Home Let’s All Save These Historic Works Of Feminist Game Making From Obscurity

Let’s All Save These Historic Works Of Feminist Game Making From Obscurity

Editor’s Note: This was originally published by our partners at Kill Screen.

In the midst of the “pink games” boom of the mid ’90s, a female-targeted CD-ROM emerged that appeared to treat its audience with a little more respect than usual.

Chop-Suey, co-created by Theresa Duncan and Monica Gesue (with narration by then-unknown author David Sedaris), explored the quirky everyday life of a midwestern girl. The vibrantly colored personal narrative even snagged Entertainment Weekly‘s 1995 CD-ROM of the Year award. The win stood out in the usually male-dominated list as a representation of what critic Jenn Frank called, “the criminally underrepresented: that is, the wild imagination of some girl aged 7 to 12.”

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Before her death in 2007, Duncan went on to create two other acclaimed and distinctly female CD-ROM adventures: Smarty in 1996, and Zero Zero in 1997. After less than two decades, these strong early examples of female-oriented game spaces and game making are slipping into obscurity, disappearing from minds as effectively as CD-ROM drives are disappearing from the newest laptop models.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/710593842/theresa-duncan-cd-roms-visionary-videogames-for-gi

That’s why Rhizome, a NYC-based nonprofit digital arts organization, has taken to Kickstarter to raise the funds they need to preserve these important artifacts. As Rhizome curator Michael Connor explains, the organization’s interest and investment in preserving Theresa’s work is double-fold. “They are an excellent example of the lyrical possibilities of the CD-ROM and important, overlooked works by women,” Conner said. “And I also want people, especially girls, to be able to explore and enjoy them again.”

‘Wonderfully unconventional interactions’

Connor and the Rhizome team have been working closely with Duncan’s family members, friends  and fans in order to deepen their already evident reverence for the work.

“I love the sounds and smells that weave through the writing,” Connor said. “The wacko humor and the bulletproof cultural sophistication, the sense of a rich community of collaborators and an absolutely unique central vision.” 

See also: What World of Warcraft Borrowed From FarmVille

After recently re-playing Chop Suey with someone who was very close to Duncan, Connor found himself discovering even more wonderfully unconventional interactions. In a scene where the two main girls are at a picnic, for example, he learned that if a you pick up the X-ray glasses from a picnic table in the game, you can see the adults’ underwear through their clothes. “It’s really funny, and it feels like an imaginative take on a very real and normal scene from a little girl’s life,” Conner said. “There’s a lot of joy in that scene. If you click on the pickle, it will sing you a song about how it’s OK if you don’t like it, while [game characters] Aunt Vera and Ned dance to tunes on the AM radio.”

One of Rhizome’s core principles is the digital preservation of these kind of seminal but out-of-date computer-based art, a pursuit too often overlooked. As curator, Connor is adamant in his belief that “the general inaccessibility of legacy works of digital art is impoverishing our culture and holding us all back,” and that Duncan’s “project is one small effort to address this.” 

For Conner, the most urgent questions we face as a society in terms of the future of digital preservation “will be less technical and more philosophical. What do we want to preserve, and why? What are the consequences of preserving something that was only ever intended to be used/circulated in a specific context? What might we want to forget?”

For software-based work like Duncan’s, Rhizome is using “Emulation as Service,” in the hopes that a modern browser-based system will make her as accessible to a new audience. Rhizome’s digital conservator Dragan Espenschied is also working on developing a program called Colloq, a data recording system which can preserve interactions with cloud-based services like social media.

Video Games Before Their Time

Possibly the most disheartening aspect of Rhizome’s campaign is just how needed and unconventional Duncan’s work proves to be, even now, after all the time we had to improve the industry’s attitude toward young female players. As a young game enthusiast in the mid-’00’s, I remember having zero options other than to play the games that either alienated me by ignoring my demographic or were just flat-out patronizing. 

See also: Sweden’s Sexism Test For Games Is A Great Idea

When you’re little, you don’t have the words to describe your sense of dissatisfaction, but the hole remains there just the same. With a decade more of distance, the rise of smaller-scale games (like Nina Freeman’s work) have begun to fill that hole for me. But the problem remains the same: a new generation of young girls who must still feel as equally starved for relevant game worlds as the generation from two decades ago.

As Rhizome’s Kickstarter campaign most aptly puts it, “video game culture is at its best when it supports the narration and elaboration through play of a diversity of experiences. Unfortunately, as it was when Duncan made these games, this truth continues to be contested. So it remains essential that these games be widely known and played—not for the sake of the history of gaming, but for its future.”

More From Kill Screen:

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