just be addressed by including a gender/race choice everywhere. The Sims does that and it looks as rather cheap politically correct move because the choice doesn’t affect the gameplay in any way and reinforces the overarching narrative of the middle class dream accessible to everybody.
We have to look at how gender is procedurally implemented in the game. Passage didn’t bothered me for the missing gender option (as I don’t generally question movies or books for their character choices) but it did annoyed me because of how the girl is located in the gameplay: a passive, decorative burden that prevents you from getting the hidden “treasures”. Now I’m sure that Roher doesn’t see his partner this way and the design choice can be justified with the aforementioned economy in the the message, but it’s not a stretch to see that aspect of the game as “procedurally sexist”.

Links to the comic (an ordinary day):
http://www.molleindustria.org/everydaythesamedream/unagiornata1.jpg
http://www.molleindustria.org/everydaythesamedream/unagiornata2.gif