- Earlier this year, I was fortunate enough to be asked to give a talk on games for BBC Radio 4′s Four Thought programme. (Radio Times were kind enough to write a very nice review here!) You can listen to the 15-minute recording on the website, or download the podcast (at 19 minutes, complete with additional Q&A too).

- In May, the lovely and erudite Emily Flynn-Jones and I presented at the Feminists in Games conference in Toronto, on our letter series Dear Mitu, Dear Emily, in which we corresponded on gender issues in games, the industry, and academia. It was an enlightening process for us both, and, as a result, we wanted to open up the dialogue to others too. We were fortunate enough to receive funding from the FiG iniative to begin our website, Dear Ada, where we have lately embarked upon this mission. I’m incredibly proud of it, even at this early stage. You can read the mission statement here, and do be sure to read the letters, too.

- And finally, my game Redshirt is still coming along, very much under active development, and headed for private beta soon. (You can still always ‘like’ Redshirt on Facebook, remember!) Of course, making games is tough — particularly when you’re a one-woman studio making your first commercial game. I spoke a little about my own experiences of being a solo independent developer last weekend at the excellent AltDevConf Student Summit. You can watch a recording here. (note: it is, unsurprisingly, aimed at students who are maybe thinking of making the same leap I did – or who have just done so.)

- Oh, and finally finally, as an additional reminder, I’ve been writing a regular column for games culture digital magazine, Continue. Please do make sure to buy all three issues so far — aside from my ramblings on issues to do with controller technology, the magazine features an even-better wealth of features of amazing game developers and thinkers alike.

During E3 this year, there was a lot of discussion, once again, about the ubiquitous use of ‘booth babes’ at the event. This discussion was further sparked by the eminent Brenda Garno’s brave series of tweets about the way the practice makes her feel. Following this, I was contacted by a journalist for a national news publication looking to write a piece on booth babes, and on the perspective of UK female developers, such as myself. I don’t think the article ever appeared (or, I might have missed it!) but since I wrote up my very quick thoughts on the matter anyway, I wanted to share my answer here on my blog, too.

Here’s what I said:

I’ve been pleased to see the backlash against the use of ‘booth babes’ this week, coming not only from Brenda Garno, but also from many other industry figures whom I respect. I am very glad that Brenda spoke out against the practice. I think it’s important to note, though, that the target of our ire should definitely not be the women hired as booth babes, but absolutely should be towards the companies who reinforce such an outdated, exclusionary, and lowest common denominator practice. It is a practice which shouts “the products we’re selling are for heterosexual men only” and implies that women are secondary to their concerns. Which, firstly as a woman, and secondary as a lifelong gamer (and a developer who is relatively new to the industry), is a very hurtful message indeed; as if the time we have invested in games is not worth the same as if we were men.

It also cheapens the games themselves; it implies that there is not enough innovation in these companies’ games that they can stand alone as worthy products, without also needing to throw in attractive women to dress them up. Perhaps, sadly, there’s a correlation there: the companies with the least interesting/innovative games are perhaps the ones which use booth babes! I think they should spend their effort and money making better games, without needing to hire booth babes, and devalue the industry for us all.

I don’t usually ‘do’ movie reviews, so I’m blundering through this. But, I want to declare that I rather loved Prometheus after seeing it a few days ago; though it did also trouble me, in many ways. However, given the mixed reactions I’ve seen towards the movie, I wanted to record my initial thoughts and, quite practically, I wanted to write something that I could point friends to, to indicate exactly why I loved it, at least. So, perhaps this is less a ‘review’ than it is a wondering-out-loud about the movie. (In fact, I’ve just changed the title of the post!)

Basically, I’d love to raise some of these as points for discussion. If you’ve seen the movie (which, right now, is not you, American/Canadian friends – sorry!), then please do let me know your thoughts. SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS, etc.

So, the primary reason I loved the movie is clear, and I can sum it up in one sentence: Prometheus is a brilliant movie about the unfettered conceit of humankind. And well, that’s why I like it. If you’ve read some of my previous writing, you might realise that criticising this sort of thing is important to me (read: strong hints of this in my previous posting on videogames and cosmic thinking here, or on games and our cognitive biases here, for example!) – and, as such, it was the kind of movie I was looking for. However, there are a number of confounding factors which obscure this a little bit, and it’s this conflict that I want to write about.

I should probably get out of the way two things, though: firstly, that Prometheus does visual beauty, and that-particular-Aliens-esque-body-horror so well that these aspects seem to draw the most attention – and, these in themselves are perfectly valid set of reasons to enjoy the movie, of course. Indeed, I felt like it does both of these things so well that it’s entirely possible to overlook entirely this subtext of deeply criticising human conceit. Also, Michael Fassbender’s incredible performance as David - the most interesting of characters - seems reason enough to love the movie, if little else.

In short, the whole ‘point’ of the movie seems amazingly summed up in the interactions between David and the rest of the crew; particularly within a seminal conversation in which Charlie Holloway opines about the Engineers’ reasons for creating human life, and David asks “why did you create me?” Holloway’s brutal answer is, of course, “because we could.” To this, David notes how disappointing that might be to hear as an answer from one’s creator, though this is only met by some more cold dismissal of David’s ‘worthiness’ as a being (“It’s a good thing you can’t be disappointed”, he says to David.)

Holloway doesn’t learn from this exchange at all, displaying a stunning lack of human empathy (ironic, given the amount of harping on he and Shaw do about the alleged sanctity of being human). At this point, I felt actually satisfied at David’s ‘infecting’ his drink (which, interestingly, meant his own sacred ‘humanness’ was thus perverted horribly. Punishment.)

Edit: As I said in the comments: I read this, actually, as David’s own attempt at ‘playing God’. Once again, life begets life, begets life, ad infinitum, just “because [they] could.”

Indeed, I think Prometheus is a movie which invites you to disagree with the philosophy of all of its main characters, and I wonder if its here that the brunt of the movie’s bad reception may lie. David is excluded from this, as are some of the minor crew members (who were, sadly reduced merely to functional tropes). But, of the rest of the crew of Prometheus, there are absolutely no real likeable characters – and here is where I’ll draw the only real comparison to Alien, which is vastly unlike this. Ripley is, of course, one of the most unequivocally badass characters of all time.

So, though there are a number of interesting relationships in the movie (the Miss Vickers – Peter Weyland – David triangle as an example that I loved), none of the component characters in these relationships stand alone as particularly interesting or likeable. But, that’s okay, as it works for the philosophy of the movie – which is to make only the non-human, David, seem likeable. Although these characters and their flaws (and their endless discussion of their ridiculous human-centric philosophies) somewhat confound and dilute the core message – they work as part of criticising humans.

After all, in Prometheus, no-one ever really brings to task Elizabeth Shaw’s creationist leanings for example,  or her continuing insistence that there should be an answer to humankind’s reason for existing, dismissing David once again, because he ‘is not human.’, and so surely would not understand. Again, the movie (I hope!) invites the viewer to disagree with her, as we have hopefully learnt from the experience, even if she has not. I hope the characters (and the viewer) get thoroughly beaten over the head with this criticism of human conceit in the seemingly-shamelessly-inevitable upcoming sequel, because quite frankly, we need it.

Surely, Peter Weyland’s final, brutal words, as he lays dying at the hands of the Engineer (after being literally beaten over the head by this!), are tragically haunting. A man, who has spent a hubristic lifetime searching for meaning is suddenly struck:  ”There’s… nothing.” David’s response is simple: “I know.”

Amazing.

Speaking of Weyland, a side note: after watching the movie, I also felt much more amenable towards the viral marketing “TED 2023″ talk released earlier this year. At the time, I was mostly dismayed by the fact that a ‘fake TED talk’, serving as sheer advertisement, would even masquerade as such on the TED website. I felt it went against the things that TED should, idealistically, be about. However, in the context of having seen Prometheus and noting the themes of criticising human conceit and hubris, I realise that the talk did a far better job of criticising TED than I ever gave it credit for, by highlighting the sort of conceit that it sees TED teetering at the edges of. It just seems, bafflingly, to have gone largely unnoticed. (And, particularly jarring given the positive, earnest reception to the video’s message in the TED comments!)

Anyway.

I will wrap up on my own main criticisms of the movie: obviously, the reliance upon ‘disproving of centuries of Darwinism’ requires some strong suspension (clamping, even?!) of disbelief, which is fine, but the movie does obviously invoke the classic ‘Chariot of the Gods’-esque thinking that humans were placed here by another, more superior race of Aliens – a proposition which is rooted in the fairly racist notion by CofG creator Erich von Daniken that only modern, white cultures are capable of feats of innovation and engineering. I will credit Prometheus though, for not suggesting that any ancient achievements were directly the result of the Engineers, whose involvement on Earth apparently predates CofG-type-thinking. Thankfully.

So, I liked Prometheus for being a movie about the failings of human empathy, the absurdity of human conceit, and our mistaken investment in the sanctity of humanness; failings which never even get resolved, which are left open, unexplored – and, at times, perverted. All of this works massively to its credit. I’m not saying Prometheus is a “smart movie” (whatever that may be), nor should it necessarily try to be. And, it is certainly not a perfect movie. But, I do think that it is a movie which thinks at least one level more than it seems to be given credit for. I am saying that thematically, this movie worked for me, and I hope I’m not still caught up in the highs of having watched it in 3D IMAX in holding it up to almost (though not quite) Blade Runner levels of esteem (thematically, at least) – this seems a far better comparison (in terms of Ridley Scott’s work) than the Aliens series.

It’s been a deeply bizarre 48 hours for me, but, after the awesome support on Twitter yesterday from many of you, it looks like Dove have investigated, and released a full statement on the issue, left both in the comments of my post, and in a post on Facebook. It reads:

Dove is committed to representing beauty of all ages, ethnicities, shapes and sizes. We believe in celebrating real beauty and in raising the self-esteem of women and young girls globally.

We found out that our European team was already aware of the mistake regarding labelling on Dove Summer Glow Body Lotion bottles. Many of our lotions focus on moisturization as the key benefit and in some cases we label them “normal to dry skin.” The Dove Summer Glow Body Lotion is a gradual self tanner that also moisturizes. It should have been marked as “fair to medium skin” or “medium to dark skin” depending on the skin type it focuses on. In this case, there was an oversight from our team and we accidently combined the phrases. As soon as our teams in Europe discovered this error, they began the process of relabeling the bottles. These will start appearing on shelf this summer. We are also in the process of correcting the language in our other communication vehicles where possible. As always, we appreciate the feedback and support from our community.

I will not, at this point, make assumptions about the nature of the error – though, as CBC’s Storify report on this issue notes, the UK Website for the product still lists it as ‘Normal to Dark Skin’, as of time of writing. I hope the change to the print is made soon, and the reprinted bottles hit stores sooner rather than later.

I am, however, very appreciative that Dove responded in the way that they did, and with such relative timeliness.

I’ve also been blown away by the messages of support to my last post. I hope I can respond to each one of you soon, because you made an uncomfortable experience far easier than it could have been. Until then, to all of you, thank you. Also, thank you once again to Laura for kicking this off, and campaigning tirelessly to bring this to attention.

While I do feel reassured that Dove has admitted guilt and wrongness by acknowledging that the labelling was a “mistake”and an “oversight”, this still brings the wider issue to the fore: why were there so many who chose to jump to trying to rationalise the use of “normal”? It’s this awful, galling feeling that I am finding difficult to reconcile. It feels, sadly, in many ways, like an empty success. After all, what does it all say about how quick we are to accept such things, even when they are later shown to be wrong?

Laura: Not being funny but I think this is possibly unintentionally racist. Is dark skin not considered ‘normal’ by Dove???

Now, normally, I would not have noticed this myself, were I wondering around a shop such as Boots or similar. The reason I would not have noticed are pretty much going to be the crux of this blog post, but I will mention that I am a British (South) Asian woman in my late twenties, having been born & brought up in the south of England, where I’ve lived pretty much my whole life. I’ll come back to that later.

But, suddenly, with Laura actively pointing it out, something went off in my head. Here was Dove, very explicitly putting forward one type of skin as normal, and dark skin as, well, not normal. 

“Wow.” I posted in reply. “No, really, that is pretty racist.” I asked Laura’s permission to share it on Twitter, and on my own Facebook, and then went ahead and posted it. In both posts, I tagged Dove’s official accounts, on Twitter and Facebook respectively.

I also did something else, though, which I never thought I’d do. I started talking, out loud, a little bit about how those comments made me, as a non-white woman, feel.

And this is the point. The labelling on this moisturiser is actively harmful, and not simply offensive (for a good distinction between the two, please see Scott Madin’s blog post)

It is harmful because it positions ‘dark skin’ as abnormal in a culture where racism is still a very real and potent thing. This kind of labelling, subtle as it is, and in a world full of similar instances of labelling, sticks to people’s minds. It sticks to the minds of those who are supposedly “normal”, and it sticks to those that it is making “abnormal”.

It took me a long time to realise that growing up, yes, I internalised the message that I was not normal. And, that is not okay.

What’s worse though, is even despite this, the barrage of comments I’ve seen and dealt with today, to the the effect of “I’m sure they didn’t mean it like *that*, though” or “They don’t intend to offend anyone”, or “It’s the same as labelling ‘normal to dry hair!’” and so on. And on. And on.

After a while, I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry, because those are EXACTLY the kind of voices that have talked me down my whole life. The voices that have told me that any thought I had of being hurt by feeling ‘othered’ were just silly. Even if I was hurt by what I took to be implicit racism, it just was my fault for being offended, or something. (Of course, invariably, these voices have come from various ‘well-meaning’ white friends.)

The truth is, I’m angry. I’m angry at all the years I spent, my entire teenagerhood and beyond, feeling apologetic about my skin colour. Feeling as though I have done something wrong by not being white. Really. In a way, I actually believed that for far too long.

I remember my first day of school in the UK (I joined a couple of weeks or so late, after having spent kindergarten in Germany), walking into a class, as the only non-white child, and a handful of kids came up to me and inspected me. “Whoa, you’re cool, you’ve been tanning!” said one boy. “No, don’t be stupid, she’s just not like us.” said a girl (she may have said something worse, actually, but this is how I remember it.)

Or the few times, when, as a young teen exploring makeup for the first time, I went up to a beauty counter and asked, tentatively, if there were any foundations or concealers for me, and I would get a certain look from the assistant, and some awkward comment, and then I’d feel really apologetic – and embarassed - about not being white.

Or plasters/band-aids. (It took me a long time to figure out, actually, that these were supposed to be skin-coloured for white people. Until my mid-teens I thought that was ‘just the colour that plasters/band-aids are’.)

Or ‘nude’ tights.

Or, all the countless number of beauty products I know I must have seen which convey the same message as Dove’s lotion, because, for the first few seconds of looking at that picture by Laura, I saw nothing out of the ordinary; (Just like those who, even after having it pointed out to them, refuse to see anything wrong.)

All of this, of course, is not even counting all the overt instances of racism. That’s a whole other topic. But, I am angry and hurt at all of the various ways I have been told by the dominant culture, in ways both explicit and implicit, that my skin colour has not fit ‘normal’. That I do not belong.

This is the culture to which Dove’s monumentally unthoughtful wording is contributing. No, I don’t think they meant it, but intention is beyond the point here. Casual racism – a culture of ‘othering’ non-white people – perpetuates itself in insidious ways, when we do not expect it. The words we use matter.

Meanwhile, Dove (in the US, at least, I think?) are trying to promote their ‘Movement of Self-Esteem’. Well, I can tell you, Dove, from my own direct experience, that things exactly like this are what contributed to my own lack of self-esteem growing up. All I wanted as a kid – as we all do – is to fit in, and subtle things like this, adding up, take away from the ability of any non-white person to do so. The 21st century, in multicultural Britain, is not the place to still be equating “white” to “normal”.

I almost did not write this. I’ve felt apologetic about it to an extent where even bringing up my skin colour, and how angry all those experiences have made me, has felt uncomfortable for me. Writing this is uncomfortable for me. I don’t like drawing attention to it, even when it is on my own terms. I am trying very hard to get over that. (Thank you to George for encouraging me to write this. Also, a thank you to Emily, who, in my recent letter series with her about gender, noted my discomfort with talking about race, and really brought it to light for me. And, a big thank you, of course, to Laura, for having pointed this out in the first place.)

Now, while many people have, thankfully, also reached out to Dove via their Twitter and Facebook, Dove have yet to respond, even though they’ve been tweeting about their current ‘Movement for Self-Esteem’ nonetheless, ignoring all tweets about the moisturiser.  I hope they do respond.

Edit 1: Ah, it looks as though Dove have responded, with this general, acknowledging tweet, so far. Let’s hope more comes of this.

Edit 2: A few people have brought up the fact that the other lotion in this range is for ‘Fair to Normal Skin‘, as though this somehow invalidates the point I am making regarding what Dove – and, indeed, western culture - considers to be ‘normal.’ The point still stands; they should not be making assertions as to what is ‘normal’ for a skin tone, and what is not. Here, I have expanded upon how, as someone with dark skin, this makes me feel, in a culture where the notion that “white” equals “normal” is widespread. Again, the words and signifiers we use matter. This post is all about implicit racism perpetuated through words. Even by labelling the lotions ‘Fair to Normal Skin’ and ‘Normal to Dark Skin’, they are normalising skin that is white. Normal is a harmful term to use, where they could have said “Medium”, or similar. I cannot personally speak of the experience of someone with very ‘fair’ skin, but for those people with fair skin who have got in touch to say that they’re not offended,  I would like to reiterate: Just because something does not offend you, it does not mean it is not harmful when viewed in wider cultural context.

Also, because its been brought up, there is a point to be made here regarding how skin colour is perceived from a ‘fashion’ perspective – and how fashion dictates sometimes that white people’s skin should be paler, and sometimes it should be tanned, but I’m feeling weary of having to explain this. So, I will leave this link here to illustrate how this particular fluctuating aesthetic trend has nothing to do with race, and does not mean that racism does not exist.

Edit 3: Dove has posted a full response, which you can see in the comments below. Also, I posted an update to this post here.

At Game Developers Conference this year, I was very lucky to be able to participate in a Games for Change ‘microtalks’ session, on the topic of “How Designing for Love Can Change The World”. The session was moderated by Jane McGonigal, and compared by Jane Pinckard, and featured talks by Chelsea Howe, Martin Hollis, Scott Brodie, Michael Molinari, and myself. The session was, very kindly, covered on a number of outlets, and also, is now available on the GDC Vault, I believe.

My biggest takeaway from this experience, though, was that trying to talk about complex things, including complexity in five minutes is really difficult. Because, essentially, this is what this talk was about: the complexity of love, and of human experience.

My original draft was at least twice as long, as George Kokoris in front of whom I practiced (he can attest that I was trying to talk twice as fast) can assure you. So, in the interests of time, my talk became way more polarised than I’d have liked – and, of course, there was plenty of l’esprit d’escalier in there too; I think I realised that subtlety really  doesn’t really well, work when addressing a crowd.

I’ve written up the session here for posterity, with added notes where appropriate.

Please note: the format was such that it was 20 seconds per slide – so, there are many slides, and therefore many pictures.

This tak is about romantic love, and the scientific method. These things may seem contradictory, but bear with me. Though first, let’s talk about space. Most of you will already know, that expanding out from the earth is a sort of ‘bubble’ of radio waves; all the broadcasts that have ever been sent, by anyone on the planet.

We’re sending out children’s TV shows & speeches by dictators, all our achievements, all our follies, all the Kardashians. Our media forms a sort of weird mix tape of the human experience, for anyone who might care to listen. It’s been asked a number of times: what would any extra-terrestrial observers make of it all? What would they make of us?

Edit: Of course, we have not been meaning to send out these messages, so this might be a weird analogy. Perhaps a better analogy would be that of  the Voyager probes, 1 & 2 sent out in 1977, containing the famous Golden Record – intended as a ‘cultural Noah’s Ark’.

Obviously, we haven’t been broadcasting games (or sending them out on Voyager…), but it’s interesting to ask ourselves: if alien beings, far in the future, were to assess what life on Earth was like, from only our archive of videogames, what would that teach them? What legacy are games leaving for us? It’s likely a very narrow sort of picture of what it is actually like to be human.

Edit: Regarding games leaving a narrow picture – mostly about shooting things: this stuff is fine, obviously, but, as I said, narrow. There is nothing inherently wrong with games about conflict over borders, or ideology; conflict is often one of the greatest sources of human complexity. However, the problem is that games don’t really reflect this complexity very well, which should be something that games are basically ace at doing.

Moreover, what would our games or broadcasts say about the human experience of love? There’s any number of love stories out there already, but, rather than telling one particular story as such: how do we model the very experience of love itself? What it’s like to love? Because we could look at any one relationship, any one couple…

Edit: The meandering point I was actually trying to get at, here: F*ck a heteronormative approach.

Love is the most interesting bit, and ours is a planet full of people in love. At the Digital Romance Lab, we took the approach that this notion suggests: if we want to teach someone who is not human about our experience of love, and we had only the medium of games to express ourselves, how would we do it?

[Note: not like this.]

We adopted a philosophy of experimentation and iteration (a bit like dating, one might say). If we have an idea, we simply build it, in hopes of discovering whether it is a design path worth pursuing, even if it is a failure, and we’ve had a few of those. But, we also ask the question of which part of love’s complexity we want to portray.

After all, love is paradoxically both universal and personal, experienced in many different ways. It’s this complexity that makes love so compelling when it comes to games. There’s a lot to cover, a lot to model. It presents a fascinating opportunity for developers to explore this experience, which both unites us and gives rise to so much diversity.

Love stories are also interesting when they go a bit wrong. Perhaps it is failures in love that make the successes all the better, prepare you for them, make them ever more victorious. Just like games. The discordant feedback of unrequited romance easily parallels the feedback loop of a game. We explore, we struggle, we learn, we move forward.

[Edit: the next few slides were a very fast, sweeping overview of some of the game-jam projects that came out of Dirolab, to illustrate the purpose and ideology behind the project, so omitted here.]

Some of this thinking has fed into a game I’m working on independently, called Redshirt. It’s a life sim set on a space station, blending classic sci-fi tropes with the impact that social networking has on our emotions. Amongst other things, it’s about capturing things like the uncertainty of sending a flirty message, seeing they are online, awaiting a response. It’s about allowing social experimentation, and trying to navigate social physics.

Games in which we may love but also fail at love, are about allowing players to think systematically about their actions & their consequences when it comes to romantic decisions. Games can be models for understanding real things, important things, and particularly useful for trying to interrogate things as weird and as complex as love. Games are the ideal engines of interrogation.

After all, video games may increase our capacity for complex systems thinking. They teach us that things – including love – may be complicated and beautiful and universal all at once. They allow us to poke and prod at its weirdness, via the scientific method; harnessing our natural awe, wonder, and curiosity about the world, interrogating it through logic and iteration.

Perhaps our best traits as humans, really, are also our most basic of traits. Yet, they are also the ones we forget about so often: how to love, and how to explore.

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