Playing Feminist (fun!)
In Feminist Challenge 2k18, self-proclaimed "friendly neighborhood feminist" Lydia sends out a series of challenges once a week over the course of a year, targeting any cis-gendered men who sign up for it. It isn't marketed as a game; the point, Lydia writes, "is to encourage men to approach empathy with women by building their own personal testimonies of awkwardness, inconvenience and pain. The belief behind this is that performance can add a different level of appreciation above intellectual understanding" (http://feministchallenge.wixsite.com/fc2k18/about). It's reminiscent of Mattie Brice's empathy games, particularly EAT, in which Brice lists a set of rules designed to provoke empathy with a person in their position: namely, a poor, trans student/game designer (for more on empathy games, check out the work of merritt kopas (kopas, m. (2014). Interrupting play: Queer games futurity. Workshop, New York University Game Center, Brooklyn, NY), Brenda Brathwaite Romero (https://www.ted.com/talks/brenda_brathwaite_gaming_for_understanding), and Queer Game Studies (Ruberg, B. & Shaw, A. Queer Game Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
Back to fc2k18: Week 1's challenge was "shave your legs" and week 2's challenge was "take a pregnancy test." But, Lydia writes in week 2, "for double points(!) I have a more complex challenge to simulate what you might feel like if you were testing for an unplanned pregnancy. Follow these steps:
Pull an all-nighter. In the wee hours of the morning read political news, check your bank account, do more situps than you normally do, clean your toilet with one hand while eating an unhealthy snack with your other hand, and read something old: the first emails you ever sent, a love letter you wrote to an ex, the first posts you ever posted on social media, something at least a little embarrassing.
In the morning, don’t shower and don't eat breakfast.
Go about your day without telling anyone about your night. When you have a break, go to the drug store and buy a box of 2 pregnancy tests and take it to the bathroom.
NOW: Take the first test.
While you're still sitting on the toilet, [...] read this.
Take the second test.
Throw away the tests and leave the drug store without making eye contact with anyone."
A game is made up of constitutive, operational, and implicit rules (Salen & Zimmerman, Rules of Play, 128–130). The constitutive rules are the math behind the game's structure: Chutes and Ladders is the same constitutive game as taking turns rolling dice and adding the rolls together, while occasionally adding or subtracting predetermined amounts if your total score hits certain numbers. The operational rules are the ones that come in the box of a board game: set up the pieces, take turns rolling dice, move your piece that amount. The implicit rules include the ones not written down but understood, and they often comprise a broader set of societal norms: don't prick your finger and use the blood to mark your paper while playing tic-tac-toe, don't wait 47 hours between dice rolls, don't emotionally destroy the 7-year-old you're playing against with vicious trash talk. No one tells an adult not to play that way; you just wouldn't. Basically, Lydia's fc2k17 takes some of the hidden, implicit rules of femininity and writes them operationally.
"Ok. But why…would I…want to do that?" My boyfriend replied, quite carefully, when I excitedly told him about the project. He is a smart and thoughtful soul, and also a straight cis white dude.
"What do you mean 'want'?" I demanded.
He paused, in the wary manner of a man who has lived through 2017. "I mean…this seems like a deliberately unpleasant set of steps designed to make me feel bad. Why would I want that?"
This question seemed to me, a year into my game studies career, infuriatingly beside the point. Why the hell would you play a game just because you want to? Just because it provides some treacly, shallow, escapist fun? There's a place for that, sure—lord knows I love Nora Roberts books—but why confine the awesome potential of empathy-provoking interactivity to something as trivial as pretending to be an uncomplicatedly heroic supersoldier? Why wouldn't you want to use that power as a force for understanding something real and true? What the hell could be more important than that?
For the record, yes I am super fun at parties, and also, I'm sure, delightful to date.
"The point is also to have some fun," Lydia writes, a bit like an afterthought. But it's an open debate. "Play is not necessarily fun…let's not talk about play as fun but as pleasurable, opening us to the immense variations of pleasure in this world," writes Miguel Sicart (Play matters. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014. p. 3). On the other hand, classical good game design requires 'double seduction': the challenge of designing autotelic activities like games is that, since there's no extrinsic motivation for continuing to play, game designers must provide intrinsic motivation (i.e. fun in some form) in order for players to 1) begin playing and 2) keep playing (this is the 'double' in 'double seduction') (S/Z, p.333). But having no fun CAN be fun, argues Bonnie Ruberg in a great article entitled "No Fun: The Queer Potential of Video Games that Annoy, Anger, Disappoint, Sadden, and Hurt" (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/585657/pdf). Moreover, what we think of as fun is often just a hedonism that quickly goes stale, whereas lasting fun is found through Mihály Csíkszentmihályian Flow (https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061339202). And suffering, writes A. Järvinen in agreement, is M. Kubovy's fifth "pleasure of the mind," which accounts for:
"the player's willingness to play even in the face of potentially suffering loss or experiencing negative emotions. This paradox has been explained in psychological theory with the concept of "metamood". The term accounts for a mental process where individuals experience unpleasant emotions on the object level, but also positive emotions and enjoyment on the meta-emotional level" [1].
(also included in this conversation: lest we forget, feminists are definitionally un-fun, as froths the lowest common denominator of the internet.)
This was also the week of Geraldine DeRuiter's "I Made the Pizza Cinnamon Rolls from Mario Batali’s Sexual Misconduct Apology Letter", a pointed, to-the-letter execution of a flawed algorithm. Her blog is a brilliant encapsulation of the mirror image of mis-play: the perfect play of a terrible game, done as a protest of that game. A jackass of a man handed us this shitty recipe, DeReuiter suggests, and I have followed his steps exactly to reach an outcome for which I will be castigated. The rules are wrong, but they are the rules I have been given, and I am trying to play them as best I can.
To be more theoretical about it: Lydia, DeRuiter, Brice, and Romero are playing with intentional estrangement—Shklovskian ostranenie in game form. Viktor Shklovsky, most famous of the Russian Formalists (ok fine, the sole Russian Formalist I know), came up with the concept of ostranenie in 1919. The function of art is to defamiliarize the quotidian, he argues: "[Art] exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony" (Shklovsky 1965 [1919], p.12; translated by Lemon and Reis, in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays). By making the everyday strange, Lydia's fc2k18 offers players the estrangement that enables new understanding.
Bertolt Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt takes Shklovsky's ostranenie, applies it specifically to theater, and intends it to be used as a political tool. For Brecht the Marxist, laborers are already alienated under capitalism; his Verfremdungseffekt simply intends to highlight how weird it is just to accept that alienation. It is, as Schaefer has argued, a "'Verfremdung' der 'Entfremdung'," a defamiliarization of alienation (Schaefer, H. (1958). Der Hegelianismus der Bert Bret'schen Verfremdungstechnik in Abhängigkeit von ihren marxistischen Grundlagen. Stuttgart: Photocopie. p. 94). By performing a shitty recipe and staring at us while she does it, DeRuiter's piece produces something more like Verfremdungseffekt.
(These last two paragraphs, by the way, are heavily indebted to Holger Pötzsch's http://gamestudies.org/1702/articles/potzsch, an ungodly good article I keep rereading and underlining in different colors)
Verfremdungseffekt isn't fun, if we're defining fun as "pleasant" rather than "Flowful." Ostranenie can, I think, be a little more fun, but still not really. Deep, certainly—the experience can definitely make you a better, wider, more self-actualized person. But something beyond fun.
[1] Because this reference was too damn long, it has been made an endnote. Btw, this is the kind of devious misplay that academics do when they write long blog posts on Saturdays. Järvinen, A. (2009). Understanding video games as emotional experiences. In The video game theory reader 2 (B. Perron and M. Wolf, Eds.), pp. 85-108. London: Routledge. p. 106; Kubovy, M. (1999). On the pleasures of the mind. In Well-being: The foundations of hedonic psychology (D. Kahneman, E. Diener, and N. Schwarz, Eds.), pp. 134-154. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
