Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Broken Age and Playing Against Gender Type!

After over a year of waiting, pussyfooting, lollygagging, and managing some incredibly troubling technical issues that I would not have foreseen a year ago, I finally finished the second act of Broken Age last week.  It's great for all the reasons that people are saying it's great: it's a call back to the best elements of a genre long past, it's visually charming, marvelously acted, and superlatively written.  These are all true statements.  But what makes Broken Age revolutionary, the element of Broken Age that I'd like to discuss herein, actually has to do with its construction of gender.

I'm on a bit of a bender on the topics of race and gender, and while the importance of an active discourse on the subjects is certainly highlighted at present, gamers as a culture often seclude themselves from those discourses, conceptualizing the "global community" as a sort of collectivized entity represented by a singular, myopic, overweight white man.  This stereotype has become observably inaccurate in the modern era (in fact, I'm typing this as I look at the monitor of my girlfriend's new gaming rig, which we're in the process of shaking down at present) but many developers, big and small, still hold to it.  There are noteworthy interruptions in this pattern, and many of them introduce important discussions to the community, and force gamers to confront notions of privilege and presumption in some pretty amazing ways.

Broken Age is not so forthright with its engagement.  It's not that Broken Age isn't subversive - it's that it's beyond the point where it's interested in discussion.  Broken Age engages in the kind of somewhat problematic post-racialism that the best works of Samuel Delaney turn on: the world of Broken Age consists largely of people, many of whom have different colors of skin.  In the world of Broken Age, that fact is absolutely meaningless and, as such, it simply highlights the absurdity of the weight with which many individuals still imbue those superficial qualities with.  That's a laudable gesture, but it doesn't really establish grounds for a dialogue.  That's not a bad thing, necessarily.  Tim Schafer sets up lots of amazing dialogues in Broken Age (in fact, it's tough to ignore them all here, and I might have to write about it again come next week) and an active dialogue about race doesn't have to be one of them.  It's not Schafer's job to have that conversation, and, frankly, he's probably not the best person to introduce it.  But he does very explicitly introduce inversions of gender type.  And while Schafer, again, might not be "the revolutionary" we asked for, his colorful, subversive world presents the revolutionary ideas that video games, as a genre, need.

To those who haven't played Broken Age yet, the game turns on the intertwined adventures of two characters: the pugnacious young woman, Vella, and the sensitive young man, Shay.  Shay is raised to be a leader, to fight and solve problems ably, but throughout most of his adventures there's a certain softness to his interactions with the world: his training programs are literally swaddling him for his own safety.  As such, he emerges from the world a leader, of sorts, but one whose attempts at self-definition are often truncated by his own ill-preparation and an utter lack of capacity for physical action.  Shay represents a kind of inverted male authority figure, subverted by the more physically ably, and highly violent, Vella.

Vella comes from a long line of warriors, and the second item she acquires in the game (after a cupcake) is a knife.  The knife motif endures, as Vella's adventure hinges on her ability to acquire and use edged weapons to solve puzzles, defeat foes, and navigate obstacles using her physical capacity and strength.  Vella is the though, the heavy, bringing hard-core masculine energy to an explicitly female role that she's already busting out of.  Weaving her way into beauty pageants through guile so she can assassinate a giant monster, literally bringing down corrupt authority figures in her wake, Vella is a bad-ass.  She's so given to fighting and hurting her foes that upon meeting Shay, inside the beast she's been hunting, her first thought is to beat the snot out of him, a threat that Shay responds to with very real fear.

This empowerment saturates every layer of the game, from the quality of the puzzles that each character engages with to the overarching qualities that define each character.  Vella takes risks, and her fearless tendency to do so defines her as a character and determines how she engages with the world around her.  The inverse is true as well: if Vella is the badass, given to beating down her foes to achieve her goals, then Shay is the long suffering, enduring female archetype: swaddled by yarn pals, capable of enduring even the strongest of hugs, and cloyed by the protective environment forced upon him by the circumstances of life.

This subversion of gender type served two roles for me: it called attention to preconceived notions of the roles that men and women occupy, both in society and in games at large, and it forced male and female players to observe their own stereotyped behavior from a new perspective, and a character of their sex engaged in non-stereotyped behavior at length.  By delivering his message with this one-two punch, Schafer forced me to consider the nature of gender-identity formation, and the manner in which I act as a gendered actor in my own life.

This wasn't a revolutionary moment for me, not by a long shot.  But the thoroughness with which the motif of gender inversion presents itself throughout Broken Age's systems, paired with the total ubiquity of that inversion, generated a kind of approach to examining gender in video games that I'd never seen before, one that was simultaneously heavy handed and subtly.  The experiential nature of games in general, and Broken Age in particular, encourages players to invest themselves in the mindset of a given character, and many of the puzzles in Broken Age require discerning the thought process or pattern governing another character's behavior, or intuiting facts about that character's history based on what you know about them already.  That pushes players into a kind of engagement that they usually don't have to deal with, pressing them not just to understand the world around them, but to understand how other people, people who will often not be like them, see the world, and to consider how these different perspectives translate across various boundaries.  The gender binary of Broken Age has a fluidity to it, even as it presents its stereotypes in neon, using symbolic language to construct generations of mamma's boys and daddy's girls.  That kind of forthright storytelling, paired with such an invested and tongue in cheek examination of our expectations of gendered behavior, is commendable. 

A young girl saves the world with weapons.  A young man saves the world by giving and receiving hugs.  These plays against gender might seem heavy handed when defined in such a light, but the way they unfold, the way that flower cake-dresses and yes-sir leadership skills mesh with their various behavioral counterpoints for each character establish a complex and individual picture of gender that, while still rooted in measures of stereotype, permits audience members to defy them, even as it forces them into an existent set of definitions.  Well done, Tim Schafer.  Well done.