At the 2020 Barcelona Facct conference, I attended a CRAFT session organised by scholars and activists Dylan Baker, Alex Hanna and Remi Denton, on “Algorithmically Encoded Identities: Reframing Human Classification.” During the workshop, participants were invited to play the “Choose Your Own Administrative Violence Adventure.” In the (digital) zine, you navigate the administrative obstacles and life choices of “a non-binary person of Asian descent” who cannot “get the thought of medical transition out of [their] head.” While, as an equality and non-discrimination scholar, I was educated on the structural injustice faced by oppressed social groups and the violence binary language imposes, the introduction of a play element made for an experience more profound than the simple reading of an academic paper or newspaper clipping. To have an impact, however, it was important that whatever agency I thought my character had was confined and co-authored by the organisers’ lived experiences, including the societal constraints imposed on them. As a white cisgender man, I will never truly experience or know what it’s like to be non-binary or trans. Yet, in this particular case, my interactive and imaginative displacement into the body and mind of that non-binary person allowed me to at least better understand the everyday institutional and social processes that marginalise and drive toward desperation. And in recent lectures I teach on structures of oppression and politics of (in)visibility, I started incorporating their adventure to illustrate the power of play, and interactive fiction in particular, as an instrument for social justice.
As an exponent of interactive fiction, video games then seem to offer a concrete opportunity to offer a window into the life and struggles of others. Yet, upon reflection, I was hard-pressed to think of many examples that had an impact as profound as the one I had in Barcelona. It left me wonder: why is that, and what might this tell about my own relationship with video games as a medium?
Let me first preface by saying that, since their inception, video games have been a powerful medium for telling poignant, moving, and even political narratives. Steve Meretzky’s A Mind Forever Voyaging uses computer simulations as a plot device to caution against the political and economic end-phase of neoliberalism. Likewise, Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please is an excellent critique of the inhumanity that cybernetic measures in border control impose on people on the move. Still, their incorporation of a third-person, or observer, perspective introduces distance from the Other. Citizen Sleeper, which has a greater focus on the individualised experiences of its main character, creates distance too because, whatever parallels can be drawn between the game’s commodified Sleeper units and real-life dynamics of exploitation, such connections must first be translated through the lens of its dystopian, sci-fi setting. Put differently, while these titles may encourage self-reflection, they do so more so after than during the fact.
One would think that RPGs do close that gap, but they too often fail to author choices with sufficient immediacy or constraint. On the one hand, many titles favour player autonomy above all else. Such narratives of empowerment leave little room for the friction that real-world physical and psychological barriers cause. On the other hand, RPGs with streamlined campaigns seldom concern the lives of marginalised communities. Or, if they could – as stories about warring nations might – they are more likely to rely on narrative tropes of fantastical heroism and overcoming the odds than continuous struggles.
Of course, other ludonarrative structures are possible. One game from recent memory is 2025’s “and Roger.” Through narration and gameplay, and Roger wants to give players a sense of what it would be like for a person to live with (early onset) dementia, including the impact this mental decline has on relatives and support structures. I wish more titles like and Roger existed. And likely such titles do exist. Yet I’d argue that the relative rarity of such titles helps explain this game’s media coverage. That said, during my initial playthrough, the mechanical elements did obstruct my connection to the game’s central themes. I appreciate what the team of TearyHand Studio was going for. Experiences are always embodied. Neurological disorders scramble the connection between what a person wants to do, what they think they do, and what they actually do. In this context, making certain motions or actions more difficult for the player to perform represents the challenges to agency that mental conditions impose. At the same time, within a game environment, those challenges might not be immediately interpreted as metaphors for dementia but rather as gameplay obstacles we need to overcome. I am quite sure that for many players and Roger was effective exactly because of these mechanics. Yet, in my particular case, those gameplay choices once again created a distance between me and the game’s capacity to instil reflexivity in the Other.
I understand that such a disconnect may signify a lack of maturation on my behalf. For the longest time, I approached video games as a mechanical, rather than a reflexive medium. Perhaps this myopia prevents me from viewing and translating gameplay as a metaphor. In the coming years, I therefore hope to expand my own radar and seek experiences in gaming that dare to push narrative boundaries in order to understand the Other. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. While thinking about this subject, I decided to buy last year’s award-winning Consume Me, Jenny Jiao Hsia’s autobiographical portrayal of diet culture and eating disorders co-developed with AP Thompson. Having dealt with issues of body-positivity myself, it might be a starting point for expanding my ludonarrative grammar and, in so doing, see attempts to render the Other more visible, more clearly.
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