Pause! I highly recommend playing through the game before reading the following post.
Find the link here: https://lysst.itch.io/girlhood
Password: trust
“Girlhood” is a primarily text-based story game about navigating online friendships as a young girl. The game starts out innocent, with the player chatting about various video games with their friend “AngelGirl14”. They have access to two applications – messaging and images – but the photo albums are locked until later in the game. For awhile, the conversation stays innocent – discussing “Dress to Impress”, “Minecraft”, and the woes of preteen life. However, as the conversation shifts to crushes and boys, the player finds themselves pressuring Angel into sending them an explicit photo she took of herself as “inspiration” for their own photo. At this point, the player’s dialogue choices become fewer – their only option is to move forward, or quit. Once Angel sends her photo, the player reveals that they are in fact an adult man by sending her an explicit photo of his penis. She is naturally horrified, and once she recovers from her disbelief, instantly wants to tell an authority figure. However, the player must watch as they try to threaten, manipulate, and blackmail her into silence. Fortunately, she reports and blocks the player character anyway – forcing them to hastily try and delete all of the child pornography on their computer. Ultimately, the endgame is timed so that the player cannot possibly delete all of the explicit content in time, and it is implied that they are apprehended by the police.
When I made the choice to make a game about such a heavy topic, I knew that there would be challenges. Having experienced a form of online grooming in my own childhood, I was both uniquely equipped and incredibly daunted to make this game. In the early stages of development, I found it difficult to get started knowing I would have to recall my own experiences to write realistic dialogue. However, once I started writing, it was easy to get into the flow of it – I even found it therapeutic at times to process the emotions that I hadn’t unpacked. Stepping into the shoes of the attacker made it easier to internalize that it is never the victims fault, and writing Angel’s response let me act out what I wish I had done, and what I wish all young girls would do in this scenario. Growing up in Catholic school, we were taught that we were just as evil as the attacker if we ever sent explicit pictures of ourselves to anybody. They told us that we would go to jail for distributing child pornography, even if it was of ourselves. This fostered a fear in us that if we had made a mistake, it was already too late to recover. It left us vulnerable to blackmail and manipulation from attackers who knew that we were too scared to come forward. It was important to me that players left this game knowing that Angel made the right choice by reporting the incident, so they could teach their future children to make the same choice if they ever made a mistake like her.
Another unexpected challenge I faced was playtesting. After making such a personal game, I found that when it was time to test, I was nervous to bare my soul to anyone but my closest friends and other people who may share the same experience. However, I believe that it is incredibly important for everyone to play this game. I think the difficulty arose from the specific relationship between me and my classmates – most of them are just acquaintances, yet they all know that this is a lived experience. I would have no problem with them playing the game on their own, but I found the thought of sitting in front of them and watching them play it unbearable. Thus, I selected the classmates I am closest with to playtest while in class, and tested outside of class with my close friends. I asked the following questions before and after playtests to gauge their response, so that they could be alone with the content while they were playing.
Before:
1. What do you know about the game and it’s contents before playing?
After:
2. What were your primary emotions during gameplay
3. Have you had a similar experience? If so, was the gameplay overly upsetting or triggering?
4. Were you able to delete all of the content at the end of the game? Did you discover and open the photo albums?
I was incredibly grateful to have the book discussion timed with this assignment, because it allowed me to draw inspiration from numerous sources and turn my idea into a fully-fledged game. For the core concept of the player being the villain, I drew inspiration from multiple sources. First, from Brenda Romero’s “Mechanic is the Message” series, featuring works like “Train” and “Síochán leat” which give players a role in enacting human-wrought atrocities. Second, from the “Jumpman” level of Braid. Both of these works hide from the player that they are the villain until they’ve already completed the terrible acts, which I emulated in my work. Additionally “Jumpman” features a mechanic in which the player can attempt unsuccessfully to “undo” what they’ve done. This inspired me to add the endgame state where the player attempts to clear their desktop of explicit material – it doesn’t undo the harm they’ve caused, but they can try to prevent the consequences. At that point, they instinctively become a willing participant in covering up the crime – they could choose to let the police catch them, but the urge to follow directions and the panic caused by an encroaching deadline urges them forward. The endgame was also inspired by Orhan Kipcak and Reini Urban’s “Ars Doom”, the first work of game art. This artwork features a digital gallery in which the players can critique the work by shooting, painting, and flipping the paintings. I wanted to emulate this “gallery” experience with the photo album feature, which forces the player to face the scope of the crimes committed by their character. Finally, I wanted to grant the player some catharsis as they come back to reality – after witnessing a horrific act that goes unpunished every day, they can rest a little easier knowing that the criminal was caught this time.
Angelgirl14’s profile picture
Klik’s Interface, inspired by the SMS app “Kik” where internet predators were common.
The Images app, which features multiple albums titled with girls’ names