Feminism

The nature of the human mind and its relationship to the body is something that we all probably dig on whenever we manipulate an embodied avatar. There´s this wet sense that comes with the control, whether making that body a tool for blowing up monsters or playing house. Striptease takes this axiom of game design and shatters it in the reflection of gender dynamics.

Ninjabi is a contraction of "ninja" and "hijabi" -- or, in this case, a short platformer implemented in Shockwave (a tutorial plus three levels).

The protagonist, Layla, per backstory, expresses her defiance of the oppression and violence she faces as a woman in an unidentified Islamic country by, apparently, leaping atop platforms, spray-painting graffiti, and then knifing bearded, cane-wielding members of the Morality Police. Before she can attack them, she must complete all the graffiti tags in the level; each time she sprays one, lighted windows go on and other, secluded women applaud her defiant spirit. Or something like that. This "community support" is evidently what allows her to knife the "bad guys."

In my review of Grey Ranks, I expressed my feeling that the game was capable of creating, in players, the kind of emotional response we associate with art of power; that playing the game can be a worthwhile and important experience, but that this kind of experience cannot reasonably be classifed as "fun." My phrasing was "fuck fun." Coincidentally -- or perhaps not coincidentally, since I believe Gijsbers is attempting to get at something similar -- the rules to his game Vampires says that it "transcends fun." (Gijsbers also created Fate, The Baron, and Stalin's Story).

In Awesome Women Kicking Ass, each player takes the role of a great Heroine of mythology, defending the land of Herstoria against an attack by the pernicious forces of the Patriarchy, who wish to reduce all women to subordination. An indie RPG with (like My Life With Master) a fixed narrative arc, Awesome Women is essentially structured as a conversation.