A Game of Spoons (Part 1 - Double Jump)

A few weeks ago, I played some of Ni No Kuni.  It was very pretty, but not my kind of gameplay and the story was not one that grabbed me, so back to GameStop it went.  One of the first things available to the player in terms of character customization, was the ability to jump, which the description flat out says has absolutely no bearing on the game in any way.  It was the first customization I bought with a rather scarce resource.

In Dragon's Dogma, which I am still playing, 9 months out, I tend toward playing my character in the archery classes even though I am a terrible archer because they can double-jump.  I get frustrated with the inability of the warrior classes to double jump, though it rarely affects exploration or combat (the mage classes can Princess-Peach-Hover, which splits the difference in terms of satisfaction, even though I find it a lot more useful for exploration).

My most empowering dreams are of me agile and strong as Spider-man, leaping, climbing, performing feats of athleticism that I (and most people) cannot perform.

I am a fully able-bodied person.  I cannot double-jump.  I am reasonably certain that double-jumping is entirely outside of human capability.  I could be mistaken.  I'm a fan of the martial arts and I have seen people do other things that I thought were beyond human capability, so I hold a sliver of doubt.  If there is such a thing on You Tube, let me know.

As a gamer, I come to video and tabletop games at least partly for empowerment fantasies.  I don't think there's anything wrong with that, per se, anything immature or foolish, and I dearly hope that it causes no one else any harm.  I enjoy feeling powerful and competent in dramatic situations (with games, it's almost always violent situations, and that is worrisome, if not problematic, but that's not today's topic - though as a matter of disclosure, I am a big fan of Koei's Dynasty Warriors series, so, yeah).  I like to be able to do things as a character that I cannot personally do.

Conversely, there's nothing that throws me out of a game worse than feeling disempowered.  For those of you who remember Autumn War and wondered why that eventually morphed and morphed and morphed again into its current successor, the Beast Fears Fire project, well, what happened was that, in testing I discovered that the bleakness of the setting and the situation left players feeling disempowered, and while there might be powerful experience somewhere in there, it's not one my players wanted to have.  It's not one I want to have.

I take it as axiomatic that feelings of disempowerment and deprotagonization are the two things that I want to avoid as a gamer and a game designer (there's another topic in that, and some who question why this should be an axiom, but again, not this topic, not this day).

Until today, I also took it as axiomatic that the ableist assumptions that go into most games (particularly tabletop games) were a regrettable but necessary byproduct of games fulfilling empowerment fantasies, or, at least, beyond my ability to fix.  But fuck that.  That's a foolish thing to leave unexamined, a foolish thing that can and does do harm.  So I'm going to examine it.

Mind, a lot of the things I am going to talk about don't apply to many modern or Story Games, but they do still apply to many, many games; all of the traditional games of which I am aware, all of the games I have played regularly, and, to an extent, all of the games I have designed.  So, yeah, my dog is in this fight.  I'm going to be focusing on tabletop games, since I know how to make those (arguably), but if something comes up that applies to video games or board games, I will explore it.