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[cqueer]

Interview with Rin Mortis

C: Hey; so glad you could join us for the first interview on CQueer! Today I’m with my good friend Rin Mortis, an indie game developer whois currently working on a game called “Vest Party” that features a wildly diversecast of queer characters. Rin, could you introduce yourself and your work in more detail?

R: Hey, everybody!  I’m a game developer, character designer, and co-founder of Nodus Tollens Studios, and one of our goals is definitely to have more representation in gaming, most of the team being queer themselves. Vest Party is an independent video game that focuses on the adventures of detectives and their attempts to keep their city safe. The world these detectives inhabit is, at least at first glance, very little like our own: their society focuses on limited means of expression and extreme body modification. However, true to the game’s noir influences, characters find themselves getting caught up in things they’re trying to leave behind. There are no humans in this world, and the races that do live here range from diamond-eating demons and winged creatures with objects for heads, to party-loving foxes and war-veteran centaurs. A prequel to the main game named “Vest Party: Below” will be available on Itch.io in Fall 2015.

C: Awesome! Could you tell us more about how being queer and being a feminist ties into your work with Vest Party?

R: Right. So a lot of my work is based around my experiences as a whole—growing up as a kid, I didn’t see a lot of characters I could relate to and see myself in. It’s hard as a queer person growing up, because most of the characters you can at all relate to are blatant stereotypes or jokes made at the expense of the queer community. It’s very difficult to find characters that are fully represented as people.

C: Definitely! On the subject of representation, one of the closest (but still not close enough) icons for me was Samus from the Metroid series: fully armored with a lasergun arm, but the only time she was revealed as a female character was at the end of the first game–sort of in a “played for shock value” moment rather than anything actually contributing to our understanding of Samus as a fully-fledged human being. I have a lot of mixed feelings about how gender representation has historically been handled in video games—I’m sure it’s vastly more complicated when working with gender and sexuality together.

R: Yeah, I think Samus does in some way ring true with a lot of people; I certainly related to aspects of her growing up. But what we’re doing with Vest Party is to simultaneously make queer identities more present and less at the same time—what we want to do is to make these characters as part of their world, just like normal people. We’re not trying to portray being queer as something separate or weird…this is just a normal part of identity.

C: That’s pretty refreshing. You’re just showing queer characters living their lives, whose queerness is just part of their holistic identities as people.

R: A lot of the races in Vest Party actually don’t have binary concepts of gender; we’ve been trying to create full characters without stereotyping or exoticizing the ways in which characters identify. We’ve been trying to avoid binary systems altogether, and for the most part gender is just something that our characters are willing to exploring all the time. That’s really neat, because it allows the Vest Party team to have more fun with the designs, and be totally unrestricted by any social expectations that we have.

C: Right; so could you tell us more about specific characters or social conventions within the Vest Party universe that showcase this open philosophy?

R: About 90% or more of our characters and all the main characters are queer in some way, shape or form (laughs). We’re currently working on the prequel named “Vest Party: Below” coming out in Fall 2015, and the main character, a detective named Flynt, doesn’t actually use any gendered pronouns. None of them really fit Flynt. Flynt is a winged creature with a cannon-shaped object for a head—his species is shortened to “obj”—and objs are a monosexual race. So for the most part, objs don’t have any concept of gender developed through their society. They just make up whatever gender fits them best, if at all.

C: As for your identity as a feminist, how does that tie into Vest Party?

R: Well, as I said earlier, when I was a kid growing up I never saw any empowering female characters or characters who supported value in female identities that weren’t total eye-candy. So in Vest Party we have a main character named Lucy who is, in short, a BA demon girl who happens to be lesbian and doesn’t really care what people say about her. Though she comes from a difficult background, she stands strong in her beliefs and can’t be stopped. Also, we have female characters who are more eloquent when they speak—we have all sorts of women in this game, and I think it’s very important that we have a little bit of everyone. The more variety we have in Vest Party, the more it’ll feel realistic, like someone you’d actually know.

C: Like a society of fully-developed, unique characters who come from different backgrounds and who are representations in themselves—self-representing.

R: Yeah, like one of the big things we want to get with this game is: “Make it feel like everyone could be someone you know.” As the main character designer, I really wanted to make sure that every character in Vest Party could be believable to the point that you could imagine meeting the character on the street—despite the fact they’re some demon person or an object head. We want their personalities to be fully realistic, even with their appearance that’s totally fantasy.

C: Going on the topic of character design, one of the things we’re extremely focused on in SPARK (the parent organization of CQueer) is resisting the sexualization of women and people in general—reducing people to sexual objects without the ability to speak and represent themselves. Have you dealt with sexualization in the creation of your Vest Party characters?

R: We definitely try to avoid sexualization in Vest Party, because as a gamer I know it feels so weird and dissonance-creating to just have a game you’re playing focus on a female character’s sex appeal. We’re not making characters in a game to have sex appeal: we’re making a game that everyone can pick up and have some sort of meaningful experience playing. Sexualization disconnects the focus of the game from a design perspective—I just don’t support the objectification of women as any kind of practice.

C: It’s so tiring! R: You see it all the time, and I keep thinking: “Can we have something different?” I realize that every character has some sort of appeal to someone playing the game, because everyone’s appeals are different—but when you make a character that’s entirely fanservice (reduced to their sexual components, with no other defining attributes), that doesn’t sit well with me. I want to make full characters, people you can relate to and care about.

C: Agreed entirely. Alright, thank you so much for your time, Rin—it’s been a pleasure speaking with you today.

R: Thank you, Calliope.

C: Rin Field, independent game developer and co-founder of Nodus Tollens Studios. Watch for their upcoming game, “Vest Party: Below,” coming out in Fall 2015.

[cqueer]

I'm Lux Cuellar! I identify as a pansexual trans woman, and I'm super excited about Crystal Queer. I'm a bit of a makeup geek, and I'm also really into theatre and poetry. 

I'm a spoken word poet in Charlotte, NC, and I use that platform to raise awareness about different nuances of being a woman and being trans. I talk a lot about cisnormative beauty standards in my activist work. 

I can't wait to hear your voices here at Crystal Queer!

[cqueer]

Welcome to CQueer!

Hey, everyone; welcome to our new blog, CQueer!

We--members of SPARK--are making this site for and with you, as queer feminists of many different backgrounds—and we want to see you, your friends, and the work we're all doing, crystal clear.

So, intros.

I’m Calliope Wong, a pansexual trans woman among other things, and I’m one of the co-starters of CQueer   :^ 

I am totally that girl to call when you need living proof you're never too weird.

(That optimistic support on your League of Legends friends list, that re-avowed fan of Emily Dickinson's poems, that girl on your newsfeed, posting about transgender activism at women’s colleges.)

You might’ve heard of my open-letter campaign for trans woman inclusion at women’s colleges—right now, Mills and Mt. Holyoke have changed their admissions policies to include trans women (look it up!). Besides doing explicitly activist work, the paintings I do in my spare time have a lot to do with the trauma and triumphs of living trans in patriarchal society—currently, I’m trying to find a gallery in the New Haven area that will feature them! I’m also finding ways for other art-parts of me to tie into my activism: besides personal narratives and writing, I’m figuring out how piano and composition can play a part in my efforts to [Row Row] Fight the Patriarchy!

 Let's work together to build this into an empowering place for queer feminists, and to share that power :D