Made for 500 sales of Videogames for Humans, a book I teach a lot!
Genderwrecked gives the player an opportunity to reflect on and play with the meaning of gender through meeting a series of surreal and sometimes grotesque monsters. Meeting each monster, you must decide: will you fight or kiss them? Not every monster wants to fight or kiss you, though! What is this post-gender world, and how did you get there? What was gender and what is it, now, to you? You have to answer these questions yourself, but conversing with the characters gives some clues.
Some games about gender address a primarily trans audience through highly specific and personal experiences, so cis players in my classroom, or even trans people of another generation or background, can feel like outsiders observing a strange world. I’ve learned through teaching this game that regardless of their identity going in, most students seem to feel welcomed and implicated by this world instead. Everyone has some relationship with gender after all. Cis people could use a chance to examine gender just like anyone else. And any player is highly different from the characters in their relationship to gender. Negotiating through difference and consent develops a kind of respect between the players and the work.
I was enchanted when I first played this game as a submission to the QGCon Arcade. I never dreamed I would get to collaborate with Ryan Rose Aceae and Heather Flowers in my teaching! Ryro inspired me to express myself more through art and learn how to use Ren’Py. If you like this game, check out Flowers’ Extreme Meatpunks series, the third-person apocalyptic visual novel/fighting games! There’s a tabletop version too where you can fight in mech suits made of meat.
Taught in Haptic Media, Spring 2021 at Occidental College
Taught multiple times at Brown University and Occidental College
Taught in Haptic Media Spring 2021, at Occidental College
Taught multiple times at Brown University and Occidental College
Taught in Haptic Media Spring 2021, at Occidental College
Taught in multiple classes at Brown University and Occidental College
Taught in Haptic Media Spring 2021, at Occidental College
Taught in Critical Video Game Studies, Brown University
Taught in Representing Sexuality and Gender on Screen Fall 2019, at Brown University
Taught in Haptic Media Spring 2021, at Occidental College
Taught in Haptic Media Spring 2021, at Occidental College
Taught in Haptic Media Spring 2021, at Occidental College
Taught in Haptic Media Spring 2021, at Occidental College
Taught in Haptic Media Spring 2021, at Occidental College
Taught in Haptic Media Spring 2021, at Occidental College
Taught in Haptic Media Spring 2021, at Occidental College
Taught in Queerness & Games Fall 2018, at Brown University
Taught in Haptic Media Spring 2021, at Occidental College
