This piece contains significant spoilers for The Red Strings Club, as well as a content warning for transphobia.
Aaaaaaaaaand Devolver justâŚfucking hellâŚ
I understand why Danielle didnât get into explicit details in the piece, but can anyone talk about what happens in this specific moment? Her writing about the game makes it seem like the developer put a lot of thought into every minute detail, sexuality included, so Iâm curious where this âdeadnamingâ incident stumbles in particular.
& @JKDarkSide , this Devolver tweet seems kind of whack. A site like this is all about the public discourse, so not expecting it to take this argument to the public is unreasonable of Devolver in my opinion.
Devolver decided to play the âwe have a trans devâ card apparently:
https://twitter.com/devolverdigital/status/955597745498312704
Havenât played the game myself (this article is the first Iâve heard of the game), but Danielle goes into slightly more (still spoiler-free) detail on Twitter.
So is the deadname part used within the context of the world, like this is an explicitly bad thing to do to the character? I canât fully parse whether Danielle has an issue with its very inclusion or the approach the devs took.
Deadnaming is simply wrong. Period.
Like in the context of a villain doing it, Iâd understand, but they made it into a game mechanic and thatâs really shortsighted. Please keep in mind this a purposefully done shitty thing, just people who didnât know better fucking in a bit. Itâs Devloverâs responses that are really disappointing me. You should have just, like, not have said anything?
Theyâre about to get ratioâd to shit.
EDIT:
considering the spoiler Danielle gave, itâs also a matter of, like⌠Who the fuck goes and uses their deadname, a name that is, typically, not one you want to associate w/ yourself ever again, as a password?
Made a mistake in my earlier post, meant to write âPlease keep in mind this is not a purposefully done shitty thingâ
But yeah, Iâm a big fan of Devolver, but they have a bad history of making sloppy mistakes like these and not really learning from it. NOT A HERO had a lot of racist stereotyping and didnât really subvert or use it for satire, Mother Russia Bleeds is just kind of a huge mess, ect. This response to criticism was a REALLY bad call.
Danielle indicates that itâs someone elseâs password
So having not played this game, and understanding that Danielle is being purposefully vague to avoid spoiling the story, and seeing that she points out other ways in which the game seems to be treating a trans character poorly or, at a minimum, in a stereotypical way, I do have some comments on just the âDonât deadname. Ever.â line.
Using a deadname as a password, ârevealâ, plot twist, etc. is pretty shitty. But just having a deadname in a game about a fictional character in a game in a context in which the deadname would normally be found in the real world, such as old documents, emails, communications from before the person transitioned seems like a valid thing to have, as long as the context is appropriate. This is a real thing that real trans people have to deal with in real life. There are old documents, pieces of paper, databases, forum posts, websites, whatever, that are going to contain their deadname forever.
More generally, my, perhaps incorrect, understanding is that the concept of the âdeadnameâ is primarily a cultural thing that the trans community has adopted for a lot of extremely valid reasons. They just want to be themselves, for starters, and reminding them of a version of themselves that didnât feel true to themselves is obviously going to be uncomfortable, but also it can open them up to harm in their every day lives, negatively affect their ability to function in society due to being surrounded by either transphobic or ignorant people, and because itâs one way that bigots specifically use to go out of their way to cause harm by othering, belittling, and dehumanizing trans folks.
Imagine a Gone Home-style game with a trans character. Letâs say you know from the start the character is trans so itâs not some kind of ârevealâ or âgotchaâ, but youâre going to be going through the environment of the charactersâ parentsâ home, finding old documents, notes, pictures, videos, photo albums, etc. in which that character is naturally going to be depicted in a pre-transition state. Their deadname is going to be in that game in that context merely due to the fact of the passage of time and the ephemera that we all live behind as we live our lives. So to try and apply the mantra of âDonât deadname. Ever.â to that context of that story just wouldnât make any sense.
I also appreciate that in the course of writing an article like this, youâre going to have readers who may not even know about the concept of a deadname or the cultural faux pas (which is probably much too weak of a term in this case, but I canât think of a better one right now) that it represents, so I can completely understand and appreciate feeling the need to strongly make that point for readers who may just not know. And in the context of this particular game, it seems, they do use it in an inappropriate or trivializing way (turning it into the solution to an adventure game puzzle). (Also, sidenote, thatâd be a real fucking insecure password!)
Anyway, I just feel like in the course of talking about fiction, especially interactive fiction, thereâs room for a little more nuance than the phrase âDonât deadname. Ever.â seems to allow for. Especially taken out of the context of the article and put into a tweet.
I sort of agree with Devolver that Danielle should have contacted the devs when writing this piece. She explicitly writes: âI really donât know what the devs were thinking here.â Maybe find out? Iâm not saying there would be any justification that would excuse the offending part of the game but this would be a much more interesting read if Danielle got the developersâ explanation and then critiqued that as well.
If a creator can justify poor writing in their game after the fact, then they probably shouldnât have written it badly in the first place. Media critics do not and should not need creator validation to make a criticism of their work.
didnât see those, but sheâs also right in that that is worse
At the same time, Devolverâs calling out a media outlet via twitter is a weird move and poor practice. Especially since theyâre just the publisher, not the developer.
Since this is very much about a personal reaction the article doesnât strictly need the developerâs input.
I do think their perspective and some context might be valuable, but slugging it out on twitter is not the way to start that conversation. Social media is not the medium for this discussion, either between corporate entities or between a creator and a critic, especially since none of the parties Iâve seen are doing so from personal accounts.
Yes. Listening to the podcast, thatâs what it immediately sounded like was the point? Where like - this is a big corporation thing, many of which are still terrible about changing specific data sets, and - having not seen it, itâs hard to say, but the hard-line âdo not buy this, do not pay for thisâ seems⌠possibly strong handed?
Particularly when⌠something like Breath of the Wild seemed to get⌠next to no, if any, flak for the entire Gerudo Town thing? Which⌠Uh⌠trying to avoid profanity, but sucked in ways Iâd like to emphasize with coarser language.
(cw: soft spoilers for BotW scene, and some shitty transphobic ideas presented in it.)(Oh, hereâs a main-quest where we play for laughs, at the very least dressing as a woman, tricking people into believing you arenât what you appear, passing, etc. so male characters can be unwanted interlopers in womenâs spaces, haha, good job again Nintendo!)
I dunno. Both suck, probably, but this one kinda sounds like itâs making a point about a thing that does suck in the real world, instead of inventing reasons to, possibly unintentionally, but seemingly for humor, mock trans identities, and explore/play into a lot of super shitty garbage that gets thrown around already.
Which, instead of âhey, donât buy this.â got to be top 10 lists number one and two for the two people now giving a âdonât buyâ warning? WhichâŚ
Mmmm⌠Hmm⌠Very possible that the developer just did a bad job, and a dumb thing? Iâll be curious to hear their response to this, if they have one. Devolver is handling all of this terribly, regardless. I guess Iâm just trying to come to terms with how⌠disparate reactions to similar issues is-
Hmm. Probably time to walk around the block a few times, come back, and regret some/all of this post.
(Edit: Also, Iâm glad people are becoming sensitive about stuff like this, regardless of those disparities/that past judgement of media. I donât mean to deride Danielle or Austin, or anybody making a stink about this now. I love that this is a space wherein these kinds of considerations are being made.)
I just deleted this long thing Iâve been struggling to put into words for a while because @k80dey and @Anime basically said it.
But to piggyback on this:
& considering apparently 1 of the 3 people who developed this game is trans, this seems maybe legitimately harmful ? the game sounds excellent in every other regard
this feels especially offputting in the context of BotW getting such a huge recommend. Like, I canât speak for anyone else, but the way Gerudo first gets mentioned in BotW coverage and then the way the game is later recommended, often without even mentioning the transphobic jokes feels like⌠I dunno⌠do we have such low expectations of Nintendo that they get a pass but an indie dev tries hard, does mostly good, and because of that when they fuck up itâs much worse? Is it that most of BotW is the massive, expensive, gorgeous game about exploring, throwing torches at goblins and playing labyrinth balls maze games forever while Red String is a relatively tiny and hyper focused game that centers politics and is narrative driven so it lives way more in the critical thinking part of your head?
Like, to be clear, I really donât know the answer to these questions, and as someone that would recommend BotW but with a huge caveat about the transphobia⌠saying this game fucked up so badly it canât be recommend is just sitting poorly with me.
A couple thoughts:
Edit: since itâs pretty far down that thread I linked, hereâs a direct link to Austinâs response. I want to be clear that I donât think that the fact that Waypoint previously apologized for something makes them incapable of reporting on these issues, but I think other commenters here have made some pretty good criticisms of this particular article.
I strongly feel like when you like so much of how an indie game handles things like identity and sexuality and it does something that feels like a misstep that you should at least check that this might have involvement from a trans person before you kinda put them on blast. I got the feeling that might be the case just reading the article tbh. Devolverâs kneejerk response certainly wasnât great but in the end this piece wound up feeling kind of uncomfortable coming from a cis writer, and this really couldâve been easily avoided.
Just to put numbers to that Zelda comparison, there are five pages of results on the âBreath of the Wildâ tag. There are only two search results for âGerudoâ, one of which is a false positive. (If Waypointâs search engine wasnât real bad itâd be easier to get accurate numbers.)
Based off this weekâs WPR episode, it doesnât seem like Red Strings is going to experience a lift in coverage as a result of Danielleâs enthusiasm for most of it. So yeah, Devolverâs response sucked from the perspective of well, this is criticism not dramaturgy, but this also sucks for the reasons @k80dey and @anime and @majugi and @FarewellRuins all said and that Liz Ryersonâs tweeting about atm -
https://twitter.com/ellaguro/status/955648559512039425
I donât know. This is messy and it sucks and has no easy answers