I’ve thought some more about this month’s Round Table topic, and originally planned on doing a couple more posts on the subject throughout the month, but didn’t have very much time. So, here’s a short jumble of thoughts on two more “serious” topics I either have tried to address in games or would like to in the future.

I’ve no doubt talked at length about being a woman in the game industry before on this blog. It’s hard not to, when the field you work in is traditionally a big huge sausage fest. And it’s been getting to me even more these past several months than it did before; I’m currently one of two women working at Hothead out of 30+ people, and the only one who actually works on the games themselves. Don’t get me wrong, I very much enjoy the company of the guys I work with. It’s just that, as I remarked earlier regarding my childhood experiences of being a brown girl amongst a bunch of white kids, I can’t shake off the feeling of being an “other”, no matter how much said guys treat me like I’m “one of them”.

Yet perhaps more importantly, what it also tends to do, in my mind, is mark me as “different” from other women, as my personal experiences are nowhere near the norm for my gender. Through the writings of feminists, I recognise institutionalised prejudices against women as a group and find them unjust, but having rarely been hurt by said prejudices to the extent that most women are, I often feel as though I have no right to speak for the entirety of womanhood. Hence, in my game designs, I find myself writing about the adventures and misadventures of specific women, rather than, say, tackling heavy generalised topics such as rape culture. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t write games about the latter — quite the opposite, actually! — merely that I personally feel that I’m ill-equipped to do so.

Another issue that’s a hot button for me is that of religion. I am, unabashedly, a woman of faith. Though I am absolutely horrified by the many atrocities that various people in power have committed in the name of God, none of it stops me from believing there’s something out there that’s greater than what we perceive with our senses. My personal expression of faith does not seek to proselytise to others, or damn people to some kind of hell if they don’t see it my way. Ultimately, I believe we’re all in this together, and we need to learn to communicate rather than blow each other up.

This is another reason why I focus on games that are about people’s personal stories, rather than about abstract rule systems. I don’t want to present my views as “right” and those that oppose them as “wrong”, mainly because I can never be completely sure that what I know is “right” in the first place. The most I can really do is express what I’m thinking at a given point in time, and allow people to engage in a dialogue about it.