Taking Games Seriously, Making Game Seriously: This month’s Round Table challenges you to design a game that deals with a social issue that personally troubles you. The recent months have seen controversy sweep through the video game industry. Whether people are objecting to the use of imagery widely considered to evoke racial stereotypes, or to the gameplay based on violent sexual crimes, or to the fact that anyone would complain about either topic–the discussion has been fierce. This month, contributors to the Round Table are invited to design a game that focuses on racism, rape, domestic violence, cruelty to animals, genocide, or any other serious, and potentially hot-button, topic.

I find this month’s topic challenging. It’s not that any of these difficult topics don’t interest me; quite the opposite, in fact. It’s not that I don’t believe these topics should be dealt with in video games in a mature manner. It’s just that the question I keep asking myself when I sit down to try to think of something is “what the hell do I know?”

You see, I’m a woman of privilege. I’m typing this blog post on computer equipment assembled in Malaysia, sitting on furniture made in China while drinking a mocha containing coffee farmed in South America. [1] I come from an affluent family, which allowed me to go to university [2] and acquire the necessary credentials to have a well-paying job in a creative field I enjoy, which in turn allows me all of these first-world comforts. Many people would say that my success is well-deserved due to my hard work and creative talent. While I’ll acquiesce to the fact that yes, maybe some of the work was my own, I can in no way deny that I had a lot of help getting there. As for creativity, well, the very fact that I’m even in a position to tell and share my stories — stories that draw upon the stories of privileged people of centuries and millenia past — really does say something about my own privilege, doesn’t it?

I know these injustices exist, but what can I do or say to make them better? If I wrote a game about poverty or war or genocide or any other form of institutionalised oppression I have not experienced, how would I do it without having at least some semblance of knowing the answers? How would I know whether said answers were doing good rather than harm to those oppressed? Would the people I portrayed even be able to play the game? Or would I merely be appeasing other privileged people through some form of armchair activism?

This is why, when writing game stories, I firmly stick to writing what I know. I deal with conflicts that are personal. Familiar. They may not be significant conflicts in the grand scheme of things, but many of them are representative of a much bigger and scarier state of affairs. Take the issue of racism, for example. It’s difficult to tell if you’ve never seen my face, but I’m not white. My parents are from Iran and the Philippines respectively, and they immigrated to Canada, where I was born and raised and still reside. For many years of my life, I lived in areas where I looked different from my peers — a definite visible minority. [3] Even in the supposedly-enlightened 1990′s, I received a fair share of racist comments and slurs and probably had far more of them uttered about me behind my back; kids can be downright vicious, you see. I’ve always heard it said by well-meaning people — the kind who “don’t see colour” — that one must have a thick skin for such comments, that they’re just words. Maybe they were, I don’t know. But those words, coupled by the fact that I saw with my own eyes that I was different, didn’t stop me from feeling like I didn’t belong and that somehow, I wasn’t wanted. I’m sure it contributed to me feeling a bit odd and out of step with the world throughout adolescence and persisting to this day.

I’m not sure how many people would have guessed, but Phlegmwad from Chivalry is Not Dead is largely based on the experiences I had growing up looking different; the paper bag he wears on his head happens to be the same shade of brown as my skin. It’s no accident that both the Queen of Everything and Leslie are very much Aryan in look. [4] And if you talk to Ahmet, the obviously Middle Eastern guy from the flea market, you’ll hear him complaining about the racially-charged oppression he’s dealt with at the hands of the Queen, exhorting Phlegmwad to kill her in the end like he was supposed to, using the commonality of their experiences as a means to get him “on his side”. Whether Phlegmwad acquiesces is ultimately up to the player; nevertheless, it adds what I feel is a more complex dynamic than your typical RPG moral dilemma, particularly if you managed to befriend the Queen in your playthrough.

Another aspect of my experiences that I dealt with in a game was in Pigeons in the Park. There’s a line of conversation that reveals that Bob’s real name is Babak, and that his parents are from Iran, but he calls himself Bob because he hates the way his Persian name marks him as different, thwarting his wishes to blend in unnoticed. Like me, he’s a “coconut” — brown on the outside, white on the inside. [5] Because we were raised in Canada, we don’t have the same experiences with culture as our parents, yet we also don’t have the same experiences as our white friends. It is these sorts of feelings that form the basis for movies like My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Bend It Like Beckham.

So, this is how I deal with issues of race when designing games and writing stories. I know my experiences are nowhere near as severe as the worst that can come out of institutionalised racism, but they are mine, and they are real, and I don’t believe they’re any less valid. That said, I do still feel guilty that I don’t feel I’m able to deal with “the bigger issues”. I sometimes think that it might be that I haven’t matured as a writer, but on second thought, maybe the very fact that I hesitate does mean I’m maturing as a writer. I don’t know. What do you think? [6]