Ava made a scripting language to share everyday misgendering
The Queer Games Bundle is a collection of nearly 600 items by LGBTQ+ creators and teams, nearly 400 of which are independent video games, all sold for just $60. I’m talking with creators from the bundle about their games and their making habits. Visit the bundle and consider buying it.
This interview discusses transphobia.
In Ava’s short game Gender Dysphoria, you navigate tricky conversations as Iris, a trans woman. And there is . . . very little comfort. The part I found most grueling was Iris continuing to talk with her parents and tell them she loves them while they “decide” whether or not to disown her. It’s an eye-opening game, the making of which seems to have been cathartic for Ava.
How long have you been making games?
Looks like it’s been about 10 years now.
What tools do you like to use?
I don’t know! I decided to switch over to Godot recently but generally speaking I don’t really like most tools I need to use. Though, I do like the narrative scripting language I made (which I used for Gender Dysphoria), but perhaps that’s a very biased opinion.
What themes or genres do you like to explore?
I haven’t really made that many games that I think are good so I don’t really feel like I can comment much on this. Although, I’m generally interested in exploring sci-fi ideas or different perspectives and making games which make the world a better place. I feel like games are especially suited at communicating those kinds of things.
What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of making games?
I love it when people enjoy the things I make and I also really enjoy the process — the parts which probably seem terribly boring from the outside — of making a game. I find it really interesting!
“I wanted to increase the tension and anxiety for the player so they feel the same way I do — that it could happen at any moment, at any time, regardless of what I was doing.”
Is there a game that has affected you recently?
The game which had the biggest impact on me is Journey. It really changed what I thought games could do and I haven’t played a game since which has connected with me in such an emotional and meaningful way.
Gender Dysphoria is an onslaught of tough conversations and misgendering. What led you to make it?
I was really frustrated at the time with another game I was making (which I eventually cancelled, but I didn’t yet know I would make that decision at the time) and I wanted to make something I could polish, release, and be satisfied with.
When I go to social events, I don’t feel like people are very aware of the struggles I and other transgender people live with. At most people know about the surgeries, the name changes, the discrimination… There’s nothing wrong with it but no one really knows what it’s like to be in the trenches, so to speak.
So, I wanted to make something that showed how the inane can really wear on someone. How do you dress, how do I navigate a conversation with a new acquaintance, what is it like to shop for clothes? These kinds of things are a constant energy drain for me, especially as an introverted person, and I find that writing things down helps me get over them.
Even now I fret over stuff like whether or not my hair style is feminine enough (even though I really shouldn’t worry about it — I should just do what makes me happy — but it does change how people tend to gender you). So, that’s why I made it. I wanted people to feel what I felt.
I liked the fractured nature of the conversations. How did you decide to break them up that way?
To give you a better idea of what’s going on there, the only scenes that play in order is the story arc where you are on your phone with your parents. The first and last scenes are always the same. The rest of the scenes — there are four other arcs — are a cohesive story if you order them in sequence, but instead they are in a random order for each playthrough. Play the game again, and you get a different sequence of events.
At a thematic level, this is sort of how I feel about daily life sometimes. I wanted to increase the tension and anxiety for the player so they feel the same way I do — that it could happen at any moment, at any time, regardless of what I was doing. And when it happens, you can’t help but think about the last time something like this happened, and you’re not really present in the moment anymore. Everything feels messy, disorganized, yet painfully connected.
I also had a lot of fun ideas I wanted to experiment with, such as choices affecting what happens for a scene which takes diagetically takes place in the past but one that the player hasn’t seen yet. There is a choice or two like that in Gender Dysphoria, but I don’t really think I took as much advantage of this as I would have liked. I’d like to revisit it sometime.
“I wanted to make something that showed how the inane can really wear on someone. How do you dress, how do I navigate a conversation with a new acquaintance, what is it like to shop for clothes?”
You say the game is a kind of personal processing — how did working on it make you feel?
At the time, it made me feel awful. I originally wanted to write one more arc than I ended up doing, but I couldn’t get myself to continue writing. I feel like I have left some of the pain behind nowadays though, and I’m happy I wrote it.
What led you to add voice acting to the conversations? I think they add a sense of urgency.
I met a visually impaired game developer in a discord server and talked to him for a while, and I really thought it was a shame that someone like him couldn’t play my game. I care a lot about accessibility, and I decided that my game was a suitable candidate. You might have noticed that I even added descriptive audio support to the game, though I had to actually hire a voice actor for it since the speech to text plugin for Unity at the time wasn’t compatible with the fact that my game is technically open source (I think this is still true). There was also the added challenge of hiring and working with voice actors and actually putting that kind of content in the game — I was eager to acquire more knowledge and skills. I clearly have much more to learn about making games accessible!
What do you hope people will take from playing the game?
Well, I think I answered this question earlier, but I am also pretty open about this on the itch page for the game. “I hope that it can give cisgender people an idea of what being transgender is like and for those who are transgender themselves that they are not alone in their experiences and that there’s someone else who has felt the pain too.” I don’t think there’s much I can add to that.
