Development 18 - Apologies to Memories OR False Authenticity

Your heart is a muscle the size of your fist

Keep on loving, keep on fighting

And hold on, hold on

Hold on for your life

Queerness is equal parts a marketing demographic and a desperate call into the darkness. Whenever I read games about articulating or exploring aspects of marginalization and especially queerness or mental illness, I run into an authenticity problem. That is to say, when a game lacks whatever it is that makes it authentic, it rings so hollow. In this blog post I'm going to discuss where that honesty dissonance sensation comes from, and how to move past it. In it, I'm also going to discuss "false authentic" games, or games that are designed to tug on your heartstrings while ultimately failing to actually be honest or well-designed. 

The Big Game

The guiltiest offender in the genre of "false authenticity" games is Memories, a winner of the 2017 200 Word RPG contest. 

Take a moment and read it. It's 200 words long. If this game made you feel something, I'm very impressed and proud of you. My emotional reaction could be best articulated as "guilt." I understood at the time that I'm supposed to be emotionally affected, but I'm absolutely not. It's making a vague gesture at sentimentality. I would be pretty surprised if anyone has played this game, or certainly enjoyed playing it. 

The most genius takedown of "Memories" I've ever read was by my friend JJ Muste, in his own short game "The Big Game." It takes the same core emotional premise of "Memories" (the ritual burning of pieces of paper to represent the abandonment of certain parts of yourself) and applies it to two football captains engaging in the big game, an unspecified football game of immense importance. It does an outstanding job articulating why "Memories" fails - because the mechanic ultimately teaches us nothing and does nothing, which is obvious when applied to the emotional possessions of a couple of football captains. What, exactly, does burning pieces of paper to represent memories accomplish? At the end of the day, what have you learned from the game? You've learned that old people forget things, I suppose. 

How is that authentic? What does it tell you about authentic experiences?

At least "The Big Game" is about an experience that JJ has vaguely had (in terms of competition). Not to be violently harsh, but "Memories" tells me nothing a NOVA documentary wouldn't.

How I Want To See Authenticity

Ten Candles is the game I've played that most directly connects to my queer experiences, and it's got nothing to do with queerness. I'm not even certain that it was written about queerness! But the reason it's able to do that (besides my personal love for all of its themes) is that it's not a game about queerness. It's a horror game, exploring themes of loss and hope in a hopeless place. Turns out that that entire framework is, in and of itself, queer! 

The most authentic games about identity that I've ever played aren't explicitly about worming around in the sadness of that identity. It's either about something else, that adopts something intrinsically about that identity into it, or it's about finding fun in a different aspect of that identity than sadness.

"Queer Messes" is a game about messy queer relationships. It's not about some abstract tragedy of the queer experience, but is instead about the celebration of that experience, in all its disastrous complexity. 

False Authenticity occurs when the mechanics of the game fail to do something meaningful with the theme. I'm significantly more interested in a "burning paper to forget" mechanic in something like Ten Candles, where it becomes about the sacrifices you need to make in order to survive, instead of just an abstraction of dementia. I'd love to see any number of games about dementia, but I'd want to see it be from somewhere with heart, that actually gets at an experience beyond sadness.

Games don't need to be fun any more than art needs to be fun. But games need to be meaningful, and they ought to say something that should be said. And in the end, they certainly shouldn't be "emotions tourism."