Korean language

Women, Games and Cyborgs : Youngjin Oh, Gayoung An

What game design strategy can break gender biases, tear down the binary world, and improve gender sensitivity? The first is to become a “hybrid subject.” ORLAN uses the format of a video game to show the process of finding one’s scattered body through a cyborg form that exists in a virtual world. The second is to “re-dictate and become.” It is possible to present a new strategy by overturning the systems that were considered as universal perceptions like “Oops! My Prince” did. The last is to “not acquire the world.” Upper One Games created “Never Alone” to promote the lost Inuit culture. Players experience the process of sym-poiesis (making together), in which players are taken into the world.

Under the subject of “Women, Games and Cyborgs,” Youngjin Oh lectured on < Game Culture from the View of Techno-Feminism > and Gayoung An on < Cyborg Imagination in Art Games>.With the biased development of our gaming culture, women are still marginalized and attacked in game production and play experience. We looked at the current gaming culture from the view of techno-feminism to see how pre-existing prejudices about the relationship between women, technology and play become a discourse and affect in reality. And we also looked at diverse ways how women use games as a tool of artistic expression and enjoy games.

Gender inequality in today’s game culture is worsening and appears to be a difficult problem that cannot be easily overcome. From the view of techno-feminism, this gender inequality begins not from games, but from prejudice against technology and women. For a long time, women have been regarded as unsuitable for science and technology. These prejudices are accumulated and discoursed over time, and our society today accepts them as a notion. The phenomenon, in which women in gaming culture are marginalized is due to how these prejudices accumulated to become a notion.

Techno-feminism has provided a new perspective on women and technology. Has technology freed women? We were able to find the answer through games.There were feminist artists in the early 90s such as VNS Matrix and French performance artist, ORLAN, who popularized the term, “Cyberfeminism” and women appearing in recent art games or post internet. And there were ways women used games as a tool of artistic expression and enjoyed games.Many feminist artists use their “bodies” as a medium and became performative subjects. Artists such as Barbara Kruger, Guerrilla Girls, and ORLAN used the female body as a tool to break down the normative concept of gender and established gender identity through performative actions.Furthermore, women began to appropriate cyberspace. In 1991, the VNS Matrix released the <21st Century Cyberfeminist Manifesto>, challenging the male-dominated art world. In order to restore the human rights of women previously alienated, they appropriated the male-centered cyberspace and began to explore the relationship between women and technology. In particular, various works were produced by using the structure and form of the game.It can help to understand the close relationship between humans and machines through game performance, how the oppressive control of masculinity is constructed, its bizarreness, and the possibility of overturning this oppressive structure through feminism. It maximizes the parody effect of the game and the effect of real learning. (JinboNet, 2005)

Excerpts from the <21st Century Cyberfeminist Manifesto>

As such, the VNS Matrix uncovered and visualized the reality of women who were completely excluded from the information technology community through games. We can look at this by extending it to the relationship between games and women. The core of the game has always been male players. In cyberspace and in and outside of games, female players have always suffered from various forms of cyberbullying simply because they are female. Regardless, there are women who create and play games who continue to exist. In order to break this prejudice against female players, we looked at game design strategies and real-life examples that broke down gender biases, tore down the male-dominated binary world, and improved gender sensitivity.
The first is to become a “hybrid subject.” Generally, the player, when playing the game, assimilates with the characters in the game. We examined games and artworks in which characters in the game are shown as hybrid subjects, and examined what it would mean to see and play them.

ORLAN, <Techno Body>, 2015

<Genital Jousting>, 2018

ORLAN's <Techno Body> is a work that shows the process of finding one’s scattered body through a cyborg-like figure that exists in a virtual world using the format of a video game. ORLAN transforms the human body into a cyborg and presents a new concept of the body in today’s age of technology. This is an artwork that shows the representative representation of a hybrid subject.

As one of the mainly studied examples in the game, <Genital Jousting> in 2018 has male genitalia as the central character. The gameplay is simple. The protagonist exists as a phallic representation and only needs to “command a loose penis and a swinging anus.” The main character, the genitalia, struggles to survive in a male-dominated society, but develops a sexual perversion due to the amount of stress. Although spending our daily life like a human being is the story we are given, it shows how difficult it is to spend our daily lives in this society and organization as a woman or a man through the form of the male genitalia. This hybrid subjectivity started from artistic perspectives and reasoning. Eventually, through the game, as a hybrid subject, we examined to see if the player could experience the game and reality in a different angle to experience entertainment and play.

<Oops! My Prince> (2008)

The second is to “re-dictate and become.” This is similar to the “parody and irony” strategy. <Oops! My Prince> is a well-known gender parody version of the <Princess Maker> franchise. Unlike the <Princess Maker>, which was a heterosexual structure, <Hey Prince> has a homosexual theme as the player raises a son rather than a daughter. If the <Princess Maker> only calls the player as the father, in the case of <Oops! My Prince> (2008), the player can choose whether to become a mother or a father. Through the game, all structures that were considered as conventional universal perceptions are overturned and a new strategy is introduced.

The last is to “not acquire the world.”<Never Alone> (2016) is a game that tells the story of Inuits in the Arctic. The main characters, Inuit “Nuna” and white fox “Silla,” go on an adventure to find the cause of an unknown blizzard. The player takes turns playing Nuna and Sila, and in the process, the video and narration featuring the actual Inuit makes players empathize with the narrative of the game. Upper One Games, a non-profit game producing company in Alaska, decided to use the medium of games to share and tell stories of the forgotten Inuit culture, and produced <Never Alone>. Players do not acquire the world by conquering the stage, but experience sym-poiesis by entering the world.Have we ever come across a lot of game design like this in the past? Not at all. A game is a genre that has no choice but to use a structure that induces competition between players. Then, what other games include elements of sym-poiesis like <Never Alone>?

<Never Alone>, 2016

Games such as <Zelda: Breath of the Wild> (2017) and <Bound> (2016) allow players to experience new entertainment by connecting with the beautiful and peaceful world of the game, which differ from acts of conquering the game world. The gameplay of <Bound> is very unique. The movement of the main character is dynamic and beautiful like a ballerina. It is a story of a girl who dreams of having a happy family despite her ongoing pains, learns a character in the fantasy novel she reads is similar to her and begins to cope with her pain through dancing, crossing the world of reality and fiction. The game does not focus on defeating and attacking her enemies, but makes her focused on overcoming her own trauma through dancing.

<Bound>, 2016

As seen in this way, we looked at various strategies to break down the distorted relationship between games and women, and looked at the art games of artist Gayoung An, who uses the form of games to create her works. Gayoung Ahn, with a background in painting, started using game engines and interactions, as a part of her interest in the virtual and 3D worlds in games, and continues to find the interface between games and art. Her notable work, <Virtual Serendipity> (2014) is an interactive media installation created using the Unity 3D engine. By definition, serendipity means “fortunately discovered luck.” And An’s work shows a cyber-superstitious world with the theme of collision between accidental images or texts. It was created in the random structure of the game where the characters also show various movements according to the player’s information and operations.

<Virtual Serendipity>, Interactive media installation, 2400 x 3800 mm (screen size), 2014

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7gk9B9VM6M&feature=youtu.be

Also, based on the ranking results of playing <Virtual Serendipity>, the artist created <Arrangement of Coincidence: Painting for 1st to 5th> (2014) for high-scoring players. The artist played the game play video with a projector on the installed canvas screen, and showed the performance of characters from the 5th place to the 1st place and traced to draw the paths of the players’ gameplay in real time using various tools.

<Arrangement of Coincidence: Painting for 1st to 5th>, Acrylic on canvas, 2108 x 1600mm, 2014

There are other media works using game interfaces such as < Random Chat on a Sunday Afternoon > (2015) and <The Box of Hermes > (2016).Gayoung An says that a game created to escape from the system of creating artworks creates another system. She adds that she was able to let people show that they live with free-will, where anything is possible, but learn that they cannot escape the fact they are living in prejudice or notions by using the medium of games. A game is a special medium that players can directly experience and interact with reality through experience. The artists started using her games as such a medium in her work. She further urges participants to pay more attention to various social issues surrounding today’s games and women in these art game lectures. Various violence and prejudice against women in the world of games is a problem we all have to solve.

Reference“VNS Matrix, Cyberfeminist Art Alliance,” JinboNet, 2005 (http://act.jinbo.net/wp/1332/)“Becoming a Teleporter of Image Space: Gayoung An,” ALICEON, 2017 (http://aliceon.tistory.com/2811)Gayoung An website (www.angayoung.com)

Youngjin Oh (Culture Critic, Supervising Professor at Hanyang University ERICA <Machine Criticism>)Youngjin Oh is a culture critic, producer and supervising professor of “Machine Criticism,” which is a convergence course at Hanyang University. His main field of criticisms include “Computer Games and Luddism Capitalism” and “Memories of Indie,” and he has written papers such as “Mirror Neurons and Principles of Lyricism” and “Virtual Reality as an Empathic Device.”
Gayoung An (Artist)Gayoung An majored in painting at Hongik University and received her master’s degree from the same university. She is currently working on her PhD in Visual Arts in the Graduate School of Communication at Yonsei University. At the Return to Alternative contest hosted by Art Space Jungmiso in 2017, An was selected for the Game & Animation Art category. And she was also one of the final 3 teams of 《Game Jam: Art, Politics, Digital Games》 organized by Nam June Paik Art Center in early 2018. She is an artist who has been constantly working on the interface between games and art. In 2016, she presented her solo exhibitions <Lazy Teleport> at the Art Space Gallery Jungmiso and <The Box of Hermes> at the Box Theater of Seoul Art Space Mullae.

Report abuse