Disassociation

In “Critical Practices in Game Design,” Jess Marcotte and Rita Khaled witness the deeply personal process behind resistance media. As it’s through designers like Pippin Barr and Dietrich Squinkifer employing the personalized perspectives of their own identities, and the engaging of those individualized perspectives in a collective dialogue that breeds proper resistance media. Put simply, the revolutionary potential of games as a medium comes not from the employment of some grand abstract theory but rather from harnessing one’s personalized perspective while adapting the established and relevant foundation of past resistance works. Thus, I, as a queer trans woman, approached the making of Disassocation with the intent of synthesizing the works of queer theorists on “affective rhetoric” and “queering games” through the lens of my own experiences at the intersection of mental health and masked queerness.

Now, to actually explain the contents of Disassociation: the game is a web game I solo-developed in the Godot game engine. The game functions across two distinct phases; it seeks to subvert the normative exceptions of identity in games and rhetorically instill feelings of disconnect and alienation akin to those experienced by closeted queer people. Upon booting up the game, the player is presented with a character creator in which they are instructed to make the true selves that they feel most comfortable as. Then, rather than have the game affirm this creation, the game shuns it, calling it perverted and chaining it to the bottom of the screen. Then the second phase of the game begins, with a black-and-white game space being presented within a TV and the player controlling a nondescript stick figure. They are controlled using the mouse to press buttons on a controller that each move the player up, down, left, or right a random distance and a random delay. The player is then tasked with completely various work-themed tasks in order to bring up their External Self Worth while the Internal Happiness continually drains without ways to sustainably maintain it. The following paragraphs will dissect both these phases of the game and analyze what resistance theories are being employed.

Firstly, the initial character creation phase seeks to create a “queering” of the act of character creation and, in so doing, confront the inherent normative nature of custom characters and identity within the game world. In the context of essentially all complicit games, custom characters are always treated as a normative identity. Even in progressive character creators like Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023) or Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) where sex characteristics are decoupled from gendered identity, the way in which the player chooses to represent themselves is always seen as normal and unquestioned. If the player selects They/Them pronouns in Starfield (2023), they will never be misgendered or subjected to microaggressions. For all intents and purposes, even games in which queer aesthetics are included, custom characters are never treated as a queer identity. To be clear, I’m not requesting big-budget commercial games make queer players have their custom character get hatecrimed, as in many ways, the normative treatment of characters created by a queer player is, in many ways, an empowering act of embodiment. Rather, I sought to use my game Disassociation to interrogate the normative societal structures underlying character creators, what it means to be treated as a queer identity, and how marginalized identities exist in the real world, in contrast to those of games.

In Disassociation, the player has their desired identity rejected by the game, and in doing so, subverts the standard design convention of fun and player embodiment, and enables intervention and confrontation of how one’s own identity exists within society. Akin to how in “Queering Control(lers),” Marcotte sought to challenge the expectation of the 5 core Aspects of control, particularly through the dimension of player input, I seek to similarly utilize character creation as a site of intervention that through the denial of control over one’s identity, drives a questioning of societal structures enforcing identity. In particular, the line “That’s perverted…” is meant to as simply as possible invoke countless similarly oppressive sentiments expressed by the “violent, hegemonic, misogynistic, and heterosexist status quo.” Additionally, drawing a clear connection between character creation and real-life identities seeks to cause an interrogation of inequalities. Namely, the recognition of affirming identity as a necessary design pillar to embodiment within the game world, while in the real world, those too far outside normative self-expression are denied this same unquestioned privilege underlying character creation. Thus, players are made to feel and empathize with this disempowerment through the “affective rhetoric” outlined by Ruberg in No Fun, which uses painful emotions, rather than standard fun, to create empathy. Though the full scope of this affective rhetoric is made clearer upon examining the second half of Disassociation.

The gameplay that follows the character creation is intended to represent the feeling of depersonalization and disassociation that occurs for queer individuals who’ve been consciously or unconsciously forced into hiding their true selves by the oppressive cisheteronormative society. In this way, the dull workplace gameplay results from the rejection that occurs when creating a character. This section of the game hinges on representing emotions such as the way in which all the workplace scenes are in black-and-white and contained within a TV in the game, meant to reflect the depersonalized feeling often described as feeling like you’re watching your life from the outside, and made to feel like the world around you lacks detail and texture. This imbuing of emotion also extends the means of control, with the means of movement intentionally unimmersive and unintuitive, making the player feel as if the experience was not made for them. And finally, the game-loop elements intentionally exist in the dull and objectiveless state with all tasks in the office whether it be talking to a coworker or printing paper, being handled exactly the same by pressing the singular interact button provided to the player, which raises a meaningless external self-worth while your internal happiness continually drains with no means of notably raising it. All of this symbolic representation seeks to communicate through affective rhetoric, leaning on the emotions they represent and instil as the game’s prime means of persuasion. Compared to Ian Bogost’s procedural rhetoric, this game is not concerned with the accurate recreation of dissociative workplace procedures as those processes are not the point of interrogation. Rather, this second half seeks to complement the character creation in driving an empathetic perspective on the mental and psychological adversity that the cisheteronormative society poses to queer identity. When I reflect on the effectiveness of this project, I believe Disassociation hits on some largely untapped veins while naturally building upon the queer theory that came before it. However, there are aspects of the game’s composition and argumentation that I feel could have better mined the full richness of queer identity in games. Namely, I believe the two halves of the game feel a bit disconnected, and in particular the second half in the black-and-white workplace in trying so much fell short and became overly abstract and muddled. By contrast, I believe the character creator offered a clearer and richer interrogation through its direct comparison point to other character creators. I find myself wondering whether an alternative version of Disassociation that replaces and or reworks the workplace section into one that more directly involves the rejection of identity. Though despite these critiques, this understanding and articulation of my perspective and it’s place within the larger discourse of queer theory and resistance media, is only made possible through the active act of creation that occurred when making Disassociation.