“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” — Plato
As a storyteller, I have been fascinated by the power of storytelling in games. It is that one interactive method of storytelling, that allows each to be an author of their own story. Games allow making choices. One part of this is Aristotle’s idea of ‘practicing morality’, an interesting quote I found in PlayMatters. Games allow us to make choices without severe consequences just like stories. But the other part is a bit ironic to recognize the options women characters have in games, which is basically the lack of choices the female gets in this industry/ field.
After reading Laine Nooney’s text on gender in video games, I was forced to reflect on my past. I remember me and my brother being locked up in the room, playing video games through the hot, humid, Indian afternoons, playing games like Contra and street fighter. Streetfighter being much newer in the market, did introduce some female characters. But I never could associate myself with them. It was rather embarrassing to have to select them as my option players. It was not just the clothes or the weird sexual noises they made when they got punched but also their assigned powers were never of a top player. Then of course it should come as no surprise that a player who chooses them, is bound to lose. This toxic masculinity that has been building up, was spread evenly into all video games. As the graphic cards grew bigger, so did the size of the breasts on a female character in these games. The car races were especially those which used women only as cheerleaders and usually they would chop off their heads in several shots. It got me a bit more into researching further and I landed on an interview by Milktea. She curated the New Meta (women in eSports) with the support of NYU Game Centre. She wrote that initially, she was usually the only girl among 30 other guys at Smash game conventions, she got used to a skewed sense of attention. So much so that she began finding extremely violent hate comments on her gaming streams as “normal”. Gradually she began adapting the boy’s attitude towards women in sports “Why is she wearing a skirt to a gaming convention”? This is when she realized she needed to build up her community just like a gamer’s community. Gamers are usually extracting their basic human instincts I.e. to belong and to share stories.
In recent events, Youtube has become a hub of gamers who stream. I feel this is the next big thing in the entertainment industry since it requires interactivity inside of storytelling and alongside it provides a feeling of virtual community and access to games which maybe not everyone could afford. Watching these gaming streams is the same feeling as watching a baseball/ cricket match with friends. One learns from the gamer’s tricks and mistakes. Meanwhile, the commentary goes nowhere. The gamer streaming keeps on commenting and giving reactions, which builds a reality outside of the digital world (yet virtually). Riding off Roberta William’s arguments, I would share about an article that I came across as a piece of news long ago, which said ‘Pac-man was being brought to MoMa’. Paola Antonelli is an interaction designer who argued how we live not entirely in the digital or the real world and games are the best depiction of this state of living. Another quote from the PlayMatters text: “The desire to play is fundamentally the desire to be.” — Sartre.
