For all humans to play
Sophie Houlden’s games portfolio is diverse and explorative. She’s never held down by one style, and her seemingly endless experiments have turned up gems like Linear RPG, Boxgame, and the startling the.domestic (it’s tough to narrow down her oeuvre, as you can see). Most recently, she’s been working on Lottie’s Dungeon, an early version of which is available for purchase.
She stays outspoken about gender, advertising, and being broke on her Twitter, but her games stay at arms length from their designer. Houlden was kind enough to answer some questions about transgender gameplay, marketing indie games, and the challenges of making (and selling) Lottie’s Dungeon.
THM: Following your work, I’ve noticed that you fly through a huge amount of ideas, and you always seem to be working. Can you tell me a bit about your work flow? How do you decide which ideas you want to flesh out?
Houlden: Actually, I’m kind of horrible at deciding which games I want to flesh out, since I want to make every idea I have. I’m still getting the hang of telling myself, “No Sophie! that will take 100 years to make!”
It doesn’t help that my work flow is very… fluid. which I guess is a nice way of saying my work flow is less work and more flow. I’m not very organized, but I tried being organized before and it only made me uncomfortable, so I think I’m best just winging it and powering at a project as hard as I can whilst I have the energy for it. It’s not an approach I would recommend to anyone else, just what has worked for me. And I’m still figuring out stuff, of course.
Your games came to mind when I read an editorial about Fumito Ueda not believing female characters could accomplish the same feats as male characters. You don’t draw any attention to your female characters’ extraordinary powers. What are your thoughts on this?
Wow, I hadn’t read that before. My initial reaction is of course that any young girl not being as strong as any young boy is ridiculous since before puberty development is exactly the same. And even then, I’ve met plenty of women who could kick anyone’s ass if they were so inclined. I’m guessing it’s a cultural thing like the article points out, and dude’s at least 40 years old right? He probably didn’t grow up with quite so many strong females. I’m sure younger Japanese designers don’t have such an odd blind spot (I hope).
I think I don’t see strong women as an issue because I grew up with it, I played Tomb Raidersince I was super young, when I was at school the spice girls were totally rocking it out. The idea that girls were inherently weaker was just not a part of my upbringing.
That said, I probably do have a little discrimination. My more powerful characters are on average women, but that’s mostly because I prefer power controlled, refined. Which, I guess, I perceive as more feminine qualities and I see powerful men as all burly, slow and cumbersome. But this is of course ridiculous of me: Bruce Lee is the perfect example of why my perceptions are wrong. Thanks for making me think on this, you’ve perhaps helped me avoid looking as backwards as Fumito Ueda; slick, powerful dudes in one of my games coming soon!
You’ve said that the.domestic was your first attempt at a “pure art game”. I’m wondering if you consider Boxgame a pure art game as well: I read it as a game about gender/self discovery, especially with the inclusion of your teddy bear.
I wouldn’t call Boxgame an art game in any way really. It’s true I specifically designed Xe, the character you play as, to be androgynous so that players would be able to relate immediately then be able to focus on the puzzles without having to feel they are “role-playing”. I think this worked pretty well, when most guys talk about Xe they use male pronouns, and most women use female pronouns. The character was immediately this blank slate they could just be… though this was marred somewhat by my decision to have that silly Naruto running animation. I thought it was cool at the time. I was an idiot at the time -__-;
As for the teddy bear, I wanted to have some secret thing that [the player] needed to rescue, inanimate (since if it had a character some people didn’t like, they may not actually want to rescue it), but also something a lot of people could relate to and care about. I figured a teddy bear fit the bill, so I modelled it after my favourite teddy bear I’ve had since the day I was born (he’s sat behind me right now). I guess I did want people to care about rescuing the teddy, but that was just a mechanism to encourage them to try and see the puzzles in a different way, I wasn’t trying to make the player relate to having to rescue things or be a hero, or convey any big meaning at all. It’s just a puzzle game and I did what I thought at the time would bring out the puzzles best.
Sophie Houlden’s the.domestic.
Have you slipped personal touches like the teddy bear into other games? Would you ever work on a game with explicitly personal themes, or do you think those things come out in a game naturally?
With the majority of projects I don’t find I’m working on them long enough to include anything intentionally ‘me’, but like you say, when so much of an experience is made by one person, it’s hard not to find that person there in the experience. That said, I did set out to make a game once that was entirely about expressing my emotions at a point when I didn’t feel there was any other outlet. I’ll not share it since it was more for me than anyone else, I won’t rule out making a super personal game again, but I think I’d need to feel something very important that I wanted to express. I don’t really have anything like that now. Unless I was to express what it’s like to be broke, and I don’t need to make a game to express what that’s like. Everyone either knows how it is to be broke or is an asshole. (See? ;) )
How do you feel about gender representation in mainstream video games? Is it any better in indie games?
I think that gender representation across the board is not bad at all, mostly. I think the frequency of strong man saving the woman who needs rescuing is a little too common, and I think indie games are better at avoiding such cliches, but only because they aren’t all trying to target the “male gamer” or the “female gamer”.
If an indie makes a game, it’s for all humans to play. If a larger company makes a game, it’s to sell to either men or women. Targeting a specific gender like that isn’t unreasonable, really. It just means you get “boy” games and “girl” games and whilst there are games in-between that, the choice is slim. Though I think culture itself will fix this, as games have become social and more accepted, games have needed to appeal to a wider array of people, simultaneously. It’s no good if your party game is a dude’s game, you’re cutting out half the market.
Like I say though, indie games as a rule don’t think of money first. If there is some gendered aspect to the game, it’s because there is some gendered aspect to the developer. Some developers will play that up, some will try to tone it down. It’s all about what they want to include and not who they are selling to. This makes quite a difference I think.
Are there examples of fairly represented transgender perspectives in video games?
Fairly represented transgender perspectives, that’s an interesting one. I think it’s largely avoided, and that’s fair. Statistically, transgender people are pretty rare, you have to spit out your window a lot of times before you hit one. The only explicit instance of this I think are games with customisable characters where you can just swap sex. While this is totally unrealistic, I think its handled well in them because as far as I know, none of the other characters treat the player any differently for having done it. It’s certainly better than some of the mainstream media who still think a woman with a beard and deep voice is a totally hilarious joke.
I do think there is room for exploring genuine transgender perspectives, though. For example, games are highly suited to put the player in the position of what it’s like to be transsexual. Give the player an avatar they don’t like. They can’t do what they want to do with it. They want to change? Not until the rules of the game say so and they jump through a series of mostly unpleasant hoops. And even then, the perfect avatar is never going to be theirs… It wouldn’t be a fun game, but being transsexual sucks for a lot of the time too. It could be an interesting experiment to try.
You have a lot of strong ideas about advertising and selling your games. I’m wondering how you think indie games might be monetized in the future.
Well, I do admit I want games to be free, and that’s tricky when stuff like food is not free. Advertising is the most reasonable way to fix this, but it all depends on wether you actually consider an ad-supported game to be free. Someone is certainly paying, and it’s not always with money. Developers have to decide for themselves if the cost is worth it to keep their games ‘free’. I’ll be happy to say “If you can afford my game buy it. If you can’t, get a job then buy it. If even that’s not an option, pirate it.”
I want my game to be free anyway, and if it’s impossible for you to help me eat and pay rent, just get the game. But thats all present day stuff, I guess. For the future what I’d really like to see is ad-free games, with the developers still getting money. I think it might be possible if Steam or Kongregate or someone like that had a model of selling commercial games, and on the same network developers put out free games. Commercial games give a bigger cut to the service, so that the service can distribute the money amongst developers making free games generating and keeping interest in the service. It might not work of course, I haven’t done the math, but I think sooner or later someone will try something like that.
If that’s not a possibility, I really do like the current Kickstarter/8-Bit Funding/indiegogo approach of crowd funding. I imagine it’s a lot less risky than the “buy the game whilst it’s in development” model used by games like Overgrowth and Minecraft. Sure it worked for them, but I think you need constant publicity, or at least a heavy dose to make it that way. that means the game needs to be good enough for people to care about before your money runs out.
What challenges have you faced selling Lottie’s Dungeon?
The main challenge I’ve faced selling Lottie’s Dungeon is that not enough people are buying it.
I simply didn’t have enough (any) money saved up before starting development on it. What’s worse is for a large portion of the development, I simply haven’t been happy with the game, so I’ve been reluctant to approach gaming blogs and the like to tell them about the game. And obviously if no-one new is hearing about the game, then no one new is buying it. This has meant I’ve had to chase down other paying work, which frankly has not gone too well for me and mostly wasted time I could have spent working on Lottie.
The current problem I face is that as I am returning to working on the game, I realise not only am I not happy with it. I actually hate a lot of what the game is, and I’ve had to face the fact that if I don’t scrap large chunks of what the game is I’ll hate working on the rest of the game and be stuck on it forever. And if I’m not enjoying working on it, it will show in the game, it will show in the preview, the screenshots and any videos people see before deciding if they want to buy the game.
My own fault for initially designing it for casual play, my approach to working on it was casual and that doesn’t suit me. I enjoy working on stuff with loads of energy. If the game itself has energy I think that should bring out that aspect of my work ethic, and the game will be more fun, and hopefully sell more… hopefully.
A lot of artists talk about having to “kill your babies” in order to finish a project, which sounds like what you’re facing with Lottie’s Dungeon. Have you ever had to scrap something major to continue a game?
Yeah, there’s some aspect of that in all projects I think. Plenty of stuff that could be in the game simply shouldnt be in the game. I think if you are someone who has taken more out than you have put in, you’re doing things right.
