It was a privilege and a delight to share Gender Reveal Party at NYC DH Week 2020. Above is a link to the powerpoint, and below is the text of the short talk I gave about the game.
“I played myself : creating an autoethnographic video game”
I’m here today to share with you a bit about my project, Gender Reveal Party.
I’ve been working on this project, in different forms, for almost a year now. It started as a little twine game in Roxanne Shirazi’s Digital Humanities class, and it has become a fully illustrated Ren’Py game.
I am also going to warn you now, almost none of the pictures relate to exactly what I’m going to be talking about, I just wanted to share some images from the game with you.
The humanities tend to be a view from afar. I have always had an academic interest, perhaps even a personal imperative, to include myself in my work. For a long time this meant acknowledging who I am, a white trans person, in the introductions to my writing, but the tools of digital humanities presented me with a new opportunity.
What is Gender Reveal Party?
It is a game in which you play as me. You begin the game as me as a child, and you get to experience my life from elementary school up through college — I have written it actually up until last September or so, but it isn’t all coded yet. There’s a lot I still need to figure out. It turns out–teaching yourself how to make a video game… it’s hard.
As a trans person, I have been asked, often, to educate people on What It Means to be trans. This is true, I have heard, for many many people across all sorts of marginalized groups (but as is the theme of the game I speak only for myself). This role that we are cast in, the unwilling educator, means that we are all too often put in a position where other people suggest that their accepting of our humanity is based on our willingness to abase ourselves before them. If we answer all their questions then maybe, this line of thought suggests, we can persuade them to treat us better.
This is, obviously, pretty disempowering. It is exhausting, and it is frustrating.
I am a pretty open person (if you play my game you will think, perhaps, too open), but these situations put me on the defensive, constantly trying to justify my own personhood. I like to share about myself, but I like, as most of us do, to do so on my own terms.
I saw, in the tools of digital humanities, a way out of the trap of teaching, on command. Digital humanities projects are often so distant, I mean, distant reading has been a pretty important text… The bodies of work examined are classical texts, or maps, or other, you know, Old Serious Things. What would it look like, I wondered, if I took this approach and applied it to myself, someone who is neither old, nor particularly serious.
I wanted to give players the opportunity to teach themselves, using a virtual version of me as a tool.
I decided to structure the project as a video game in part because of the remarkable ability games have to force players to move outside of themselves, to consider the world of the game through a different perspective. In games you are asked to make choices for a character you will never be–Lara Croft, a tiny Italian with very powerful jumps, or many, many, many iterations of “the chosen hero”… All of these are, in some capacity, role playing games. In pokemon you are role playing as someone who collects cute animals, and in Walden, a game, you are roleplaying as Thoreau.
I thought that giving the player an opportunity to role play, not as A trans person, generally, but as This trans person, particularly, could help them to see the normal, boring, charming, and challenging aspects of being a trans person. I wanted the player to come away from the game with a more nuanced idea of what gender is, and to have reflected on how it feels to be trans.
The game is partially constructed from from my diary, emails sent and received, and chats that I had with insurance companies. The rest of it is my attempt at a reconstruction.
The game is structured as a visual novel. This genre usually features dating sims, where you can attempt to romance various Cute Girls or Lads, and if you choose the correct set of responses you get the “Good” ending. I had initially wanted to create a system like that within this game that would allow the player to get more or less trans endings, but this, while a funny joke to me, would have given precisely the wrong impression to the player. The game instead follows the visual novel format in presenting the player with sets of choices that can, in some cases alter the course of the game.
Sometimes I present the player with an option, such as “tell your parents that you are trans as a child” and then I show a brief hypothetical digression, before taking the player back, and setting them on the only course that I know, mine. I don’t want to theorize about what my life would have been like if things were different.
I always want it to be clear that the character that is being played is me. So you can ask invasive questions like “did you always know you were trans?” and “I” can answer, only I do not actually have to answer, and you do not actually get to ask me. I, or rather the character named “Me” can be evasive and annoying, and you, the player, do not get to tell me that you are annoyed, or that you think I am a liar, because I got to construct the world of the game, and I did not want anyone else to tell me that I was lying about who I am. It’s tiring!
The work of creating the game has been intense. Over the summer and early fall of 2019 I wrote a full script for the game, and went through rounds of editing. I transcribed pages upon pages of my diary, and I found and sorted all of the awful emails I received from my mother after I came out. It wound up being about 90 pages of material, some original, and some archival. In retrospect, I should have written less.
I spent about two months trying to teach myself how to draw enough that the figures I made looked anything like the people they were supposed to represent.
My goal was to emulate the generic anime-ish style that is seen in many visual novels–you can see the image featuring the stars of Doki Doki Literature Club in this slide. Unfortunately, as you can see from the pictures that I drew on this slide, this degree of professionalism, of smoothness was completely unattainable for me.
I have had to accept my limitations, and that was really really hard. This game is a work in progress, it isn’t even all the way coded yet, although there is a prototype version online for play. This game is full of half-realized ideas. Things that I wanted to explore more, or places where there should be mechanics that I haven’t learned how to create.
Despite this, the question that I have gotten the most from people was not about the process of the game, about teaching myself a coding language, and how to draw, it was this, “Aren’t you afraid to share so much about yourself to your academic peers?” “Are you really comfortable with this?” “You must be feeling so stressed about people learning all this about you.”
I made this game so that anyone who hasn’t met a trans person might avoid the need to say, as my dad once did “I don’t want you to be trans, all trans people seem to be sad.” So I made a mundane game about the process of becoming, the delight and the drudgery. I hope that you play it, and have fun.