Week 1

Welcome to the devlog for Shapely! Shapely is a game in development by Robin van Bree and Tyler Sanders that aims to:

1. Give cis people insight into the experience of being misgendered
2. Help trans, nonbinary, and intersex people feel seen.

We are both Game Design MFA students at DePaul University and this game is a project for our Games With A Purpose course. As such, we are designing this game through the Transformational Framework, which is a tool created by Sabrina Culyba to help designers develop games for social transformation. Unlike entertainment games, transformative games are designed specifically to change players in a way that transfers and persists beyond the game.

For us, we aim for these transformations to be in disposition, behavior, and identity. For disposition, we want cis players to come out of the game having felt the type of feelings trans people feel when being misgendered—obviously, we can’t simulate the degree of this feeling—but we aim to give them a taste.

For behavior, we hope cis players will misgender people less often after playing our game. We understand that misgendering is frequently the result of sincere language slip—each of us has misgendered people multiple times in the discussion of our project—however, we hope playing this game may be impactful enough to shift the gears in players’ unconscious pronoun selection.

For identity, we would like cis players to come away with a greater awareness of their privilege in having their assigned gender at birth aligned with their correct gender. For example, we would like cis people to consider that choosing the men’s or women’s bathroom is an easy decision for them.

For our first prototype, we’re attempting to simulate the experience of being misgendered through the use of a GM and cards with shapes on them. Each player will pick a card with a shape that represents their true gender and the GM will then give them a card with a shape that represents their assigned gender. Each round will consist of the GM asking players to perform an action depending on their shape. But the GM doesn’t specify whether players should be acting off of their assigned shape or their true shape. It is then up to the GM whether they made an acceptable move or not. On this point, there are several different methods we’d like to test. First, see if the GM can act as though the player doesn’t understand the rules of the game and is playing the game wrong (even though they’re not). Second, the GM lets them take any move but only gives them points if it was “right.”

However, this is the first of many prototypes, and the final game will surely evolve in directions we can’t foresee. But for each iteration, we’ll make sure to discuss it here in the Shapely devlog.