Non-Binary explores how gendered language hems us in
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.
Marco and Mattia, a.k.a. QueerWolf and LazyFox, work together as owof games. Their game Non-Binary is a bullet hell about language — thankfully for me, it has an easy mode! — and how we’re surrounded by gendered terms. That’s even more true in their native Italian, but they’ve translated the game into English and adjusted the writing to match.
How long have you been making games?
We started designing our first video game in the summer of 2021, so it’s about a year now.
What tools do you like to use?
To program: Unity and Ink. For getting organized: Drive and Trello. To brainstorm: paper, pen, and cute dogs to cuddle.
What themes or genres do you like to explore?
We love to explore the experiences of those who live on the margins, bringing the lives of queer people to the center. Our gaze is intimate, personal: we want to talk about the difficulties of the individual, which are in turn often a reflection of larger social issues. However, we want to avoid perpetuating a negative view: queer narratives are often dramatic, whereas for us it is important to talk about euphoria, recognition, joy. Being queer is a beautiful journey.
What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of making games?
Marco: I love brainstorming, seeing how the ideas that emerge are bigger than the individual people in the group. I love much less the organizational and bureaucratic part, which makes you feel small even if you are the most competent person in the world.
Mattia: I definitely don’t love debugging. Whereas exploring new technologies is something I love.
Is there a game that has affected you recently?
Marco: He fucked the girl out of me by Taylor McCue. Three runs and still I haven’t been able to get to the end because of how powerful it is.
Mattia: Chicory. There are tons of things that touched me in that game, but especially the way it talks about feeling not competent enough, strong enough, good enough.
Non-Binary is a narrative game that turns the gender binary into a bullet hell. How did you come up with that core gameplay?
We reasoned about how words can hurt, like bullets, and from there the connection to bullet hell was instinctive. You may survive a gunshot, but the scar will remain.
The game is available in English and Italian. What was it like translating so much loaded language between the two?
The first draft was in Italian, where gender is strongly expressed in every sentence. When we decided to do the English translation, it was necessary to rethink the structure of the sentences to mark the presence of pronouns. In a sense the two versions are thus the same game and a different game: the discussion of inclusive language in Italian is less about pronouns and more about new grammar, and this was reflected in the game itself. Now that we are working on the French and Spanish translation, we are noticing the same peculiarities.
How was it to merge two such different gameplay styles into one smooth narrative experience?
In the initial version (the one born during the Global Game Jam) the two elements were much more separated. During the revision phase we looked for ways to make them blend, focusing for example on the presence of bullets during the text moments, and on the word wall, which makes the text element persistent during the main bullet hells. It was actually easier than expected, once we really focused on what the theme of the game was.
I was moved by the narrator’s discomfort in seemingly everyday situations. What do you hope players take from that?
Often when we narrate the lives of people on the margins we put the focus on the big dramatic elements. This somehow makes us feel innocent, absolved of our responsibilities. The problem, however, is that these things are justified by our small everyday actions, our silences, the things we say or the glances we cast. In this sense we would like to make the player become more aware, without aiming at an unnecessary sense of guilt, but rather a sense of responsibility. For enby/trans people, the message instead is, “hey, it’s normal that it hurts, you are not the one who is wrong.”
The orb crafting sliders are really cool — that is a neat scene. How did you think of that, and how did you make it?
[Spoiler alert!] There are a thousand reasons. For example, together we have been thinking a lot about how queer time is not the same as cis time: we can have parallel lives, and trans people often talk about a second adolescence when they begin to show themselves to the world. In that sense we can often only affirm who we are when “the game” has been going on for quite a while. As we said before, we did not want to put dramatic elements at the center. And that is why focusing on self-expression, on gender euphoria, seemed crucial to us. This complicated things in no small way: in fact the game pretends almost the whole time to be 2D, until the ending!
