by Rob Gallagher.
First off, and as an example of how girlhood can stand for exploration and transformation and that, I’d like to refer you to artist Tamas Waliczky’s video piece ‘The Garden,’ from an era when it took a million supercomputers a million hours to render digital scenery warping around a Polish artist’s toddling daughter (aka 1992). Waliczky links to girlhood with potentiality and flux. Philosophers Deleuze and Guattari agree, proposing (in their characteristic, headily cod-mystic brand of jargonese) that ‘becoming-girl’ might be a good way to start undoing ‘molar’ conceptions of the body, the self and being – something that’s pretty high on their to-do list. Susan Hillier’s ‘Psi-Girls’ – a five-screen video work that features clips from movies like The Craft, Stalker, and Matilda – is all about our cultural habit of associating girlhood with a kind of mysterious, potentially malign power (you could, pace Halliwell, call it girl power).
Maybe it’s the fear of this arcane power that’s to account for girl-children hardly being allowed to play. Certainly I remember thinking, as a kid, that being a girl was a pretty raw deal playwise; while my games and toys were based around dragons, spider-men and lost civilsations, my little sister mostly played at scaled-down versions of domestic stuff: operating lightbulb-powered muffin ovens, grooming a bodiless Barbie head, wheeling dolls around in miniature pushchairs. This split has been carried over into interactive entertainment too. While a lot of girls and women now play videogames, figures suggest they play different games, in different ways. Because girls tend (at least in the West) to play fewer narrative-driven games, and because boys tend not to want to play as girls (though they’ll occasionaly condescend to play as buxom, cheesecakey heroines of course) there aren’t that many decent girl characters in games.*
That’s something M/F Belgian development house Tale of Tales are looking to change. They describe their works as ‘computer games without all the things that we don’t like [about commercial games] (competition, meaningless violence, strict rules, predefined goals, canned stories)’ and recently put out a fairly buzzed-about game called The Path. Based on Red Riding Hood, it sees players guiding six sisters along a resoundingly metaphorical path to their grandmother’s resoundingly metaphorical house.** If you keep to the path you don’t get anything out of the experience; only through straying do you make discoveries (this may be metaphorical). In many ways – and despite how offputting the unremitting visual emo-ness of the graphics is – The Path is trying to do some pretty admirable things. Tale of Tales wanted to make an accessible, thought-provoking game that addresses issues – girlhood, sexuality, cultural memory – which, with a few notable exceptions, are seldom addressed in a medium still pretty much stuck in the ‘kill the Nazis &/or save the princess’ backwaters of narrative.
The problem I have with the game, however, is that it’s not gamey enough. ‘Interactive Narrative’ is a difficult, all-but oxymoronic remit, and The Path, in the attempt to remove barriers to entry, stints sorely on the interactivity front. For all The Path’s rhetoric about straying, exploring and experimentation, there are countless ‘commercial’ games that are richer and stranger, more amenable both to improvisatory play and to free interpretation than The Path (wherein rhymed couplets appear onscreen to spell out the symbolic significance of everything you find). The lack of actions and objectives in the game might remove barriers to participation but it also limits the extent to which it can be played against the grain. Maybe this is to be expected; interviews with Tale of Tales suggest that being precious, condescending and prescriptive is kind of a forte of theirs…
Card-carrying Deleuzians Dean Lockwood and Tony Richards hold that it’s exactly this tension between interactivity and storytelling that makes videogames a great medium for staging the sorts of becomings and recombinations Deleuze associates with becoming-girl. More tied to notions of plot, character, place and identification than other interactive media but much looser than traditional modes of storytelling, games facilitate a ‘flickering’ between different positions and possibilities, meaning there’s potential to tell/play stories about girlhood that’ll prove even more compelling than a bulb-baked muffin.
* not that it’s stopped a terrifying subset of Japanese geeks giving up on real-life romance in favour of ‘dating’ dolls, figurines or life-size pilllowcases representing their favourite videogame and anime heroines instead (the trend’s known as ‘2-D love’ and there was a scandal when its main proponent confessed to occasionally watching non-cartoon porn).
**The Path’s demo/prologue is available for free download here, if you’re interested and have a computer you can run it on, which I certainly don’t.
