The Legend of Baron

The Legend of Baron

Final project made by Group 5 of CMLIT 191N, Fall 2021, The Pennsylvania State University

The core story of our game will be about the player who is a non-gendered student at Penn State that goes on an adventure to save president Eric Baron. Our group chose the topic of our game after some brainstorming and we came to the consensus that we wanted our game to be about Penn State or at least have some ties to the school. We chose this because we feel that as students, we have a good understanding of the overall experience of the university to supply a relatable and accurate spin on the experience that our potential players can appreciate and or relate to. Our game does not have an educational purpose and we intend it to be a game for entertainment. If there were a message or takeaway that we would like the players to receive is the feeling of familiarity and that as a student body we may all be different but a lot of the same experiences unite us as Penn State students.

The audience for our game is specifically Penn State students or previous alumni of the university. We are taking into consideration our own position in respect to the type of character that we are representing by using our shared experiences at the university. But to take the position of the other people who could feel represented in this game, we are having the character be non-gendered to increase the feelings of inclusivity. To double down on the decision to make the character of the game non-gendered, we felt that not giving the character of the game a gender made it more immersive to allow the player to project themselves into the position of the character. Additionally, we acknowledged that Penn State students come in all shapes and sizes so it would have been impossible to try to fully represent the student body in a single character. 

The three connections to issues we have discussed or read about in class that we plan for our game to highlight are violence in video games, gender and the identity of the player, and the tools used to help increase immersion. We learned in class that violence often sells and games that include it are often more successful and played more. This correlation causes game companies to over glamorize these often-gruesome gameplay features. The film Joystick Warriors: Video Games, Violence & the Culture of Militarism that we watched in class was a prime example of this practice and really exposed the truth that as a consumer is often neglected. Our game is connected to these concepts because in our text-based choice system we plan to have varying levels of violence for every choice so the player can play how they want and will not be forced to be violent if they do not want to. This addition to the game was inspired by the pacifist ending of Undertale that we discussed in class. We felt that the subversion of these themes of violence would lead to a more enjoyable and genuine game.

Gender and the identity of the player as well as the identity of the cast of characters in games has been a strong highlight of the course and was important to us to consider in the making of the game. We have learned in class about the many tropes attributed to specific gendered characters and how many times the same recycled trope of the damsel in distress and the subsequent savior from a male hero appears in video games. The creators of Feminist Frequency have created an expansive list of common tropes attributed to females such as the damsel in distress, women as a reward, and the overall over sexualization of female characters. Our game, in response to these tropes, plans to switch the positions of the gender tropes so that a male character will be the one needing to be saved instead of the traditional female captive. Another noteworthy connection to what we have learned concerning gender and the identity of characters is the relationship between the player and the player's character concerning how they identify. “Play Like a Girl: Gender Expression, Sexual Identity, and Complex Expectations in a Female- Oriented Gaming Community” talks about how the forced gender and sexual identify given to the player and characters often presents a barrier that takes away from the game instead of using it as solution to a more representative game (Richards 165). Our game aims for its non-gendered character to be this solution to better representation so that players feel more included and not forced into a predetermined box.

Lastly, we wanted to use what we have learned in class where many developers go wrong to create a more immersive game. Using some of the previously listed connections to course material, we plan to create a quality story that aims to include and let the player choose how they want the story to go. This plan was inspired by our reading of Janet H. Murray’s chapter on “Immersion” in Hamlet on the Holodeck. Narrative is talked about as a key contributor to immersion and the idea that “A good story serves the same purpose for adults, giving us something safely outside ourselves (because it is made up by someone else) upon which was can project our feelings” stood out to us as a key aspect to include in our game (Murray 100). We aimed to make this projecting of the players' feelings easier by making it more inclusive and creating a genuine narrative that does not force the player.

Our expectations for the finished game are that using the features talked about previously, we will have an interactive narrative for our text-based game that lets you pick your own adventure to save President Eric Barron. Our intended audience for our game is the students and previous alumni of Penn State. It would be released as an in-browser game that aims to be an entertaining game that relates to the experience of Penn State while also using the platform to create a more inclusive type of game that does not fall into the traditional tropes and practices usually associated with video games. 

The genre of the game would be an adventure game as we plan for the story to be an adventure to save the president of the university. Our twist on the genre is that the traditional gender roles and tropes are subverted and there may be pre-written storylines but the choose your own adventure style lets you play how you want.