CDo video game writers have the biggest and best jobs in the industry? That's right: Meghna Jayanth is fine everywhere. Last year, she released Thirsty Suitors in collaboration with Outerloop Games., A fluorescent fusion of messy flirtation and skate chic. What comes next? all rise, a climate action courtroom drama. These are indie games. The main character in Thirsty Suitors is a queer digiskater, and the villains are her emotions. Of course, this is an indie game. And her Jayanth, one of his generation's star video game writers, is here in full force as a trade-off for making fun games with people, with themes of colonialism, identity, and sexuality. It's familiar. Her values match her own.
Money is scarce, and it's painful to get attention for your work. “When I came out, it was tough,” Jayance says of Thirsty Sweeters. “People were still playing Baldur's Gate III because Baldur's Gate III was huge. The average gamer on Steam plays four games a year. That's the real deal for most indie studios. The question is: How do you reach people without millions of dollars and a marketing budget?”
After more than a decade, Jayance is an indie by choice, but perhaps the world's indie as well. Jayance was sitting at her home during her 2023 Golden Joystick Awards ceremony held in London. Not invited as a presenter For amending his statement calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Jayans from the stage of the 2019 Independent Game Festival called on the industry Condemn fascism and support the formation of trade unions. In the 2021 lecture, She criticized the fundamentals of modern mainstream game design It is rooted in capitalism, colonialism, and whiteness. These aren't necessarily interesting ideas for producers of successful mainstream games.
Jayance made his breakthrough in 2014 as a screenwriter for 80 Days, an adaptation of Jules Verne by Cambridge studio Inkle. His 80 Days, an anti-colonial vision, rewinds history to the scramble for Africa and reverses it, creating a world with people, cultures and ideas as wonderful for their time and place as the technology of Verne's imagination. satisfy. 80 Days is a unique achievement, a rich, romantic, and charming crowd-pleaser that unravels why the world has become the way it is over the past three centuries.
This game led Jayanth to work in the open-world Horizon: Zero Dawn from Guerrilla Games, which at the time was best known for its Killzone series of shooters. Released in 2017, Horizon is an adventure about hunting robot dinosaurs in post-apocalyptic America. “The writing team at the time was all white men, and we were creating a game that had a young female protagonist and some touch on indigenous culture,” Jayance says. “It's not my area of expertise, but I do a lot of worldbuilding for them and [fictional] We communicated our culture in a respectful way. ” But that has been distorted by perspective, she says. “I did a lot of little presentations internally about brutality and barbarity and how they are colonial concepts. And, you know, it was 'Welcome to this wild land!' Something like that.”
“I was really surprised by the scale of it,” she says. “I came in about a year before shipping thinking, “Well, this is taking too long,'' but a team of hundreds of people had already been working on this for years. A lot of things were fixed. It turns out to be a very difficult ship to turn around.”
Horizon has sold over 20 million copies, has two sequels, more sequels in the pipeline, and a TV show in the works. That was where the ship was supposed to go. However, Jayanth, who has worked on other unreleased AAA projects, began to think that on such a ship he could only be a deckhand. He said, “Gestures can be disguised, but [progressive] The idea is there in the story, but the game's systems themselves don't actually carry it out. Although there are typical body and skin colors, [the player] He’s still kind of a colonialist.”
Since then, Jayanth has mostly remained in the indies. Her experience in mainstream game development didn't hurt her much, but when she was hired to think about why those kinds of games worked, she found answers to those questions, as well as working on the industry's biggest series. I'm not very happy with that honor. “This is basically a very stupid job,” she says of the game. “Entertainment is important, but [but] What's the point of looking around the world? What are we participating in? ” Both of her parents are doctors, and they approach her work with a clear sense of ethics that Jayanth envies. How wonderful it would be to know that what you are doing is good. “In order to have a career that is meaningful to you, you need to feel that what you are doing has value…As a marginalized person, I think there is a place in the court that should be occupied by the 'other.' It's really important to question success. Effective resistance to dominant power is never rewarded in the form of success.
Lecture If you think about the entrenchment of colonialist and capitalist thinking in modern game design systems, and describe triple-A developers as “courtiers,” you might never write a game for them again. , she doesn't care. “Without politics, I don't know what I mean,” she says. “If my work is good, everything that makes it good comes from me caring. It makes me want to do it.”
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Criticizing how games have been made for decades won't cause shareholders to change course, and calling for a truce at a video game awards show won't end a war. But Jayanth knows that. The difference, she thinks, is that it's the individual. Jayanth tries to talk about colonialism and color, and she's seen young designers burn out trying to challenge the way games are made. “In the studio system, you often have people making promises like, 'I really want to remake all of this, I really want to reimagine this, I really want your ideas,' and then in the end you have to fight the whole system. It is an organization with no power or authority.
Jayanth has been there too, which is why she's now speaking so openly and vocally about what's important to her. It's sad for young designers to attend meetings with anxiety. She says the gaming industry avoids risk in a “very stupid way” and that if you're going to try it, you need to make sure something has been done before.
She may be someone who has done it before. Her work can overshadow other designers to stand up and say, “See, I'm not the only one.” Even if Jayanth loses her opportunities or money by speaking her own opinion, it doesn't matter to her. She found her worth.
Source: www.theguardian.com
