Game developers revive Sissyfight as an open-source online game about sexism

“We think of it as a game where another version of the main goal is to survive a hostile social environment, which encourages tearing each other apart — the kind that innumerable girls experience growing up — with a shred of your own self-esteem intact and with a friend by your side,” the FAQ read. “Skilled Sissyfight players discovered early on that the key to doing this was trust and support between players — most importantly, knowing who you should trust and support. Some of the best players even developed strategies — including social ones! — that could win without ever teasing or scratching another player.”

The lesson from the game is that the top players were the ones who formed strong friendships and cooperative strategies. You can’t play as a boy by design, as the team “wanted to create a very different kind of gendered space than what we saw in blockbuster games of the 90s.”

Clark said, “Sissyfight is definitely a weird and troubling game that doesn’t have an ‘easy’ political message or takeaway. If we were trying to create a game to help with messaging for a political campaign, teach ethics in a middle school classroom, or support a NGO’s unambiguously positive mission, I would be very worried. But Sissyfight isn’t meant to be any of those things — if anything, it’s more like a piece of public art meant for a community of players to react to and mess around in.”

She added, “Back in 1999, we took our own experiences of adolescent social conflict and reactions to ‘men-only’ gameplay of the 90s and set out to make a strange, ambiguous space that can be interpreted in a lot of different ways — positive and negative. We got superficial responses and easy reactions then, too — people asking why we were trying to teach little girls to be mean to each other or insisting we were being reverse-sexist by excluding boys, for example. We have plenty to say about any easy reaction. I’m a lifelong feminist, wrote for years for a feminist blog, and helped found a gender-justice nonprofit, so I’m more than happy for a lively debate about Sissyfight on the merits. But of course, if someone with an easy reaction doesn’t want to hear the nuances, what can you do?”

She also said, “I think of the easy reactions as similar to when Fox News portrayed Mass Effect as a game about lesbian alien sex; if you play the game and unpack it, there’s a lot more going on. Sissyfight is a community game, shaped by what players do with it far more than an ‘authored’ work like Mass Effect, so it’s even more slippery and open to interpretation. The kind of conflict in Sissyfight is definitely a culturally gendered kind conflict — it’s seen by society as ‘girl fighting,’ and that’s part of what we’re trying to portray, drop all kinds of gamers right into the middle of, and raise questions about. If a player’s first experience with Sissyfight doesn’t make them raise their eyebrow and have at least a twinge of ‘WTF?!,’ then we haven’t done our job as well as we could.”

In closing, Zimmerman said, “Sissyfight is a game about sexism, although that doesn’t make it sexist. Perhaps it’s a kind comparison, but the game is like a Chris Rock show — critically smart, extremely entertaining, and intentionally inappropriate. On a simple level, the fact that you can only be a girl in Sissyfight is a counter-balance to all the games where you can only be male. In my mind, that kind of unspoken choice by game developers is a kind of stealth sexism — although we don’t usually label those games as sexist. That’s our intention, anyway. It also goes without saying that the way culture creates meaning is subtle and subjective.”

Now I’m not sure what to think. My 16-year-old says about my explanation of Sissyfight, “That’s stupid.” My wife thinks the creators are out to create intentional controversy. I think their message just might go over a lot of heads. But I could be wrong. They may be brilliant game designers, or they just may be shining me on. What do you think? Take our poll below and check out the full description on the Kickstarter page.