Gameplay Journal Entry #8
For this weeks journal entry, I played “A Closed World”, which is linked above. This game was designed to explore and research different aspects of games, in this case, the lack of compelling video game content for LGBTQ youth. As someone who enjoys playing video games, and is also part of the LGBTQ community, I had a personal interest in checking this game out. The theme of the game is a young queer person goes out into the forest with an endearing attitude and faces challenges along the way. With a history of homophobia in video game culture, it is refreshing to see games, albeit Indie, coming out with more inclusive themes.
Regarding the effectiveness of the message, the main characters ego takes the LGTBQ theme a lot farther than the game objectives do. In my opinion, there was no compelling queer content, and although the game engine allowed the players to discover their own path, it lacked the emotional diversity needed to make this game enjoyable. I think the game designers could’ve used methods discussed by Flannagan and Nissenbaum, such as Pre- and Post- attitudinal surveys, control groups, play testing, and other methods(188) to determine the effectiveness of the game designers message and theme. In an effort to make this game enjoyable to all players, but to be inclusive to the LGBTQ community, feedback from all groups of sexually diverse people would be required to make this successful.
References
College, M., Flanagan, M., College, H., University, H., Nissenbaum, H., University, N., . . . Authors: Mary Flanagan Hunter College. (2007, April 01). A game design methodology to incorporate social activist themes. Retrieved March 24, 2021, from https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1240624.1240654
