Readers jeer the “3 a.m. fantasy of a male nerd” in our comment roundup
Don’t Get Your Hopes Up
One of Anthony John Agnello’s major complaints in his review of the first episode of République, the stealthy iOS game from developer Camouflaj, was the lack of characterization given to its hero, a young lady named Hope. “Hope is pretty much a blank slate as well, a teenage girl with a crush on the quiet boy in her classes,” he wrote. A few commenters found this disappointing, as well. Don Marz led the charge:
I thought this was supposed to be a game with a well-rounded female lead, but that sounds like the silent 3 a.m. fantasy of a male nerd who never got over high school. I know it’s par for the course in male nerd culture, the action-fantasy-girl who inexplicably picks the passive male classmate to pursue because his lack of presence is just insanely compelling to her for some reason, but I guess I expected something more.
LawrenceFrohely added:
Even lesbian lead characters seem to be more common than strong female leads with strong male love interests. That’s probably, in part, because lesbian lead characters often (but not always!) fulfill male fantasies just as much as the bikini-clad Amazon who pines away for the quiet kid. Whether the designer intends it or not, both types of characters remove the male gamer’s dreaded competition from the arena and allow him to inhabit a self-centered fantasy.
Teach Them Well
In an entirely welcome tangent from the Out This Month matters at hand, boardgameguy mentioned that he spent some of his holiday vacation playing an innovative iOS game, Simogo’s Device 6. This prompted Mr. Martini to share some thoughts on the efficacy of more literary games like Device 6 as educational tools:
I strongly recommend Device 6 as a tool for the technique called “close reading.” It’s an educational strategy that is in vogue in English language education. Basically, it involves students reading a short but challenging text over and over again, each time focusing on a different element of the text (things like authorial intent, tone, sentence structure, etc.). Like so many educational mandates, the technique itself can be really valuable, but it is often implemented poorly. The problem is that students aren’t presented with new ideas or challenges when returning to the text, so multiple readings quickly become a dreadful slog.
Device 6 solves this problem beautifully. Its puzzle structure creates a genuine incentive for re-reading each chapter, and many puzzles force the player to reconsider their interpretation of the text before they can move forward. The novel layout of the onscreen text also challenges readers expectations of page layouts and the meaning associated with paragraph breaks and text orientation. I really wish we had more texts designed like this. And I wish we could broaden our institutionalized concept of “texts” to include things like Device 6.