For this week’s critical play, I played With Those We Love Alive, a text-based narrative game in which you’re a character that makes weapons for an evil empress. The game builds a world through interesting story painted in mainly mundane language that downplays some of the horrors of the game. Quickly, you realize that the only interesting part of your existence is your ability to customize the weapons you create for the empress; since you live in the palace and have essentially nothing else to do once you’re done exploring the palace, you’ll oftentimes just choose to sleep. The game’s mechanics are entirely centered around selecting pink words to choose to follow that thread or clicking on purple ones to change them to another option. In tandem, your encourage to draw on your body at certain points in the game.
As it relates to feminist theory and feminist gameplay, With Those We Love Alive does create a narrative as Chess prescribes, however, I felt it ultimately felt flat and static. Aside from a few moments of action that take you out of the repetitive gameplay and provide new story elements, much of the narrative are nearly identical loops that don’t feel like they’re building towards anything. At the same time, your choices don’t feel like they have any impact, resulting in a lack of play empowerment, and therefore a lack of player engagement. Aside from a few callbacks to past descriptions of weapons or the empress, you can tell that the story is the same as it would be in any other version. Essentially, you can see the edge of the magic circle and feel yourself on a track towards some inevitable ending. There’s a very apparent lack of player autonomy in the game.
You could make the case that this is smart commentary on women’s role in the patriarchy: a lack of autonomy and instead repetitive tasks to be completed. However, it feels like there’s better ways to get this message across than through what ends up being stilted gameplay. While the message of a lack of autonomy is important to communicate in some fashion, literally limiting the autonomy of the player in a meta way does result in, at least what I would consider, a shortcoming for the game.
Additionally, a major argument Chess makes in her piece is that feminists need play. With Those We Love Alive to me feels closer to social commentary than true play. At the same time, it’s very possible that my personal taste in games just doesn’t align with those one in particular and that others are engaged in the story. In that case, the game fully succeeds as it manages to tell a story very different from conventional ones found throughout the current game industry in a manner that challenges the norms of game mechanics. The added layer of player engagement through drawing on oneself furthers this break from convention in a way that I haven’t seen in any other video game.
Discussion question: How do you recommend game designers balance communicating important messages with creating fun, engaging games?
