Would it help to write it anonymously/pseudonymously?
I find myself thinking about, not making a statement with the flavor parts of a game, but focusing the mechanics themselves on things I care about. A lot of games reward greed, selfishness, obsession, how would I design one that rewarded altruism, healthy life balance, positive thinking, planning ahead?
I don’t know. Maybe. It’s just so hard to even write.
I don’t want to be seen as a insensitive douchebag but this post reminded me of something I once read:
It’s much easier in IF, but I want to make stuff that isn’t about obsessively killing. Not that I don’t like games about combat, but what the heck? Occasionally I reimagine (emphasis on imagine, 'cos this stuff doesn’t get made) familiar game genres so they aren’t about killing things:
[rant=perhaps overly frivolous]Roguelikes as get-out-the-vote operations (I could even see doing this if a team of people who know something about making roguelikes got involved)
First-person shooters as paparazzi games (the best part is the tutorial level: “Boom, headshot!” Further commentary.)
Tower defense as advertising sim[/rant]
It’s amazing how literally any theme makes more sense of the “succeed against an obstacle, get money or some other item” mechanic than killing people for loot drops does.
Not that these mechanics would reward balance or anything; at least some of them are still kind of about sociopathic behavior. But at least it’s not psychotic serial-killer behavior.
I care a lot about global warming, the psychopathology of American politics, inequality and its consequences, but I don’t see myself making games about most of these – partly because they would tend to turn into angry rants. My take on most of these things isn’t very nuanced. I had an idea for a super-dark open-world game inspired partly by some of the more horrifying stuff that happened during Hurricane Katrina – the way the police straight-up murdered black people including those who were seeking help and the white militias who shot black people trying to escape through their neighborhoods – but it’s not my story, I’d have to tell it indirectly through some kind of sci-fi setting if I didn’t want to embarrass myself most likely, and it just makes me too angry to think straight.
So, maybe like Emily, I just work on things that I find mechanically interesting and try to do it in a way that’s otherwise just.
One thing games are good at is to comment on other games, including their obsession with killing. One of my favourite reactions to The Baron is this passage from a student who got completely confused by it in a way that I would love many people to get confused by it:
[spoiler]What followed has completely disturbed me and I do not wish to play the Baron again unless there is some different ending. I didn’t know how else to approach the problems that came in front of me. For example, with the wolf, I just figured I had to kill it. Yet, the detail of everything was grueling and frightful. I did not enjoy it. I wish for the game just to have said, wolf killed, and to be able to move on with the story. The gargoyle was not so much trouble, however, I did not listen to his story, and as I sit here now I wonder if I would have heard some solution to speaking and negotiating with the Baron in order to get my daughter back. Yet, I thought I need to press on and keep going.
Then, I met the baron and I thought it was my duty to kill him. Once again the words were so graphic. I did not know how else to get around the baron and get my daughter back.[/spoiler]
Ooooooh, brilliant!
This is an incredible discussion. :>
As someone who does a lot of hobby work in building large and consistent fantasy settings, I’ve put a lot of thought into this sort of thing.
[rant=Perhaps not totally relevant]Obviously the experiences and cultures of my settings are abstracted one more layer away from reality by the veneer of fantasy, but I think there’s still plenty of potential to tackle - or at least provide a sort of commentary on - some difficult topics. When I do my design work on the people of my worlds and the way they behave, I tend to avoid attempting to model any real-life social dynamics while still making sense in the context of the setting.
For instance, all my story worlds tend to have four major races of people - humans and three other races that are different anthropmorphic animals (I came up with them when I was young and have kept them around long enough that they’re dear to me now). Obviously there is a lot of potential to use the standard tropes - Humans Are Special, Fantasy Racism - but I attempt to make my work a little more nuanced than that (perhaps there is bigotry within the races - like, between humans of different ethnic backgrounds - whatever makes sense in the particular context I’m writing at the moment). It’s a lot of work, but I like to think the result is a setting that has a certain amount of relevance while still feeling real (and not contrived specifically to tackle particular issues).
Anyway, I’ve never actually put any of this stuff into games and I’m just tooting my own horn, so I’ll hide it away in a rant because it’s not really directly relevant to the discussion.[/rant]
I think it’s relevant, Kasran.
In response to the original question:
You’ve described why I broadly prefer what people call genre fiction as a bed for most content, issue-heavy or not.
Also, I experience didactic/polemic games coming off as considerably more didactic or polemic than books or films which you might call issue books or films. I think part of this is to do with the canvas size (books and films - and IF games - can use a bigger canvas - some clicky indie games which were produced at a rate of knots can be played at the same speed) and part of it is that genre material brings scaffolding with it that makes it easy to deliver all kinds of content without seeming to be walloping people with it.
Kasran’s example with racism is a reminder of why fantasy and sci-fi are great vehicles for issues, though obviously genre fiction doesn’t have to be off-world or in another time.
-Wade
I sincerely believe fiction is the delivery method for the truth, so to me, presenting your observations in the context of fiction is taking the best road you could take anyway. Sorry to downplay your inner struggle 
I can relate to the friends part - I think we all can - in that most writers are rightfully cautious about creating a character that seems too much in whole like someone they know. There are lots of issues, and regardless of the discourse of privilege you raised, it can feel like talking through them or stealing something from them anyway.
I’ve a lot of trouble with privilege discourses, which I don’t need to talk about here, but part of them that I see here is that you potentially block yourself from writing about someone or something because of them; but I also see that it is within the context of knowing these individuals as friends that this block comes up, which I get. You mentioned moving some observations into Counterfeit Monkey, which to me is already a good way to deal with this kind of thing.
-Wade
Having reading through this topic, I would stick myself on the ‘less cautious’ part of the graph compared to most posters re: the dangers of of portraying different kinds of people in fiction. However, the generally high caution alert level already shows how mindful everyone here is towards the idea of representing others accurately, and to me, that’s the bulk of the battle already fought.
I believe every good writer has the potential to write any kind of character. Men can write women, women men, gay straight, vice versa. I couldn’t count the number of transparently real characters I’ve met of all kinds by now in fiction. I tend to remember the ones that didn’t work and they’re a small percentage of the whole. I know there’s a real concern here about misrepresenting people whose experiences are less widely shared or known, whether in the culture or personally by the author. But if you (here, in this topic) want to write about such people, it shows you probably already know more about them than you thought, and actually I think every artist knows more about people in general than they either realise or can remember at once.
Most of fiction is writing your way through things you haven’t done anyway, asking yourself what you would do if A was B and you cared about C and hated D. So I advocate to myself and others to extend that to the people in your fiction, if you haven’t already. Just stretching to write characters or situations you’ve wanted to, but baulked at including due to this fear. There can’t be any real mandates. I mean, not really real ones!
Last time we had this discussion, Marco was saying he knew zilch about what women thought, and now here he is gearing up to write Lady Game ™ 
And so, to this question:
I say no; anyone who can and wants to should try. (My long-winded take on MTW’s one line version.) Obviously, the more sincere the interest, the better the result is likely to be. But the more a particular issue outside your sphere of knowledge and experience becomes the entire focus of your story, the harder the task will be to get the verisimilitude up. In some circumstances, it may become impossible, or as good as without doing so much research that your time would probably be better spent on something not as far away from you.
The idea of misrepresenting is fraught, too. Every time you think someone can’t do or think something because of some quality they have, somewhere you’ll find someone like that who does do or does think that thing. People have infinite variety that we underestimate and can even rule out by accident when we’re too concerned about ‘getting them right’. Nor should they always be viewed as symbols. But I understand the basic inclination expressed here re: social justice; if a certain type of character seems always to be one way, you can help things by including one who is some other way, and you don’t want to perpetuate the same old stereotypes.
- Wade
Sorry for all these posts, but I figure I’m less annoying when spread out, and this topic interests me.
To my answer to the question: “Are there issues you really want to talk about in IF? Do you have a plan for doing it?”
I’m interested in psychology and philosophy. It takes so long to make a game, I doubt I’d ever make a game purely about either one, or about mental health, which can involve both. But what is handy about my interests is that they are sort of the province of the everyday. Especially psychology. I am interested in the total differences of behaviour between people, and to get right inside one person at a time is the thing IF and books are good at. To be true to each character in the game, and to have a range of characters who are different to each other and to me, even if the player is just sitting in the head of one of them the whole time, is my interest.
-Wade
This is pretty much the perpetual debate in the Christian speculative fiction community, where there is a general consensus that “agenda fiction” is undesirable, even if the other extreme of “art for art’s own sake” may be pretentious and counter-intuitively shallow.
I agree. This is pretty much a broader application of the “show, don’t tell” rule for writing.
You can’t really dictate how the audience is to interpret fictional depictions of truth. I didn’t think much about transgenderism when I played Counterfeit Monkey, but the religious themes stood out strongly to me. Counterfeit Monkey is obviously not primarily about religion, but it treated the subject earnestly, both through character and setting.
BEE might be one of only two fictional narratives I’ve ever seen that are explicitly respectful to religious fundamentalism. (The other one I’m thinking of is one particular episode of Battlestar Galactica.)
I’ve been thinking a lot about Inclusivism lately. (It’s probably obvious that religion is a subject that I’m always worrying about, that will probably always be tangential to anything I write.) I think writing good “issue fiction” is sort of a matter of Inclusivism. The recipient of the message might not make the same specific conclusion about the real-world application of the message, but the truth of the message is the same. That is, the message is incarnate in the fiction, and it’s up to the reader to decide how he or she believes the same truth works in the real world.
There are two issues that I care about substantially.
The first is my religious beliefs. In the ‘West’ it often looks like religion’s best days are long gone. I am used to religion being poorly betrayed in fiction of all sorts, though for the group I identify with any portrayal at all is markedly unusual. I’m having trouble thinking of examples. But I don’t think this is really a big problem. Art is good when it makes you think, not because it just portrays anyone.
All the same, it would be good to have more from my tribe. Agenda fiction is rarely great. Art for insiders is often better. Biographical works can be good, but are probably hard to adapt to IF. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any.
I am used to self-censoring. That’s one reason why I’m only posting here now. I do wish there was some art I could share freely, but I don’t expect there to be. I know I’ll never manage it.
The second issue I care about is mental health. My partner has depression. There are quite a lot of works written by and portraying those with mental health problems, and I love them. I wonder what works about those one ring of affectedness out would be like. I don’t know.
I don’t have any writing or artist credentials yet, but art is an expression of the soul and it’s hard for me to believe that any truly beautiful expression can do anything but bring issues forward in a powerful way.
That’s based on how and when I’ve been moved by various pieces in somber ways.
Then there are works that were made with the intention of conveying a message. From my experience, the only people they affect positively are those who already sit one one side of a particular fence about something. I guess that can be good if you want to stir up the choir. I’m skeptical of it, but that’s all. There may be value there which I underrate.
Edit: I also meant to say that I think the most beautiful expressions are certainly no easy accomplishment. But I also don’t think they come about by thinking or soul-searching. At least, that never did work for me.
I care a lot about issues but haven’t found any good method to do so. I don’t want to be too direct, because didactic stuff is bad.
I also think there’s a lot to be said for games that avoid Big Issues and instead sort of observe small things and make you able to laugh off meanness and nastiness. They can prepare you for the bigger more serious stuff. Sort of like how if I am reading PG Wodehouse, it won’t change my world view, but it’ll leave me ready to tackle heavier works, because I need time to recharge.
That said, I think a game can do both. I’m reminded of Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture, where he discusses that you often learn one thing very well while seemingly learning something else. Obviously, there are literary devices that echo this, but I think it’s pleasing when you’re able to fuse 2 things–whether it’s politics and common decency, or even an abstract puzzle and abuse of power.
I think text adventures afford a lot of ways for people to be able to look into stuff if they’re paying attention, too, so a game can be as didactic as the player wants.
I like how text adventures allow a reader to explore a space while taking on different personas. It’s a bit like live role-playing exercises except that 1) game-state truly resets between plays, 2) no real-life audience projects your player-persona onto you and 3) no external time limits.
- The amnesia that a game-state reset brings means there is no residual baggage from the game-engine. A player can take a fresh look at various paths to see how that space reacts to them.
The gives a powerful tool for issue exploration but it comes down to what narrative devices the author prefers. I did a maths exercise in Twine as a kinda dialog - but, even in maths, that came across as too preachy. - Role-playing involves other humans as participants; there are particular social norms that exert a powerful peer pressure. There’s a sense that player-persona will be equated with the real-player. That leaves a lot of “what-if” questions a player might be afraid to explore and thus the role-playing might be a much less vigourous exploration.
- When role-playing requires other participants then the frame of that places external time pressures onto exploration. Others must have their turn (only fair). That encourages an economy of exploration that doesn’t exist in IF-space. The player can explore to the limits of their energy or the limits of the world created by the author.
I suspect that live-role-playing to explore issues is better suited for demonstrating and cementing expected patterns of behaviour. That gives IF-games some distinct advantages for issues games.
Mind you, a bit of peer-pressure can go a long way to helping people accept a bit of discomfort as part of the process. A game has the problem of a funny cat meme in the next browser tab.
Re: portraying characters belonging to minority groups of which you are not yourself a member, this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately (for reasons I won’t go into, because it’s a long story involving a recent explosion in another geeky community I’m tangentially involved in), and really, where I come down on that is that I’d rather see people try and not get it quite right than not try at all. I don’t want to limit representation of minority characters to writers belonging to the relevant minority, because then you end up with less representation overall, and that’s not what I want either as a person who cares about social issues or as a person who wants to see people like herself in her preferred genres of fiction sometimes. I mean, maybe I’m edging into reductio ad absurdum territory here, but if you can only write characters with backgrounds just like yours because otherwise it wouldn’t be “authentic,” you’re going to end up with an army of clones, which is neither realistic nor interesting. (Well, a literal army of clones could be interesting, as long as George Lucas isn’t involved, but you know what I mean.)
I do think if you do this as a writer, then you should be open to criticism and not jump immediately to “But I’m not [X]ist, so there’s no way I could have messed this up!”, but then I think that writers should be open to criticism in general. (Possibly this is because I’m an editor in real life, but never mind that.) And I do think that if someone starts screaming at you about it in a more personal-attack way or going “How dare you tell a story about this kind of character? Their stories aren’t yours to tell! Why can’t you just write about people like yourself?” (paraphrased from an actual argument I have read lately), then they’re in the wrong, not you. (Plus, there is the messy fact that minority groups are made up of people, and people often disagree about things, so you’ll get, for example, one group of women arguing that the movie Frozen is empowering while another group of women argues that it’s disgustingly sexist and many more women have various more moderate opinions along that spectrum, and who’s right? Who gets to arbitrate that? They’re all part of the group being portrayed. … I don’t really know where I’m going with this. I guess the point is, it’s not a clear-cut situation where either you Do It Right and it’s great representation which everyone loves or you Do It Wrong and it’s hurtful and terrible and no one likes it.)
As far as the actual original topic of the thread, which is writing games involving issues that you care about: While I do have a lot of appreciation for games like Depression Quest, I don’t think I would ever be comfortable writing something that explores an issue so directly, whether it’s something I have personal experience with or not. If I do write about things like that, I feel better doing it through a lens of humor and/or speculative fiction, and honestly in my IF work (such as it is–mostly a handful of messy speed IFs and a few dozen works in progress and nebulous ideas that will never see the light of day) I don’t even do that much. That being said, I think the issues I care about deeply are always going to bleed through into my work a little just because they’re not really separable from my general worldview and who I am as a person. Like, I wouldn’t say that Hauntings or Wedding Day are games about women or sexism so much as they are games about (er, spoilers?) necromancy and human sacrifice, respectively, but they both have some weird undercurrents about gender going on. I can’t exactly articulate what those undercurrents are in either case, and even if I could I don’t think you could get any particularly new or radical messages out of it; basically all it is is that I was trying to write horror and on some level, apparently, what I really find unsettling and disturbing is the patriarchy. Or something like that.
On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, The Presidential Pizza Plot is probably the most idiotic thing I’ve written this side of being sixteen years old (and is intentionally kind of bro-y, having been written for the amusement of a particular eleven-year-old boy). It would be ridiculous to claim that it had any kind of message or merit, and at no point in the process of writing it did I sit down at my computer and say “I’m going to make the Galactic President a woman because feminism!” But I think it would also be sort of disingenuous of me to claim that my worldview and values have nothing to do with why I made that choice, even if it wasn’t really a conscious thing. If that makes sense.
… and really it feels terribly self-indulgent to be talking about the IF I’ve written like it’s some kind of Real Serious Art that’s in any way worthy of discussion rather than being obscure, mostly awful, and generally written in 24 hours or less, but oh well, that’s what I’ve got to work with.
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I think this was a big barrier to writing to me. You remember the 90=A 80=B 70=C 60=D grading scale? I took that literally with creative writing and (especially easy without accurate metrics) assumed I was just no good, and I shouldn’t try to risk things, and other people had magic I didn’t. The thing is, you want to take risks but you want to prepare for them and be able to say, this doesn’t work, try again–or have an editor who can.
I’ve felt the same way writing about a chess player. I said “Am I just writing about that?” But then I found a way to universalize things, and a project is on track. I generally give myself a few levels of skepticism to pass through before I feel good a serious work isn’t didactic.
Well, to flip your own argument on you…if you don’t know your own work, what do you know? You know it better than you know others’ work, and you know it better than others know your work.
I think this is an extremely important issue for fiction generally and IF specifically. As someone’s who actually written a book which has a large section dealing with sexual assault (Sorry for the horn tooting, wanted to give some context) I can tell you that it’s possibly to effectively represent something you’re not familiar with. I took stories of assaults that had happened to my friends and incorporated them. As writers who have ability, it’s up to us to talk about that which others cannot. There is a fear, of course, that you’re going to say something wrong, misrepresent, offend, that’s always a risk, but I’ve found that when you write about the subjects no one else wants to talk about, those people will respect you for trying at all. Most important, I think, in the representation debate is that they’re never not your stories. Sexism, racism, homophobia, psychological disorders, may not affect you at that very moment, but they might affect someone you love, someone you care for, and it will hurt you.
Why this is important for IF specifically is because IF is a very unique medium. It combines the depth of reading with the participation of actually interacting with the story. I can still remember the feel of disassociation from schizophrenia from Adam Cadre’s “Shrapnel”, or the horrible and chilling choices I had to make in “The Baron”. All of these were possible because I was actually interacting with the story, forcing me into the mindset of the protagonists. I think we can incorporate these into so many games, to get players to actually think like the protagonists (or realise they think the same, depending on what you’re going for) that are considered “different” and make a difference to someone’s thought, however small or big. As long as it’s emotionally authentic and not overtly pandering, I’m pretty sure you’ll be alright.