[Together]

Amazing how the designer instantly draws you in with simple minimalistic game. Who cares if I win or loose, I just want to fly!

"As long as you have each other, there's no limit to where you can go."

can we PLEASE have an art game about relationships in which the relationship is not of necessity heterosexual?

In fact, even not using blue=boy pink=girl would be a start.

I don't get it. Based on my research (i.e. reading all the comments) nobody else does either. Sure, [Together] evokes an emotional tone, but it leaves too many questions unanswered: Why does the girl leave?

What if that is just a BUG in the software? ;b

Great review. Made me laugh out loud, and very thoughtful. I hope you contribute more in the future.

Why not complain about the fact that both characters appear young and slim? How about the fact that the girl is sitting and waiting, and the boy is running and taking action? That's a huge cultural assumption, isn't it? And why do I not see rings on their hands?! ARE YOU PROMOTING EXTRAMARITAL INTERCOURSE, YOU LIBERAL BLASPHEMER?!

In any work of art (or whatever), you always have things you want to talk about, so you experiment with them, and the (majority of) things which are not your focus, so you tend to stick with some kind of default setup. Sometimes it's sufficient to simply not mention something (e.g. nationality). Sometimes technicalities force you to specify a detail that you don't really want to bother with (in this case - gender), so you pick the first thing that comes to your mind.

This particular game is about being together. It's not about sexual orientation, to the point where these two people could easily be fourteen. So it uses very simple means to say "look, this is just a generic romantic couple". It presents what the author thought would be a default setup. Default setups are useful, because they are ignored by default. THEY MEAN NOTHING. They're not part of the message. In this case, the couple's genders don't really matter. The game's message lies elsewhere.

You understand this setup in an instant, because the game talks to you with signs you're very familiar with. So, the boy being blue and the girl being pink is a useful thing in this case. It's a convention. What it tells about the culture this convention comes from is a different matter. It does not necessarily tell anything about the author, because the author is communicating, rather than preaching (e.g. trying to convince you that you should be wearing blue at all times).

[Next time I write an overly elaborate tirade, it will be about the annoyance of stereotypical depictions of various nationalities in American games and films. And don't get me started about the term "Western civilization".]

I only got the sixth heart after watching someone's playthrough on Youtube, because the idea was counterintuitive. I generally resent the mannerism of "the only way to win is to lose". It's been done so many times that it's not even subversive anymore.

And then the game continued, and I got stuck, and frankly, it's very frustrating when a game like this suddenly fails to specify what it is that it wants me to do.

In particular, if it wants me to do nothing, then at least it should make it clear that inaction belongs to the game's dictionary (i.e. it's a valid gameplay option), because the common convention of games is that inaction equals abandoning the game rather than concluding it.

Oh jeez, does it fall into 'inactivity = gameplay'? I'd swear that meme was actually trained into gamers from WOW and other mmorpgs of that design, and is now filtering into supposedly indipendently minded games.

On the boy girl thing, I'd actually argue it is important. Even if the artist didn't think about it much when they did it, that's their artistic expression. If you want some other genders, then your just ignoring the artist/designer. If your not interested in preserving the artists expression, who cares about preserving what notion you have for it?

Though if you want to encourage game designers by saying that if they want to make a game with a different gender mix, they have an audience for it, that makes sense. Sometimes a designer wants to, but thinks no one would care, and so telling them someone would care does work out.
~~~
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@JZW

Actually, I very nearly added to the comment once I played the game and realised the reiteration of the active/passive male/female trope. But I thought the point had been made. You're partly right about the youth and slimness factor -- at least, in most games which aim for some kind of "beautiful" mood, body diversity is certainly underrepresented. But, at least in male representations, body and age diversity is commonplace in games, mainly, I suspect, because of game designers reclaiming their own faults, R Crumb-style. That is, we have lots of fat, balding male protagonists with frustrated sexual desire.

Sorry to take your semi-sarcastic comment so literally.

On the bulk of your post: I suspect we simply disagree on the cultural effects of gender representation at an axiomatic level. You think that depicting to the unmarked or "neutral" figure (the white male, the blue and pink heterosexual couple) has little or no cognitive effect, that the player/reader treats the depiction as a floating signifier for *any* protagonist, *any* romantic couple. I disagree. I think that the constant use of such depictions cognitively reinforces the norm, perpetuates hegemonies, and continues to exclude the possibility of diversity. Put simply: if all I ever experience in art is the depiction of heterosexual couples, I'm very unlikely to grow up unconflicted about my homosexuality, I'm very likely to feel somehow aberrant. Put another way: there is no such thing as a neutral symbol; all symbols have content.

There's not much further I suspect we can take this argument, without doing some research into cognitive psychology and cultural studies. But I'll ask one thing: If you're right, why is it that the supposedly neutral symbol also happens to always be a representation of the entity who already has the most social power?

Thanks for responding.

Your answer is contained in your question: it is neutral precisely because it is a representation of the entity who already has the most social power.
I agree that meaningless symbols don't exist, but some symbols have more intentionality than others. By definition, the more you stray from the socially accepted norm, the more you give meaning to your symbol.
Now let's say I am making a game (or writing a book, or making a movie, whatever) that talks about any given subject A. If I inject elements that refer to B, I am weakening my A.
Although I might be, as a person, extremely sensible to the gender issue (as a matter of fact, I have almost nil hetero friend), I do not necessarily want to make a point about it in everything I do.
I that particular game, which is very pure, putting two guys or two gals would have distracted from the essence of the game which is flying with a loved one.
Now I do agree that he could've gone further in the abstraction and made two sexless protagonists, which would have left more space to the imagination and rendered all those questions nil. If I ever have to develop something around that theme, I'll think about it and in this regard, your comments were fruitful; But as a hetero guy, I would not have thought about it naturally. I would just have used a commonly-accepted, widely-used image of a classical couple. You can't criticize him for not having a will to defend gay rights in a little flash game...Or else there is no limit.
Why isn't the guy black? Why isn't the girl fat? Etc.
Sorry if I come out a bit strongly about this, but it is more for lack of English vocabulary than something else. No intention to offend, sorry if I did.

The early drafts of my review included a brief discussion of how [Together] reinforces traditional gender roles, but I ended up cutting all that stuff in order to focus on gameplay and story.

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who noticed the game's conservative gender stereotyping, and am thankful to those who have participated by writing about the issue in the comments here.

So featuring what is the norm counts for "conservative gender stereotyping" by PC terminology? Ohh my...