Ballroom Glitz: Analysis of Feminine Game Design Via "Princess Debut"

Writing for Mammon Machine's ZEAL project, Alex Roberts looks at what she says is a prime example of "feminine game design" that she feels was overlooked: "Princess Debut" for the Nintendo DS:

Princess Debut is a rhythm game and dating sim released, to mild commercial success and critical disinterest, in 2008 for the Nintendo DS. It stars a teenage girl who, after trading places with her princess doppelganger in a parallel universe, learns ballroom dancing and wins the heart of at least one handsome prince with the help of her feisty talking animal companion. She finds magical accessories that transform into elaborate outfits. She spends perpetually sunny days in gardens and beaches with cute boys who are all interested in her. Princess Debut could only be girlier if her dance instructor was a horse instead of an anthropomorphic rabbit. (But that would mean striking a crucial Alice in Wonderland reference.) 

What makes Princess Debut feminine, though, is not its pink menus, delicate soundtrack, or shoujo manga-inspired character designs. Rather, those external aesthetics are genuinely representative of an internal structure that whose priorities and techniques are expressly feminine. Its cover art — a petite teenage girl, gasping with delight, eyes wide as dinner plates, hair in a perfect up-do — is wonderful in itself, but what makes Princess Debut worth writing about almost a decade later is the way it delivers on the promises that happy face is making.

Roberts does a deep dive into the aesthetics of "Princess Debut", comparing and contrasting it with another rhythm-action game, "Elite Beat Agents". She examines why one was a critical darling, one was met with critical indifference, and the difference between feminine game design and pinkwashing. It's a great read and has me so interested, I'm gonna be tracking down a copy of "Princess Debut" as soon as I can.

Captain Kirk: How Pop Culture & Toxic Masculinity Got It Wrong

Kirk:"Leave any bigotry in your quarters. There's
no room for it on the bridge."

The popular collective image of Captain Kirk from the original Star Trek series is that of a brash, impulsive captain who charges in first and asks questions later. Pop culture would have it that Capt. Kirk was also a serial womanizer, bedding alien women across the galaxy.

Popular culture has it completely wrong.

Writing for Strange Horizions, Erin Horakova penned an essay entitled "Freshly Remember'd: Kirk Drift" that looks at just why it's important that these notions be debunked and the conclusions people can draw from them be deconstructed. For example, there's a lot of toxic ideas about what it means to be "macho" if you buy into the "Kirk was a womanizer" narrative:

If your vision of masculinity cannot distinguish between choosing to have sex and situations of dubious consent incurred in the line of duty, it is deeply toxic. You are insisting that men are hyper-sexual, unemotional, and can never be taken advantage of (lest they cease to be strong, compelling men due to their ever having displayed vulnerability)... These misreadings are supported by a subterranean network of ideas about masculinity, pop culture, and the past that consistently reinforce them, hitting refresh on these dank memes. I don’t think all the connections have been made here, and all the implications unfolded.

Horakova outlines many instances of what she calls "Kirk Drift"-- the difference between what people think Capt Kirk did and Star Trek portrayed, and what actually aired. How these misconceptions not only inform the average person's idea of what Star Trek was, but what the reboot thinks Star Trek should be, How the ideas trickle down, changing and erasing everything from science fiction's attitudes to concepts of what it means to be a man to expressions of Jewish masculinity. Why should we care? hhhh makes the case thusly:

All texts run the danger, even if they’ve worked hard to be progressive, or if they yield easily to positive interpretations, of being “rewritten” in the world and even in our minds. In relation to her own work, novelist Dr. Nnedi Okorafor says that “what I really want to discuss is the whitewashing battle in many readers' minds. The one that turns characters white upon reading them so the reader is more comfortable.” Her work, like all work that comes from a place of or offers any potential for alterity, is at risk of being “colonised” by conservative narrative reclamations operating via the mechanism of mismemory. It is not enough for a text to be progressive; its memory must also be defended against this decay.

The entire essay is well-written, thoroughly sourced and a fascinating read. Grab the whole article here.

Soylent Bars: Literal Toxic Masculinity

Description: Cartoon of a white man with eyeglasses wearing a green sweater,
contemplating a glass of liquid.He declares, "Removing my taste buds has
increased drinking efficiency by 4%!" Illustration by Brad Jonas.

Soylent, the much touted "meal replacement" drink substance has gone from mixable pastes to coffee-flavored drinks to its latest offering: a Soylent bar. Soylent's consistency (in both the ingredient sense and in the promise of never having to worry about cooking, preparing or eating something different sense) has been presented by the company and it fans as a feature and key selling point.

Something that's also been consistent has been Soylent being unsafe to eat . In 2013, a documentary by Vice showed rats scurrying around the factory where Soylent was made. Despite repeated claims of commitment to food safety, browsing the subreddit devoted to Soylent shows reports of every few batches released this year have come with an extra ingredient-- mold. And while the recently released breakfast bars haven't had mold, there have been enough consumers of the bar that have reported becoming violently ill, in one case leading to a trip to the ER.

A community manager on the official Soylent forum responded to one users concerns about transparency thusly:

I do tell you info. I generally tell you more info. But i'd rather have all the info before I speak. In this case we are testing bars. We've eaten bars sent to us ourselves. Myself included. All our evidence leans towards people having an ingridient[sic] intolerance.

Okay, so the community manager actually trotted out the "I ate some and I'm perfectly fine defense" but they're just a person on a message board. Surely the actual company in charge of making Soylent wouldn't use the same--

Description: A screenshot of Rosa Labs' statement to the press that reads: "After these reports, we have retrieved remaining bars from our consumers and have personally consumed many of the remaining bars without adverse effects. We have also sent them for further microbiological testing and all tests have come back negative. Based on this we remain very confident in the safety of the bars. A certain subpopulation of individuals may have an allergy, intolerance or sensitivity to ingredients such as soy and / or sucralose, or certain vitamin and mineral sources and should consult with their doctor before continuing to consume these products."

Okay, so the actual makers of the Soylent bar did resort to the "we ate it and we're fine" defense too. And instead of contacting everyone who bought the tainted batches to initiate a recall, they're just telling people to send them in after they get sick. According to the FDA's online database, the current factory where Soylent is made hasn't been inspected since 2014. Then again, the tech-bro founder behind Soylent (which takes its name from the sci-fi movie "Soylent Green" where the titular food was made from human corpses) had this to say about shopping for groceries:

I have not set [foot] in a grocery store. Nevermore will I bumble through endless confusing aisles like a pack-donkey searching for feed while the smell of rotting flesh fills my nostrils and fluorescent lights sear my eyeballs and sappy love songs torture my ears.

Hey was also fined and charged by the city of Los Angeles earlier this year for his "experiment in sustainable living" that was really just an abandoned shipping container and port-a-potty covered in graffiti and trash.

Remember how in Harry Potter they had magic jellybeans that could taste like any flavor, from cheesecake to human earwax? If a melange of misguided libertarian, bro-grammer culture, start-up philosophy, engineer's curse, and insecure masculinity would have a flavor, it would be Soylent.