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| A Nano-Game Anthology |
Ann K. Eriksen's Tropes vs. Women wasn't tbh a game that seemed particularly interesting going through the #Feminism anthology. But it also didn't feel like what a reviewer aptly called a "canned debate." The playing the same scene more than once reminded me of My Daughter, The Queen of France which I was very impressed by. My expectation was that there would be some kind of gain in depth or perspective (like in the aforementioned game). I thought that that would probably be something like: Realism Mode and Cliché Mode aren't really different when using Clichés/Tropes vs. Women. Or just making people want to ham it up more in Cliché Mode after the restrained "realism".
In the first scene I facilitated Realism Mode and played the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl in Cliché Mode. In the second I, again, facilitated Realism Mode and played The Man in Cliché Mode. We didn't play the third scene.
In Realism Mode the scenes were pretty unremarkable and boring. Concocting a Manic Pixie Dream Girl and a max-sleazy guy for Cliché Mode was fun insofar as coming up with characters by remixing and pulling from (bad) movies usually is, but it also immediately felt bad in the way that telling a bad joke does. But making people tell bad jokes is not a critique and not sth I would wan't people to go out of a game with. I didn't feel that there was really a point to the whole exercise.
Our first game of the evening, Susanne Vejdemo's So Mom I Made This Sex Tape, firmly belongs in the "canned debate"-group of games. That kept me from wanting to play it, but since one of our players had played it before and thought it was great, I agreed.
And the game proved me wrong by being a lot more fun than expected. Where I had thought that it would be mostly about the extreme (!) talking points of the various characters, for me, playing the daughter who made the sex tape, it was more about navigating a loaded conversation between family members. About standing my ground, but also not being hurtful to my family, who I did seek at least some input from. Because the second thing was coming to a decision about what to do with my boyfriend, who had broken my trust by sending the sex tape in question to an amateur film festival. I came up with a compromise solution - he'd be invited to the online interview the festival wanted to do with me and would reflect on his bullshit behaviour. After going over this with the family I decided to just report him to the police instead.
What's interesting about the one game mechanic, saying "Listen!" and calling attention to one of the arguments provided in the character background, is that you don't have to use it or rather that you can decide which arguments you want to use it for or not. It's the navigating again.
Is it bad or harmful that Mom ("all porn supports trafficking"), Granny ("'sexuality rights' isn't a feminist issue; it's a slut issue.") and Aunt ("Making and selling good porn is a more useful kind of feminist activism than Gender Studies at the university") are total extremists that you're supposed to kinda take seriously in this game? I'm not sure. I would be interested in seeing if and how the game would change with more reasonable characters.
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