[Livestream] Nominee: Gamer Girl

Presenting the 2020 IndieCade Nominees: Gamer Girl

Gamer Girl is a harassment simulator that forces the player through uncomfortable interactions with students studying game design and development. The player takes on the role of a female student in her second year of a game-based degree who is in an all-male programming class.

Based on real interviews with women majoring in Game Design and Development at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Gamer Girl challenges its players to navigate complex dialogue webs that always seem to be stacked against them while attempting to maintain their academics, their reputation, and their sanity.

The game forces the player to choose one of five classmates to work with on a semester-long project. The five classmates are based off patterns of abuse identified as common threads throughout our interviewees’ stories. Each character harasses the player in their own way — through physical intimidation, emotional manipulation, stalker-like behavior, negging the player, and angry outbursts.

Just like in real life, there is no way to “win” any specific conversation. The game tracks how the player interacts with their chosen project partner and often forces players into bad situations due to their actions. If you are too kind to your partner, they will talk down to you, dismiss your ideas, or even ask you out. If you are too assertive, they will fight back against everything you say, going so far as to threaten violence to keep you in line.

The goal of the game is to educate non-predatory men who are studying games about the constant stress their female peers are under. While Gamer Girl does not claim to offer some sort of magical fix-all answer to the sexism running rampant in the games industry, it has been an incredibly effective tool for teaching students how to step up and protect vulnerable women.