Bitmap Game

Description

    This is the Cool Girl game. In this game, one must strive to become the fictional character trope – “ the cool girl ” – created by and for male fantasy, by meeting these impossible standards such as being “effortlessly hot”, “always there for their partner but never needy”, “never gets angry and always carefree”, “interested in everything a guy likes”. The trope of “the cool girl” is prevalent in popular media like film, TV shows and, last but not least, video game narratives. The cool girl serves as an accessory, a female counterpart who has no inner voice, whose sole purpose of existence is there to help their male protagonist to realize their true self. So I thought, why not make a video game about this popular trope in gaming culture?

    In this game, the narrator would first challenge the user to become a cool girl. To become a cool girl, the user must pick up all the objects that represents stereotypical male interests and avoid their own emotional needs, represented by circles. They must also pick up a precise amount of makeup lipsticks within a certain period of time, no more or no less than that, in order to meet the beauty standard of “effortlessly hot” for a cool girl. In the process of playing this game, the user will encounter a plot twist, where they are given the choice between conforming to the rules of the game, or challenging the narrator and rewriting the game.

Design Process & Reflection

    I decided to switch my project from the initial idea of art history based game to the idea of “the cool girl”, because I found it more personal and relatable as a concept. I first encountered the idea of “the cool girl” from a character monologue in the movie Gone Girl and this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEKNFX7LWRk&t=43s. I was rather surprised to find out how prevalent this character trope is in the media I consume growing up, but also how much this has influenced myself and other women I know. Many women I know have somewhat been through this phase of desiring to become a “cool girl” in their life, where they would consider feminine qualities as inferior to the masculine ones, and celebrate emotional detachment as a sign of carefree independence. I remember this phase began for me when I was younger. Once I asked my uncle why boys are always better at discussing important topics like politics and military than girls? He said, there are certain things that boys are just inherently better at. I was very upset by that statement. At the time, I could not fathom how stereotypically feminine qualities and interests can also be seen as non-trivial. I remember picking up all the subjects that are stereotypically masculine in China, such as math, military and politics, and shunning away from the interests my female friends shared. I wanted to have a seat at the table with the Big Boys. It was not until much later in life, I realized that I had assigned a hierarchy to the two genders, and what I thought as my liberation from the feminine stereotype is just a different kind of sexism, one that is less overt and yet more dangerous.

    The Cool Girl game is trying to portray what it is like when one is forced to internalize that sexism and live up to the supposedly superior type of the girl – the cool girl. In reality, the cool girl is a fictional character created and perpetuated by male fantasy in popular culture, yet many women still aspire to it. I want to point to these unrealistic expectations and impossible standard for a cool girl through the overwhelming amount of tasks one must achieve and the hecticness of the graphics. I also want to just bombard the users with the constant pressure of judgement through the yellow banner text and point to the immense amount of calculations that go into these seemingly “effortless” appearance. Moreover, the user is in some way programmed to “fail” in this game.

    If the game is created as a kind of satire of this character trope, I wanted to introduce a way for the user to reject and break out of the game. I have always been interested in the idea of unreliable narrator, and the ability to go against narration in games like the Stanley Parable. Hence I decide to make a simpler version of that, by creating a narrator who would offer a skewed version of the rules, which demands the player to sacrifice all their emotional needs, and as a result, all their lives, to achieve the status of “a cool girl”. In the middle of the game, I create a plot twist that would confront the user with the two choices, to continue following this set of rules defined by the male fantasy, or to challenge it and rewrite it. The latter choice would then guide the user to acknowledge their emotional needs and use them as ammunition against the narrator. For me, the most problematic aspect of this character trope is this absence of emotional needs – it simply reduces the female character into a shell. I think it is important to point out the unsustainability of avoiding one’s emotional needs in this context, and how those needs can be a powerful expression of one’s individuality against the other.

    For the aesthetic of the game, I want to stick to a retro bitmap video game aesthetic. There is something about its gaminess speaks to me as a stereotypical male lingo, but it is also an aesthetic that has been reused and reinvented by cyberfeminism and many other groups. The images I used is selected from pixelart.org and pixelmaker.com. For the representation of the narrator, I played with multiple different patterns, such as the camera lens or the limelight, as a representation of mass media. I ended up choosing the eye, as a stand in for the male gaze. Maybe it is a bit of a corny choice but I think it somewhat suits the over-the-top gaminess of this game. The background music and sound effect is also chosen with that aesthetic in mind.

    The coding process was a lot of fun! I must admit that I am a big fan of OOP. I feel that I have acquired this superpower to have different objects interact and talk to each other. One small interesting device I learned, thanks to several online tutorials, is the use of flagging as a Boolean value detection device. It was especially useful in collision detection or customized scene switch, where the transition must happen under very specific conditions and only for one time. It was the first time I worked with large amount of code (the whole program comes down to about 700 lines of code), yet it was very rewarding throughout the process.