by Archita Mittra
Navigating [the gaming] world as a girl, to find the kind of game that you like (and can afford) is difficult. That’s where indie games and accessibility come in.
Gris (Nomada Studio and Devolver Digital, 2018) is an exquisitely-crafted platformer that plays like a poem. It’s deceptively short, not really difficult, and gorgeously rendered. Also, it’s easily playable by both casual and experienced gamers. As therapeutic as painting in an adult coloring book, it straddles the line between “interactive art” and “video games.” I recommend this game to people who’re curious about gaming. Still, to this day, it’s one of the games in whose art I can easily lose myself no matter how many times I play it.
I’ve had doubts about using the “gamer” label for myself—but I’ve accepted I’m someone who just likes to play games, and perhaps also talk about them. If a bookworm is someone who enjoys reading books, regardless of how many books they’ve read, then a gamer, as per my logic, would be someone passionate about gaming, about interactive and non-linear storytelling, and not defined by whether or not they own the latest PlayStation or Nintendo Switch console, or even if they’ve played the games that industry stalwarts consider classics.
Games have fascinated me for a long time, but growing up, I didn’t get to play as much as I’d have liked. There were many practical reasons: For one, I was a girl, and secondly, I was a girl growing up in an Indian family.
In fact, I didn’t possess a computer until middle school. Before that, I completed any schoolwork requiring a computer at my local cyber café, which was often crowded with neighborhood boys playing video games by the hour. The games mainly involved shooting people or racing through surreal urban locales on a motorbike.
Much to the surprise of the boys, the latter interested me, and I lined up to play Road Rash (Electronic Arts, 1991) on a Windows 98 desktop. It was exhilarating to completely lose myself as I raced for the finish line, as though my life depended on it.
The boys didn’t really object to me playing. Sometimes we even helped each other. But they regarded me as an aberration from the norm.
We were civil, but we weren’t friends.
My parents didn’t approve of me hanging out in a local café by myself —and playing games on a computer I had to pay for. They insisted I use computers for “school work.” They also insisted too much screen time would damage my eyesight. Perhaps “games” were not worth it. As the years went on, I frequented the cyber cafe less and less.
But then, the children’s library I visited every two weeks for my supply of fantasy and sci-fi novels acquired a computer. It was ancient—a grey and white Windows 95 relic that ran tremendously slow and had Captain Claw (Monolith Productions 1997), a side-scrolling platformer some remember fondly even now. Initially, I found the story of a feline pirate hunting for treasure, fighting bosses, and escaping traps difficult. Eventually, I got used to it and played for an hour or two at a stretch. My library routine involved quickly returning and choosing two new books and assuming the lone computer that was unoccupied, proceeding to play Captain Claw until my mother dragged me away.
When I insisted my parents buy me a Playstation, they regarded the device as some new-fangled monstrosity, and upon hearing the price, straight-up refused. A cheap desktop with minimum RAM, lacking a graphics card, and a carefully-rationed internet connection which limited the choice of games, had to suffice.
Instead, I focused on Pinball, chess, and those agonizingly slow Windows card games. Meanwhile, I watched the boys in my cohort graduate to first- and third-person shooters and massively multiplayer online role-playing games. At home, I installed some old favorites (Road Rash and Captain Claw), discovered the sheer brilliance of cheat codes, and engaged in short free-to-play Flash games as well as virtual worlds online. In one instance, I remember installing CounterStrike (Valve, 2000), constantly getting killed, and finally crashing my desktop for good. My parents never forgave me for it, and the boys grew even more distant when I told them that CounterStrike really wasn’t my kind of thing.
And as anyone will tell you, middle school can be terribly long—and I found a new solace in otome games or dating sims and visual novels. They granted me an imaginary social life and provided a semblance of gaming. I began with Alistair++ (Sakevisual, 2010), moved onto the breathtakingly poetic True Remembrance (Shiba Satomi, 2006), and played trial versions of paid games—my avatars nursed dying boyfriends back to health, went on date nights in haunted mansions that always went wrong, and had an assortment of pretty anime characters to choose a romance with. Years later, I played Doki Doki Literature Club (Team Salvato, 2017) and decided to never ever return to the dating sim genre.
During my last year of high school, I stumbled upon the world of indie games. While looking for Red Riding Hood retellings, I came across a gothic/horror game called The Path (Tale of Tales, 2009) along with Gone Home (The Fullbright Company, 2013), a walking simulator-cum-mystery. Both broke the notion of what video games could do. There were no high scores to beat, monsters to slay, or cities to race through. Instead, what I had in my hands was interactive art.
Finally, in college, I had the good fortune of meeting a friend who let me check out games on his snazzy laptop. I played a few rounds of Tekken (Namco, 1995) with him which I didn’t like, tried my hand at Dark Souls (FromSoftware, 2009) which was a disaster, and explored a magical cave in the thoroughly enjoyable Rime (Tequila Works, 2017). He even let me borrow games from his hard drive that would run on my slow and crippled laptop.
Of course, the games we like tend to say a lot about ourselves and our tastes. The magic realism of Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer, 2013) enraptured me, the finale of Life Is Strange (Dontnod Entertainment and Square Enix, 2015) devastated me and What Remains of Edith Finch (Giant Sparrow and Annapurna Interactive, 2017) left me speechless. I enjoyed the sibling bonding in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (Starbreeze Studios and 505 Games, 2013). 80 Days (Inkle, 2014) brought back my nostalgia for text adventures, and playing the cyberpunk Red Strings Club (Deconstructeam and Devolver Digital, 2018) and the slightly supernatural Oxenfree (Night School Studio, 2016) made me realize my fondness for dialogue and choice-heavy narrative-focused games. Walking simulators seemed to me the easiest to get into, like The Stanley Parable (Davey Wreden, 2013), Firewatch (Campo Santo and Panic, 2016), and Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, 2012) while To The Moon (Freebird Games, 2011) recalled my love for visual novels. Owing to the constraints of time, I thought role-playing games wouldn’t be up my alley, but I was pleasantly surprised by Transistor (Supergiant Games, 2014) and Child of Light (Ubisoft, 2014).
While I was in the middle of playing Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall, 2014), another friend expressed an interest in playing it with me, saying his computer was too old for the game to run. Playing together was an alternative kind of multiplayer experience. We argued over which dialogue option to choose or which part of the city to explore and all the time talked about the characters whose trajectories we decided. He also installed an emulator on my smartphone, thereby fulfilling my long-cherished wish to play Pokemon Emerald (Game Freak, The Pokémon Company, and Nintendo, 2004), which I’d seen engross my best friend in middle school.
Indie games made me realize that while not many of us may be able to afford the tech or even the games for that matter, there is a game for everyone if you look hard enough. And being a part of an inclusive gaming community that welcomes everyone regardless of their experience and gender is important—both for fostering a love for the genre and for making games accessible to all. At least from what I’ve seen, playing video games regularly as entertainment is a privilege.
But even those of us without access find ways to enjoy this privilege. We share Steam libraries, we go over to a friend’s place to play a pre-installed game, we anxiously follow flash and discount sales on gaming sites to get a game or two for free. Or we pool enough money to buy them. Not all of us come from families or communities that encourage gaming. Navigating that world as a girl, to find the kind of game that you like (and can afford) is difficult. That’s where indie games and accessibility come in.
Incidentally, Gris is a game about a girl who is unable to sing and who journeys from a colorless world to newer places of magic, life, and vitality. The game ends with her having found herself at last, away from despair and ready to sing, in a world of restored color and light.
But it took me years to find that game (and myself).
And I suppose that’s a really beautiful metaphor for so many girl gamers out there.