Some of you have probably already read about my company's upcoming game "Stonewall Brawl", which recreates in a tongue-in-cheek fashion the events of the Stonewall Riots. Stories started appearing in the blogosphere about it on Thursday the 12th, and on Friday the 13th (appropriately enough) we started seeing the first comment backlash.
Mostly people have expressed concern over the fact that the main character is a white male instead of a black drag queen. This was a poor selection of screen shots on our part, but we had finished animating the white male character while the black drag queen was still undergoing some pixel surgery. Of course, I knew as soon as we publicized this game, we'd immediately hear about something that wasn't quite right. It's been an interesting discussion in our half-gay, half-straight office: where does something go from being "just funny" to "political satire"?
The tough part here is that we're actually trying to make fun of the game mechanic of "Streets of Rage" style games (which generally involve a lot of button-mashing) while also giving people a potentially empowering experience. We're basically asking the question, "What if Stonewall were actually one super-powered LGBT (or insert letter of your choice here) person versus the cops?" There are good game play reasons for this, including the fact that having the player control more than one character at a time is a difficult interface problem (though we are pushing to add a "buddy battle" mode before the game goes live in a week). We've also attempted to come up with ways of indicating other brawlers on the street, but the focus of the game is really on you, the player, getting to kick some authority ass.
Things have gotten a LOT better for the LGBT community in the last 30 years, but it's still important to feel this empowerment. I have just been rereading John Rechy's "The Sexual Outlaw", a book written in 1977 about gay versus the police in LA during the three previous years. Revisiting this book has been somewhat of a revelation to me. OK, I'll be the first to admit that when I first read it in high school in the '80s, I skipped a lot of the analysis for the juicy bits... and got a pretty weird impression of gay life in the process, which took my coming out and actually finding a community before I realized just how weird it was. However, in reading the book now, so much of it is about the negative effects of oppression. A surface reading of the book led me to think that Rechy was advocating public sex as the ultimate subversion against the criminalization of gay behavior, but on my second reading, I realized that he was talking about public sex as an angry reaction to oppression.
Whether public sex actually solves anything is debatable, but then again we can also debate whether violence solves anything. However, the point is, in part, that striking back against authority feels good. This is part of why games like "Grand Theft Auto" do so well: it's not that (most) people really want to go out and kill other people, but that they want to feel like they can explore a more subversive side of life.
Today, (most) people also wouldn't go out looking for a fight with the cops, even though many people live in fear of some authority figure or other. "Stonewall Brawl" gives players a chance to act out a superpowered fantasy against the backdrop of historic events. I am glad that so far the game has gotten people to discuss the significance of Stonewall a bit more; I hope that once the game is released, people will also be able to laugh along with it. It's pretty outrageous. And I mean that in the good way!
Today I marched in Boston Pride with the ACLU (full disclosure: I am not a card-carrying member).
