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Courier: Dragons Within, a video game. An exploration into the magic circle as healing circle: restorative game design for a masculine framework free from the template of domination
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Courier: Dragons Within, a video game. An exploration into the magic circle as healing circle: restorative game design for a masculine framework free from the template of domination [document]
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Content
Copyright © 2024 Maynard Hearns
Courier: Dragons Within, A Video Game
An Exploration into The Magic Circle as Healing Circle: Restorative Game Design for a
Masculine Framework free from the Template of Domination
by
Maynard Hearns
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
(INTERACTIVE MEDIA)
May 2024
ii
Dedication
To the men, women, and gender-expansive expressions in my life, real & imagined, who
have played a part in my healing, and all those searching for the benevolent masculine.
iii
Acknowledgements
Recruitment is a long game, with warm leads and goodwill cultivated over time. Games
are not made alone, and there is no guarantee that a student project will ever get off the ground,
let alone be the fruit of a collaboration between 45 hearts and hands across 17 time zones. The
team’s time, talent, efforts, and hopes powered this production, and a year later, I am
overflowing with awe and gratitude. Without these individuals, there is no game— Courier:
Dragons Within would not exist without you.
To the team leads and producers, in first name alphabetical order— Akshata Nagendra
(Lead Producer), Anooj Vadodkar (Lead Engineer, Producer), Edna Lopez-Rodriguez
(Marketing Lead), Edwin Leon (Quality Assurance Lead), Emma Pritchard (Art Director, Lead),
Jack Giba (Narrative Lead, Producer), Jacob Vickers (User Interface, Art Lead), Jonathan
Emord-Netzley (Audio Lead), Patrick Larmon (Lead Designer, Producer) , and Siphon Lokay
(Writer, Narrative and Audio Producer). It’s hard to believe that a little more than two years ago,
we were all strangers. You all took the little flame of an idea I had and stoked and magnified it
into dazzling streak across the sky.
To the team at large, who emerged from the world and fashioned my loose and nebulous
concepts into meaningful and breathtaking samples and assets: Akari Johnston, Anik Panja,
Beck Houser, Beverly Pan, Brian Royston, Carter Gwertzman, Christopher Wasp, Christine Co,
Collette Quach, Dexter Knaack, Drew Dimmick, Flora Frank, Gabriela Venegas, Gerald "Jerry"
Maynard, Gracia Yolanda Barrera Ruiz, Hannah Cabral, Jace Clowdus, Jack Giba, Jake
Wylykanowitz, Jasmine "Jas" Lim, Jessica Lam, Kylie Chen, Lili Chazen, Liam Beckley, Nickey
iv
Olson, Patrick Larmon, Paula Cunada, Sol Lagos, and Timothy Lim. Everything you made,
everything you touched, left me speechless and filled me with determination.
Special thanks to Brandon Skylar, Joy Jin, Minyoung Heo, and Patrick Fitzsimmons for
their additional insights and support.
To Richard Lemarchand, the model of professionalism, kindness, and candor, and a
paragon of masculinity. Studying under you has been a high privilege, not just for your insights
and wisdom, but for your unfailing encouragement. I will be studying your ways for many years
to come.
To TreaAndrea Russworm, PhD, who took all my theoretical musings and gave them a
springboard. To be seen on such an implicit level is a quiet and powerful affirmation, like air, and
nothing could replace your contributions.
To Tracy Fullerton, who uniquely equipped me to lead such a massive operation with
your Video Game Directing Class. Everything I learned in that class, every conversation we’ve
had over the last three years, I’ve used before the end. Nothing you’ve done or said was wasted
on me.
To Marientina Gotsis, who saw in me both an artist and a scholar when I considered
myself just a “hopeful.” Here, I have bloomed, just like you said.
Thank you to so many of the other faculty in the USC Games program, including Peter
Brinson, Martzi Campos, Andreas Kratky, Marianne Krawczyk, Laird Malamed, and Margaret
Moser. Your guidance across all areas of design and development showed me where my
strengths lie as a game designer and expanded them, and your insights into my struggles and
failures were impactful and affirming. Growth is safe in each of your hands.
v
To Belinda Garcia, my mentor and friend. Before I had the courage to present this idea,
you were its champion. You first showed me how urgent my work is for all men and those who
love them.
To my cohort, my adventuring party. Never had I had access to so many resolutely
friendly and affirming friends. You showed me there’s something just right with me. I am a
different person because you all saw me so.
To my high school English teacher, Brian Mudd, who showed me that the men in the
stories I loved could be teachers, and that being a man was a wonderful thing and required
taking nothing away from anyone else.
Finally, I want to thank my family: Shilene Blain-Hearns, Alexandria S. Blain, Nathaniel
Hearns, and Tiffanie Schwenk. I have been away from you all for far too long, and your undying
faith in my ability and champion of my efforts have been a massive comfort through the years.
vi
Table of Contents
Dedication.......................................................................................................................... ii
Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................... iii
List of Figures ..................................................................................................................viii
Abstract ............................................................................................................................ ix
Introduction: Designing As Resistance..............................................................................1
Chapter 1: Critical Contexts: “It’s Just a Game” ................................................................5
Magic Circle as Social Contract.....................................................................................5
Masculinity “In Crisis” ....................................................................................................8
A Template of Domination and a Community Charge to Dislocate It ............................9
Nonviolent Game Design and Restorative Play ..........................................................17
Chapter 2: Analyzing The Game: Narrative and Mechanical Close Readings ................21
The Present Narrative: A Rite of Passage Tale in the Style of Myth ...........................21
Summary..................................................................................................................21
Why Dragons? Why Bikes? Why Big Sur? ..............................................................23
On Genre: Designing Towards Myth, Not Fantasy ..................................................23
The Present Game: A Close Reading of Mechanics ...................................................26
The Nonviolent Primary Mechanic of Breathing, and Its Many Uses.......................27
Meditation as a Journey Inward and Confronting Misbelief. ....................................29
Reflection as Hearing a New Voice in Nature..........................................................30
vii
The Bicycle as a Model of Nonviolent Exertion........................................................33
Pursuing Nonviolence in the Design of the Adventure Game Genre...........................35
Conclusions: What about Masculinity?............................................................................37
Is Masculinity Fragile? If so, what do we do about it? .................................................38
Bibliography.....................................................................................................................43
Appendix A: Design Documentation................................................................................45
Meditation Design Documentation...............................................................................45
Summary..................................................................................................................45
Comparison: Nier Automata.....................................................................................47
Reflection Design Documentation ...............................................................................48
Summary..................................................................................................................48
viii
List of Figures
Figure 1 --A depiction of Meditation's Approach, (Ely Labyrith Pattern)..........................46
Figure 2-- Confrontation ..................................................................................................47
Figure 3--Nier Automata's “Hacking Mode”.....................................................................47
Figure 4--Reflection--when the player approaches a thought in the world......................49
Figure 5--Reflection-- the player breathes on the thought, and it begins to dissipate.....49
Figure 6--Reflection--when the thought begins to reappear, reframed. ..........................50
Figure 7--Reflection-- the thought, reframed ..................................................................50
ix
Abstract
This thesis paper is a companion to the video game Courier: Dragons Within, a 2D/3D
character narrative video game designed to situate the masculine protagonist with nonviolent
agency in a rite-of-passage story. This paper explores the magic circle of game spaces as a
potential space for cultivating new, nonviolent instincts in the 3D character action video game
genre. The author first approached the project to identify a healthy relationship with anger.
However, throughout the development of the project, and reviewing of the available literature in
preparation for the development of this game, came to understand that a healthy relationship
with anger required confronting definitions of masculinity, and how society handles masculine
persons, and how those definitions are reinforced in the games and player experiences
designers make.
Drawing inspiration from games like Nier: Automata, The Last of Us, and The Witness,
this game seeks to bring interactivity to internal verbs and character monologues in 3D spaces,
showing how characters actively think through their assumptions in natural spaces in a dialoguelike fashion. Drawing inspiration from the game Season: A Letter to the Future, this game
acknowledges the necessity of physically exertive component in nonviolent ethics and looks to
the bicycle as a nonviolent example of engaging the body for catharsis. The verbs of this game
aim to use the model of the hero's journey and the genre conventions of myth to propose an
interactive template beyond domination, where rhetoric and ludism meet to knit together an
experientially based understanding of what one can do and be prompted to do.
Drawing from game studies, Jungian psychology, mythology, genre studies, feminist
critique, wilderness therapy, and publications on far-right extremist recruitment in game spaces,
x
this paper offers the invitation for designers to think through 1) a crisis of masculinity as it relates
to game spaces, and how the male gamer is done a disservice by the lack of mature masculine
representations in interactive spaces, and 2) the role of conflict in character action games and
how conventional player verbs and game dynamics reinforce our assumptions about
nonviolence being an unrealistic strategy for engaging in potentially hazardous contexts.
This paper concludes with a unifying cry from theorists across the gender expanse for a
masculine framework that is generative, nurturing, and calm. These representations of
restorative masculinity are dwindling in the face of the growing threat of violent resurgence in
public society (and by extension, game spaces). This paper implores the game designer to
confront the absence of nonviolent, thrilling adventures through the design of mechanics that not
only reward nonviolent behaviors, but present nonviolent game verbs in the face of these violent
encounters. The accompanying game, Courier: Dragons Within, is meant to approach a proof of
concept of nonviolent verbs in the character-narrative game space
1
Introduction: Designing As Resistance
It is a weird reality to grow up hearing that you do not measure up for an identity that will
ultimately be foist upon you. As a child, I was both told that I had no choice but to be a man, and
at the same time, I had all the makings of a very bad one. These ideas were reinforced in the
home, through my elementary and middle school experience, and in my adopted place of
worship—to be a man was to become incased in this hardened shell of fury, violent in speech
and deed, thrust with the expectation to be aggressive, competitive, and emotionally devoid. For
most of my upbringing, I hated the idea of becoming a man—similarly, I didn’t mingle well with
other boys, who were rewarded for the qualities I struggled to adopt. Before I became a legal
adult, the phrases “lost cause” and “failure” were normal parlance in association with me. These
qualifiers became more closely identified with my understanding of myself more than any notion
of “manhood.” While I eventually found my first stable foil to this expectation in high school,
these bonds couldn’t realistically persist in the same capacity after graduation. Far from feeling
as though I had a sure idea of myself upon leaving the homes of my parents, I felt both
underprepared and mortally exposed—would the world at large be as unkind as the world I had
grown up to? There was no reason to believe it wouldn’t…except for my video games.
My video games showcased some of my earliest alternative models of masculinity that
extended beyond the perspectives and surroundings of my lived situation. As someone who
primarily played character action roleplaying games, titles like Final Fantasy X, Kingdom Hearts
and Kingdom Hearts 2, Tales of Symphonia and Tales of Vesperia, and The Mass Effect Trilogy
expanded my ideas of what a man could be and cultivated within me a desire to befriend and
emulate these portrayals. Like so many of the boys who played video games growing up, I
played my games to escape—but like so many boys who fall in love with stories of all kinds, I
2
returned for the themes and earnest hopes of the people within those stories. If these men
existed, I wanted to be like them. And if they were written, then they had to exist somehow.
These were the hopes that sustained me and which I return to in adulthood.
I am still searching for those men, though the nature of my search has shifted as I have
learned about this ‘status quo’ of a story-world we call reality: these men are not missing, but
dormant, nearly smothered by a media and political landscape that foists upon them the idea
that men are bad because they are men, and then exploits from them the identity that to reclaim
one’s manhood is to fully adopt the heinous behaviors and perspectives that have been labeled
“being a man.” “A real man is everything a feminist fears,” certain demagogues will proclaim on
their platforms. At the hands of ruthless algorithms and exploitative corporations who monetize
the energies and attentions of the public, the modern man is nearly drowning in messages that
deny and erode from him a fundamentally positive self-image. And in them I see myself, and I
remember the men who sheltered me from those ideas.
Games have been described as a window into another world, but I see them as
experience engines, and the experiences of the games of my childhood, mostly single player
and insulated from the larger world, which featured worlds far from where I could ever go in my
own lifetime, fed the hope that there were men out there who could accept for who I was, and in
turn had to offer qualities that were comforting and empowering. I could experience having a
friend who was gallant and stalwart and earnest, even unto the end of the world. A real man,
even when I got a game over state, was a safe place. But where are those places in games
now?
3
The development of Courier: Dragons Within is occurring during a strange time in the
industry. The Games-as-Service Model has moved beyond popularity into market saturation,
with the most popular games now featuring champions with market appeal and iterative sales
through cosmetics. These same companies forgo bespoke stories or moments of formative
character growth in their core product, instead focusing on iterating on battle modes and
narrative-agnostic “seasons.” Story concerns are serviced minimally in these games, chiefly
relegated to transmedia avenue beyond the immediate play experience and the occasional
character bark and marketing cinematic. Champions aren’t characters, but mascots and action
figures, crafted for visually representative qualities and appealing aesthetics, but lacking the
psychological tensions, depth and motivational direction beyond tragic backstories that are
never resolved.
In the Games-as-product sphere, technical and performance breakthroughs have given
way to unsustainable costs and protracted development cycles—even the excellent stories are
becoming harder to justify in their price points and often suffer publishers meddling in narrative
contexts out of creative insecurity. Independent Game developers find it difficult to find funding
to tell their own experiences, and the stories these games tell can betray a lack of direction,
thematic cohesion, or narrative or emotional depth of character and voice.
With exception, characters now feel as though they are created out of a distrust of the
player than the opposite—they are scrubbed of ethos and lack nutritional value. They have no
point of view. These artifices may be in part a reality of globalization—Chinese and Saudi
Versions of Spider-Man 2 didn’t feature any pride flags in their New York due to specific
restrictions from the respective governments—but some of these may simply be “smart”
4
business decisions: Champions, as IP, do best if they stay the same in the business strategy of
franchise development. If spiderman is always a kid from the Bronx, we never ask ourselves
how his story ends. Things never have to change.
But stories are about change, and if there is no change, then these Champions never
mature and are relegated to mascots—agents of relief, which keeps them marketable. If I were
still a kid, looking to games for models of how to be a man, I would sooner find an answer from
the alt-right recruiter in my lobby than I would an Aragorn or a Picard’s in-game lore. My place of
refuge would become a snare for exploitative radicalization. This is the reality of the targeted
male gamer.
Courier: Dragons Within was created out of a deep and urgent desire to create games
with models of masculinity that reject easy and mindless consumption under capitalism and the
fascist snares of demagoguery. Together with this paper, the game investigates how an
ideological expectation of violence in the character adventure genre can permeate the aesthetic,
dynamic, and mechanical construction of game spaces, and reimagines the genre space in a
nonviolent posture. This paper asserts that the accompanying game is a work that deliberately
refutes the narrative genre designation of “fantasy” for an older form of myth, chiefly out of a
concern for giving the player the language and tools to take from it into the living world rather
than exploitatively calling them back to the game world for them to never leave. It is a story that
seeks to offer something to the player—not power, but growth, and an opportunity to find the
language of what is inside themselves and how to begin to imagine a future where they are a
man of their own making.
5
Chapter 1: Critical Contexts: “It’s Just a Game”
Magic Circle as Social Contract
The Magic Circle is a space of dynamics. In game studies, it is primarily thought of as a
consensual space, centering a pleasurable interaction between voluntary participants.1 This
makes the magic circle a particularly narrow and limited social contract. It is assumed that
before we can play together, we must trust each other enough to allow play to prevail over
instincts of self-preservation. In a way, the dominion of the play space is a fragile realm–bad
actors, cheaters, griefers, “fun-ruiners”, and individual value judgments can dispel and collapse
the circle. Great care must be taken to preserve the illusion that we are equal players, even and
especially if there are known parameters like formal asymmetries, prompts towards competition,
or the designed results for losers (the difference between “a loser” and the outcome of losing
could be the subject of another paper) and winners. In this way especially, the magic circle can
mimic the lies we tell ourselves about an equal society.
The overlap of meaning between the magic circle of play and the ritualistic spaces of
religion, nations, and other markers of identity (in this space, one is a catholic, in that space,
1 Aaron Trammell, Repairing Play: A Black Phenomenology (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2022),
14-16. Here, I am paraphrasing elements of Aaron Trammel’s critique of canonical theories of play, where
he alludes that a critical perspective on play must contend with the notion of consent as fundamental to
play.
6
they are a conservative, in still another space, they are a financial consultant) is situated around
the system purposes of those spaces–the verbs: one prays, one votes, one works. The
connection between the performance of these verbs and the perceived rewards are ideologically
bound: the belief in God and the subsequent benefits of worship, the belief in a free market and
role one participates in it, the belief in party loyalty and the promise of “a better life” by voting in
accordance with their agenda. This relationship between identity, verbs, and rewards formulates
a closed “loop” of meaning. Similarly, to play is to engage in a meaningful activity, and therefore
playing is the act of adopting a role, performing a verb, and either intrinsically or extrinsically,
getting something out of it.2 Thesis activities and consequences are not immune to the
ideological underpinnings upon which the magic circle exists, which means there are meaningful
tensions to be addressed.
2 This is consistent with the excerpt included in Pearce, Celia, Tracy Fullerton, Janine Fron, and
Jacquelyn Ford Morie. “Sustainable Play: Toward a New Games Movement for the Digital Age.” Games
and Culture 2, no. 3 (2007): 261–78. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412007304420. Look no further than the
block quote, which reads:
A game is a social contract, allowing participants to suspend the culturally defined
significances and consequences of their behavior. A game has a set of rules, roles, and
goals that are distinct from those of the culture that supports it. It is an esthetic system
with qualities of elegance, symmetry, and clarity.
Once upon a time, was masculinity a game? Is the game breaking down? Or is it evolving? Is a
period of instability inherent in games thousands of years in the making?
7
Tensions around broadening our understanding of the Magic Circle to allow for differing
aims and experiences are significant and meaningful and are considered in the forthcoming
critical considerations of this thesis. “Is pleasure the sole point of play?” Aaron Trammel prompts
in his work Reparative Play: A Black Phenomenology.3 “What about pain, and not the pain for
pleasure’s sake?” There are of course many lenses of play, fifty-one of which are taxonomized
in Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design.4 But none of them are the ones Trammel is
describing in his work: for him, the magic circle should be a place where we can safely
experience pain,5 and presumably from pain, misery and suffering, in so much that we might
achieve–what, exactly? For me, I might venture to guess “catharsis.”
For the Game Designer, “Catharsis is not about emotion, but intensity,” Jenova Chen
states.6 I would venture to say that catharsis is an emotional climax or fulfillment, or “ah-ha”
moment, where the potential energy of the standing tensions of social contracts is converted into
resolution. In the game Journey, I want to climb a mountain, but wind and snow dampen my
movements and threaten my success. In politics, I want my candidate in office, but other voters,
media outlets, and the donors who finance the campaigns of my candidate’s opponents threaten
3 Trammell, Repairing Play, 13.
4 Schell, Jesse. The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. (Amsterdam; Morgan
Kaufmann/Elsevier), 2008.
5 Trammell, Repairing Play, 13.
6 “Designing Journey.” Accessed March 29, 2024. https://gdcvault.com/play/1017700/Designing.
8
his success. In my chosen faith practice, I want eternal life, but sin and temptation are ever
present, and my understanding of love is conditional on my perceived purity to another, notably
verbally silent, being. To ask “who am I in context” is to invite the effects of both pain and
pleasure, either in games or outside of them, and their associated intensities. To be, then, is to
be in relationship with catharsis.
Masculinity “In Crisis”
“Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” – Soren Kierkegaard
If catharsis is concerned with resolution, crisis is concerned with the stifling of desired
resolutions. A game may be in crisis if, upon agreeing to play a game, a player finds themselves
unable to meaningfully compete with their competitors, either because they are too advanced or
not advanced enough, and cease to have “fun,” and figure their only option is to leave and quit
the game. Democracy may be in crisis if a certain class of voters feel chronically
underrepresented and ignored by the voting and decide that the only way to meaningfully
compete is to intimidate or shame other voters, break elements of the social contract, or engage
and recruit in acts of violence and suppression. A crisis of faith may come from the sense that
one’s actions truly will not persuade a faceless god, or if there is insufficient feedback from the
performance of practice of the faith about whether they are fulfilling or thwarting their role in a
master plan. It should be noted that in all of these examples, effort and reward are situated
within previously established roles and goals, and the resulting expectations of those roles serve
as the primary driver of the efforts of the participant. In a Call of Duty game, if I kill, I win; before
going to mass, praying, and basking in my identity as redeemed.
9
When we hear and say that masculinity is “in crisis,” we mean to say that this clear
relationship between the role of masculinity in society, the goal or “arrival point” of this role, and
the effort required to achieve the goal have been thwarted. This is a structural observation:
modern work does not provide stable income; dating and socializing does not materialize into
long lasting or even meaningful relationships; “why am I here?” has become an increasingly
unanswerable question. Life demands effort, but why? To live? And do what?
I think that some of these crises in masculinity come from previously clear directions
becoming incompatible with modern life. The efforts required to connect, participate, and
achieve in modern society pull further away from expectations of domination, even as some
elected officials seek to reverse this trend and undo the necessary advancements of women in
the modern workforce. To gain employment, one cannot merely be skilled in technical craft, but
possess sufficient emotional literacy and generosity of spirit; to be in a relationship, one cannot
simply be a gentleman or a breadwinner, but potentially possess the nurturing qualities to be a
caregiver for children; to find an answer to “what is the meaning of life,“ they must (perhaps with
fear and trembling) ask themselves “what is the meaning of my life?”
A Template of Domination and a Community Charge to Dislocate It
The need for men to be able to meaningfully establish a positive sense of self, or positive
self-image, requires a blueprint for being that matches the dynamics of a larger society, and that
blueprint must be actionable with sufficient feedback, and it must allow for the player to grok a
strategy for being that can feel as though it is their own. It must be interactive. Previous
strategies of exclusivity: that men are the only breadwinners, that men are in control over other
10
men and non-men, that men only operate in control-based societies, constitute what I call a
Template of Domination, and it is this template which has been significantly undermined by a
materially more egalitarian society (though not completely egalitarian) which underlines the need
for a revisioning of the role of men. Masculinity, as a role, is in crisis, which is to say that it is
ready for a new way forward.
In truth, masculinity and “manhood” have never completely stagnated. Our definitions of
what constituted a “man” in the United States have moved from the ability to own and the color
of one’s skin to a focus on the fulfillment of specific gender-based roles. What is interesting is
how narrow expectations around traditional masculinity have become. Sometime in the last 80
years, contemporary readings of classical literature came to portray an emotional landscape to
male protagonists which may seem incongruent with the artifices of far-right toxic masculine
norms: Stories like Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Flies, Paradise Lost, Of Mice and Men, and
even The Book of Job might run the risk of being too effeminate to some of the fringe groups
that claim to espouse traditional masculinity today, for each of their protagonists sing, weep,
beg, love, and emotively consider their plight that in the face of a standard of masculinity that is
so emotionally restrictive, it could constitute a disqualification from being a “real man.” There is
an expectation that to be a man, one must lose touch with his emotional breadth and depth–
otherwise, he is opening himself to being dominated by other men. Under this dynamic, the man
who dominates others and is not himself dominated is the “true man.” He is also the most
emotionally stunted.
11
Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette elucidate this emotional stunting in their book King,
Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine.7 In their
introduction, they situate classical Rites-of-Passage as core developmental events that assist
the masculine figure in their maturation from boy to manhood.8 They also look at feminist
critiques of patriarchy for the system’s propagation of violence and emotional numbing as a core
element of manhood and arrive at the conclusion that, under patriarchy, the development of
masculinity is stunted, as “the mature masculine itself is not violent nor abusive.”9 Embedded in
their argument is the implicit separation of Rites-of-Passage and Comings-of-Age. While a
Coming-of-Age story may be removed from formal community events into occupational seasons
(one may “come of age” on the job, for example), Rites-of-Passage events are embedded in the
community itself, usually accompanied by a formal initiation and gathering of community
members, a sequence of performances or trials, and a conferring of a new identity, with its
responsibilities and powers therein, unto the individual. This community-orientation element in
the progress of a man’s development is inextricable from the ritual element– as feminist writer
7 Moore, Robert, and Doug Gillette. King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes
of the Mature Masculine. Harper Collins, 2013.
8 Moore and Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, xvi.
9 Moore and Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, xvii.
12
Sophie Strand writes, “A hero is not an individual–a hero is a reproductive event”.10 What a man
is is a conversation–informed by other men and non-men. He is a community construction,
destined to be born again and live twice. But not all initiations and ceremonies are created
equal.
When Moore and Gillette identify false, “pseudo-initiations'' in military boot camps, prison
gangs, and street gangs as being centered on an amplification of the immature Ego as opposed
to a reincarnation of it into its mature form,11 they are centering common environments where
the identity of manhood is both centered and propagated and still thwarted from their mature
forms through their submission to a mission and operational standard of violence. For them,
Patriarchy is based on fear–the boy’s fear, the immature masculine’s fear–of
women, to be sure, but also fear of men. Boys fear women. They also fear real
men. The patriarchal male does not welcome the full masculine development of
his sons or his male subordinates any more than he welcomes the full
development of his daughters, or his female employers.12
10 Strand, Sophie. The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine. (Simon and Schuster,
2022,) 22.
11 Moore and Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, 5.
12 Moore and Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, xvii.
13
Under patriarchy and incomplete rituals, immature men not only fail to “grow up;” they
work to ensure that the men around and beneath them never grow up, either.13 In the age of
online gaming platforms, we may be able to add extremist and reactionary groups to this list.
As it relates to games, especially genres which conflate paths to victory with the
destruction of fellow human competitors, these instincts and the toxicity which commonly
accompanies them can breed a cultural expectation of domination characterized by a mandate
of violence. When we broaden our definitions of play to account for experiences that engender
and traffic pain between participants,14 we can begin to see with clarity the alarming openings
afforded to the recruitment efforts of violent extremists, especially within the western gaming
13 ibid.
14 Trammell, Repairing Play, p. 13. “We must understand military and disciplinary torture—with its
connotations of pain and not pleasure (and not pleasurable pain) — as play.” Trammell’s insistence of
declaring a definition of play as broad enough to include unfavorable experiences within its domain is an
attempt to account for the experiences of minority populations within the play space. He argues that to
only center what is “pleasurable” in our theories of play and disavow other sensations, which reflect the
lived experiences of the BIPOC players who experience those sensations, is white supremacist (p.14). For
our understanding of play to critically move away from submission to this ideology, we must revise our
definitions of what play can include. Therefore, play that is reparative is both intellectual and ludically so,
exploring “the painful and traumatic depths of life,” albeit contained. (p.14)
14
sphere, which targets male gamers to spread hateful ideologies.15 While the direct link between
violence in video games and physical violence may be weak,16 games, and therefore the magic
circle, exist within a community ecosystem, and the proliferation of violent rhetoric can serve as
a pathway to radicalization, a complex operation involving “recruitment, community building,
reinforcing ideologies, and normalizing white supremacist beliefs”.
17 Furthermore, it is my
suspicion that the design paradigms and certain verbs of the games themselves may act as a
priming agent for these malefactors. Extremist groups work to shape men away from the mature
masculine, marked by posture that is “calm, compassion, [with] clarity of vision, and
15 Wells, Garrison, Agnes Romhanyi, Jason G. Reitman, Reginald Gardner, Kurt Squire, and
Constance Steinkuehler. “Right-Wing Extremism in Mainstream Games: A Review of the Literature.”
Games and Culture, April 11, 2023, 15554120231167214. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120231167214.
16 Young, Helen. “Extremists Use Video Games to Recruit Vulnerable Youth. Here’s What Parents
and Gamers Need to Know.” The Conversation, November 10, 2022.
http://theconversation.com/extremists-use-video-games-to-recruit-vulnerable-youth-heres-what-parentsand-gamers-need-to-know-193110.
17 Wells et al., “Right-Wing Extremism in Mainstream Games.”
15
generativity,”18 to a posture that is wantonly hostile and maintains and reinforces an antagonist
relationship towards out groups.19
To combat downstream consequences and the pseudo-initiations embedded along the
way, the game designer must return to their work with critical eyes, understanding the play
space they construct will potentially thwart or reinforce violent paradigms that prime the player to
be susceptible to engaging in and witnessing harassment. To design towards maturity within the
game space, the game designer must accept that they do not create peaceful men by stipulating
they kill to win, or conflating power and its escalation towards violence, and calling it play. We
must rethink our propensity toward violence in designing for conflict.
Sarah Schulman is equally concerned with the dynamics of escalation to quash the verbs
of navigation, negotiation, and productive resolution in relational encounters. In her book Conflict
18 Moore and Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, 6.
19 It cannot be overstated how instrumental the maintaining of this dynamic as “antagonistic” can
be; research suggests that extended connection with people in an “out-group” can have a softening effect
on radicalism and improving intergroup relations. Contact doesn’t even have to be actual, just perceived;
those who imagine positive interactions with members of the outgroup are likely to improve their
perception with members of that group. For more information, see Shamoa-Nir, Lipaz, and Irene
Razpurker-Apfeld. “Can You Imagine This? Imagined Contact as a Strategy to Promote Positive
Intergroup Relations.” Frontiers in psychology 14 (2023): 1226503–1226503.
16
is Not Abuse20, she works to identify the pattern behaviors which both potential abusers and
potential victims alike use to escalate disagreements beyond productive discussion and
negotiation. As she states in her talk at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, “When we abdicate
responsibilities for our own anxieties and our own contribution to escalating conflict, we enhance
the power of the state.”21 In the introduction to her book, she states:
“Yet over and over again, self-righteousness and the refusal to be self-critical is
expressed as dominance reliant on the ability to shun or exclude the other party.
Those seeking justice often have to organize allies in order to force contact and
conversation, negotiation… around the goal of forcing one party to face the
reality of the other, and thereby face themselves... The community holds the
crucial responsibility to resist overreaction to difference, and to offer alternatives
of understanding and complexity.”22
A Game Designer is still a member of the community, and by virtue of their skillset, can
interrogate conflict dynamics and offer unique alternatives in the form of interactive blueprints to
the expectation of violent escalation in play. I believe that underpinning the assumption for
control in the Template of Domination, or “the self-righteousness and the refusal to be selfcritical", is the legacy of mandated violence that precedes modern gaming, and that the mandate
20 Schulman, Sarah. Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the
Duty of Repair. (Arsenal pulp press, 2016.)
21 Sarah Schulman: ”Conflict Is Not Abuse”, Uploaded Mar 9, 2018. Last Accessed March 29,
2024, 9:24 pm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9bWvKLvqZc.
22 Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse, 20-21.
17
itself was responsible for the stifling of both men and women. What a man is was whatever he
said he was–what that required was for non-men, either on the basis of sex, ownership of
property, or race, be disallowed to speak. As these previously disqualified voices have
expressed themselves, gained salience, and become cultural norms, the mandate for violence
has been supplanted, incompatible with the recognition of non-men as equal participants in the
labor market, voting booth, and relational decision making. To pursue masculine catharsis under
the Template of Domination today would require a dramatic resurgence of public and
interpersonal violence, and among extremist groups, community building is a key component to
building momentum for these activities.
But to offer an alternative to the player, the designer must first construct it. Additional
blueprints for masculinity, whether incredibly old or very new, are urgently needed to allow men
to discover and affirm within themselves new, nonviolent, community-oriented modes of being.
This would not be a distraction, but a practice of restoration.
Nonviolent Game Design and Restorative Play
“Play Hard. Play Fair. Nobody Hurt.” — New Games Motto23
The core loop of a game is never neutral. It is an agent of behavioral and potentially
ideological reinforcement. The game designer who leverages his knowledge to combat injustice
must confront the reality that the core loop is the ideological engine of his play space and tend to
23 Fluegelman, Andrew. New Games Book: Play Hard Play Fair Nobody Hurt. (Headlands, 1976.)
18
its conceptualization with increased care. To design for a new result is to design with new verbs,
which means evaluating our verbs for games and their use.
Because my aim was not to merely make a nonviolent game, but to establish a blueprint
of masculinity that was potentially equipped with strategies to deal with conflict nonviolently, my
verbs must be appropriate for converting potentially violent engagements into nonviolent results;
because the blueprints had to be equipped for dealing with the violence of the past, my verbs
had to be both external and internal of the player character, while remaining diegetic; because
my blueprints required differing assumptions of what is a man, I had to turn to the philosophies
of the genre of myth to begin a new origin story. Because this origin story would not be accepted
without the player having their own violent past implicitly acknowledged, I made a main
character who might be recognizably plagued with a violent past to serve as their proxy.
Finding and externally representing internal verbs required crossing the conventional
boundaries of game design. It required looking at what game genres exist and asking, “what
does a nonviolent bullet hell game look like?” It required looking at the aesthetics of narrative
sequences and asking, “what is the rhetorical argument of floating text, and how that text
moves?” It required reassessing the “solved” mechanics of 3d character controllers and asking,
“is frictionless, effortless movement the goal of this mechanic?” To reapproach, to reevaluate, to
re-read sequences this way is to ask, “where is the assumption for violence coming from?” It is
to deconstruct mechanics, that they may be reintegrated and upcycled to a new purpose. To be
nonviolent in the game design of the character action genre is to disturb the philosophical
underpinnings of modern game design and aggressively and persistently confront them.
19
When I say that I am interested in restorative play, I mean that I am interested in play
that pulls the player closer towards a form of self-actualization, and that self-actualized selfimage should be an optimistic one. That means that I am unlikely to find games that center
competition with fixed binaries as congruent with my goals. It is not that I find contests unhelpful,
but I think the model of competition itself could use some competition as a templated dynamic.
People do find themselves amid competition–the problem is the number of people who simply
see the competition space in games as reaffirmation that they are by in large a “loser,” or
worse–those who come to implicitly believe that they can only “win” in a video game.
As I define restorative play in the character action genre, it is play that acknowledges and
feeds adventure and powers the player to feel equipped to deal with exciting, fun, potentially
hazardous situations not merely nonviolently, but in a manner that affirms the inherent
worthiness of themselves and their apparent adversary. It is a play that operates on the
assumption that one does not need others to grow smaller to become more, and that to fail,
even spectacularly, can be the cause of enjoyment. It is a play that assumes the next person is
also a source of enjoyment.
Our conceptualization of violence permeates not just our heuristics for game design, but
the way we establish play through a male dominated consumer base. I argue that our propensity
towards violence in design is grounded in the assumption that men are violent creatures who
thrive within a Template of Domination. This paper and the accompanying build of my thesis
project, Courier: Dragon’s Within is a proof of concept of nonviolence as a ludic strategy for
identifying, reexamining, and reforging the self, and it begins with re-conceptualizing our
understanding of men in play, both where play is a pedagogy for being, and men as beings of
20
destruction and domination. We need to play to be men, and what follows will rethink some of
these core concepts of masculinity.
21
Chapter 2: Analyzing The Game: Narrative and Mechanical Close
Readings
The Present Narrative: A Rite of Passage Tale in the Style of Myth
Summary
Our story begins within our main character, Chase. We experience a phantasmagoria of
his suffering as we advance in his inward labyrinth. We hear two episodes, first distinct, then
bleeding into one another: the first episode is when his father, his primary male relationship,
exhibits callousness to his suffering and vexation at his petitions; the second is Chase,
confronted by a male friend, and exhibiting the same degree of callousness and vexation. As his
father abuses his son, so does the son abuse his friends, and Chase is left with a crippling and
deep emotional isolation. As our first meditation subsides, we taste the nature of Chase’s core
wound.
We move from memory into Chase’s reality, where he is amongst a field in a National
Park. His guide, a black man named Tag, who has promised to show him the avatar of his soul:
a dragon. Chase and Tag travel across the landscape as Tag prepares Chase for his encounter.
Chase, coming to understand that to ignore his inner turmoil is to sabotage himself, seeks Tag’s
help to reframe his understanding of what is the nature of a man, and by extension, what is the
nature of a dragon. To accomplish this, Chase looks out to nature to dialogue with himself in
Reflection, and he looks inward to himself to confront his misbeliefs.
22
The journey takes the day and leads them to the beachside. Unable to cross at high tide,
Chase and Tag retire for the evening, and staring at the stars, Chase confides in his guide and
perhaps friend–that he is experience with masculinity has been violent, that his understanding of
it has demanded cruelty from him, and he has struggled to free himself from the mandate to
commit violence or suffer it from within. Tag, himself familiar with this struggle, asks his ward if
he could start over and become any kind of man, what kind of man would he like to be? Looking
up at the night sky, new constellations of being emerge for Chase to contemplate. Knowing it
could be enough, he passes into sleep.
Chase is later awakened by the sound of the dragon call and sees the tide has lowered
for him to pass. He walks along the beachside and finds a cave where the call seems to be
coming from, although when he enters, it is empty. He sits, and his mind reflects on his father
and his friend. He concludes that he is ready to begin to forgive himself, though first he must
begin to forgive his father. In doing so, he can loosen his grip on the past, find his peace in the
now, and have a say in who he is to become. He comes to understand himself as cyclical–as
someone who is becoming and might become again. He passes into meditation and releases
himself from the shame which has plagued him.
When he reemerges from the cave at dawn, Chase sees a rock formation that looks like
a dragon beaching from the surf. He smiles, satisfied. He hears a chirp, and looking to his right,
he sees a curious, skittish, man-sized dragon approaching him. The dragon gives an expressive
mewl. Chase reaches out and pets it. They connect and breathe in unison. It is only for a
moment. The dragon then alights, and Chase watches as it takes off. Chase returns to the
23
campsite, where Tag is now awake. Tag says, “You’ve shed your skin.” Chase, hearing his
friend's voice clearly as if for the first time, says in turn. “I have.” And the story ends.
Why Dragons? Why Bikes? Why Big Sur?
We wanted dragons because we wanted to externalize the internal shadow in an
appropriately ambiguous figure. The associated notions of ferocity in the dragon can be
templated as a congruent with our assumptions of masculinity. It should be noted: Aggression
isn’t inherently bad, but a template of domination demands aggression be applied towards
destruction and violence, as opposed to the ability to act upon the space.
The shadow figure is that which we both inherently deny and simultaneously entertain. In
both Eastern and Western traditions, the dragon can be both ferocious and wise; it can be both
terrifying and relieving; the dragon, therefore, serves a useful purpose for leaning into the
weirdness of the masculine wilds, reclaiming those spaces as an unknown and internally
encroaching. But the unknown is not the same as evil.
On Genre: Designing Towards Myth, Not Fantasy
In comparing the Action Genre to the Genre of Myth, Screenwriter John Truby Writes:
The life philosophy of the Action genre moves beyond that of the Horror form by
shifting our focus from death, which we can’t control, to life, which we can. This
recipe for success in the quantifiable areas of life is highly effective. But while it
may take us to a high level of achievement, that doesn’t necessarily make for a
24
rich and fulfilling life. The next rung up the ladder of good living is Myth, which
shows us how to grow over the full course of our lives.24
When comparing Fantasy to Myth, Truby writes of Myth:
At the beginning of the Myth story, the hero typically lives in an oppressive or
conformist society-culture. Often, the current king is a tyrant. The hero’s family
may pressure him... to follow in his father’s footsteps even when the father is
gone... this story world exacerbates the hero’s weakness-need.25
And of Fantasy:
Above all, Fantasy celebrates imagination,26 the primary tool for showing people
how to live well... thanks to the enormous contrasts of plot and world, Fantasy is
the most “high-concept” of all stories. While it appears to be a “light” form, the
genre’s foundation is rigidly geometric...Fantasy is most popularized when the
larger society is homogenized.27
In identifying and designing the narrative and tonal core of this thesis, there was an intentional
decision to lean into the Mythic Genre Form over the Fantasy Genre Form. This distinction is not
immaterial: Fantasy has rigid, out-of-scope requirements of its genre that Myth does not;
24 Truby, John. The Anatomy of Genres: How Story Forms Explain the Way the World Works.
(Picador, 2022) 128.
25 Truby, The Anatomy of Genres, 137.
26 Emphasis not mine.
27 Truby, The Anatomy of Genres, 527.
25
Fantasy owes at least part of its artifice and acceptance to a homogeneity which may signal a
stamping out of other models of being (itself a problem when trying to design towards an
alternative masculine baseline of being), where Myth does not; Fantasy is where “the reader can
immerse herself and never leave”28, while Myth is something “every human being creates...in
some form to solve life’s problems29.” I specifically wanted to scrub the commercialized and
commodified odor of modernity from this project: the masculine blueprint I sought to design
towards is not a consumerist construction, delivered from the proscenium, but a community one,
grown from a variety of perspectives and under swellings30. Modern Fantasy does not often
consider the spiritual elements of being, although Myth can: the myth story-form strategy
involves an “inner rebirth”31 that is not guaranteed in the Fantasy genre.
28 ibid, 530.
29 ibid, 128.
30 ”Wilder, more magical modes of the masculine have always been hidden just below our feet,
and just below the surface in stories and folktales we think we understand.” Strand, Sophie. The Flowering
Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine. (Simon and Schuster, 2022,) 29. The primary difference between
myth and fantasy is the same difference between a society with a godlike-figureheads and a society with
elder-guides. A fantasy is one directional, points from the producer to consumer, and says, ”this is who
gets to win” while a myth arises out of many voices from within a community and out back again and
says, ”this is who will help you win.” As it concerns the community, Myths are alive; Fantasies are not.
31 Truby, The Anatomy of Genres, 132.
26
Fantasy, as a genre artifice, resembles more a product of modernity than an artifact
guiding self-knowledge. A myth’s function is closer to a prayer bead or talisman—something one
returns to in order to help them live, and to employ mimetically; modern fantasy is less
concerned with equipping audiences and players with values and strategies so much as
commodifying aesthetics for varying degrees of passive and active consumption. As a product,
Fantasy is about the transactional goods of entertainment—Myths are accoutrements for a
dangerous journey ahead.
The Present Game: A Close Reading of Mechanics
The following analysis of the mechanics of the game draw heavily on the model of the
MDA framework32, and is predicated on the assumption that there is an ideological affordance to
the arrangement of features of a game’s design, which are then able to be used towards a
specific end. This analysis looks at both primary and secondary33 features of the accompanying
game and considers their nonviolent potential.
Courier: Dragons Within is a 2D/3D Character Narrative Game following two characters,
Chase and Tag, on their bicycles to search for dragons in Big Sur National Park. It is a
32 Hunicke, Robin, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek. “MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design
and Game Research,” n.d.
33 Lemarchand, Richard. A Playful Production Process : For Game Designers (and Everyone).
(Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press), 2021.
27
nonviolent rite-of-passage narrative that centers the primary verb of Breathing to perform the
core loop of Meditation, Reflection, and Cycling.
Our chosen verbs for play reflect our ideologies and understandings of meaning. A game
is a series of meaningful decisions and, in character-action games especially, we have
understood, ludically, meaningful as punch-packed verbs. On the level of gameplay, insofar as it
reflects a chosen ideology or understanding of meaning, Courier: Dragons Within seeks to
showcase expanded access points for men to relate to themselves and others more fully.
Our verbs required us to shift our frames of reference many times and move from the
internal world of Chase to the external world Chase inhabits and back. We needed to show how
the breath can clear the way towards the self, infuse curiosity in previously held axioms, and
assist in unburdening ourselves from sins of the past. The breath, as a restorative function,
needed to be the grounding point for our new origin story. We also had to communicate the
latent power of breathing to the player in matters consistent with standard cognitive models of
storytelling and genre. This was an emergent function of making the shadow self a Dragon: we
needed to make something as natural as breathing foreign and potentially hazardous; something
to be feared, or presumed deeply violent, and provide an opportunity to speak back to those
assumptions.
The Nonviolent Primary Mechanic of Breathing, and Its Many Uses
This game centers a central verb of breathing and looks at the possible extensions of
that verb in spiritual, relational, and physical contacts on the journey to confront a Shadow.
Breathing is one verb that means many things – Breathing in our game is given many access
points for meaning: as a passive experiencer; a gentle reframer; an exertive engine; and as
28
conscious persister. We do not breathe the same way in spiritual meditation as we breathe in
cognitive reflection as we breathe in physically embodied exertion.
Played on a game controller, players squeeze the left trigger to inhale and release to
exhale to perform a variety of internally distinct verbs, defined by their contexts. Depending on
the context, breathing can clear a path, secure a foothold, or reframe a thought. In this way,
breathing is a primary mechanic (as opposed to a secondary mechanic or feature), like
movement.
Choosing a verb that embodies the moments of change within a person required that we
honed on when and where change happens. Often, character-action games that seek to explore
matters of the internal world choose to take the violent artifices of their externally-focused core
loop and reapply them internally–one reading of this can be seen through the adage “the mighty
man has conquered himself”, while another reading of this can be “to know ourselves better, we
must commit violence upon ourselves and others.” As a design ethos, we rejected this latter
reading, which we found to be implied in the verb of conquering in its benign former.
Conversely, we needed a verb that was sufficiently discrete to the player's experience,
and avoided a frictionless, tactile-less engagement. While punchy verbs may be violent, they are
readily understandable to the player, and the verbs of reflection, meditation, and confrontation,
while full of meaning, did not immediately call up discrete, actionable verbs to perform that can
be summoned at a push of a button. A player does not “press X to meditate”; they perform a
meditation through repeated breaths. A player does not “press Y to reflect”; they engage in
reflection through recalling, reconsidering, and reforming or reinforcing their beliefs. A player
does not “press A to confront”; they take a deep breath, brace themselves, and stare down the
29
issue. To give access to these contexts required a verb suited to interiority, strength, and
compassion. No sword or gun, or paradigm of competition would ever suffice. Breathing was the
only verb that allowed us to situate the play experience appropriately, as it was the only verb
powerful enough to engage in the matters of the Player Character’s heart.
The primary verb of breathing is the largest driver to the decision to make the core loop
of the game a 2D and 3D excursion. To rebuff the premise of dominating others, we wanted to
represent the interiority and exteriority of the male figure in tandem. As Schulman states, the
primary purpose of both the abuser and the victim in escalating conflict is to avoid self-criticism.
Self-criticism, as a process of looking inward, requires switching perspectives away from the
over-the-shoulder perspective to the flat, 2D perspective. Conversely, reflection, the act of
looking outward to nature to ponder one’s life and beliefs, requires removing the body from the
frame to observe their surroundings.
These decisions to move both within and without the character, to leave the world and
then extend to the outer reaches of the self, required a flexible home base in the breath, as the
camera centers a variety of contexts. These practices of decontextualization and
recontextualization are meant to serve the player as much as leaving the urban and suburban
world for the natural world is a decontextualization and recontextualization for Chase.
Meditation as a Journey Inward and Confronting Misbelief.
Meditation comprises two parts: the approach and confrontation. The approach is an
audio/visual excursion, where Chase wades through a labyrinth laden with sonic artifacts. These
artifacts plague him with episodes of cruelty–one where he is a victim, and one where he is the
abuser. The purpose of this is highlighting how masculinity overly defined by its emotional
30
illiteracy and callousness engenders violence, as it defines violence as its only appropriate
emotionally expressive mode. Chase is a haunted and flawed protagonist who is confronting the
misbelief that progenerates his tendency towards abuse. This tendency is at least in part tied to
his definition of what is a man: to confront the self is to confront the distance between where we
are emotionally and the spiritual core of ourselves. We must wade through the unresolved
moments in our lives to truly change from within.
As a companion to approach, confrontation is a restorative interpretation of the bullet hell
genre: in it, there are “bullets'' that feed and power the episodes of shame and trauma that
Haunt Chase, and to withstand them is to endure an increasingly terrifying audioscape that
psychologically afflicts Chase–under the shadow of trauma, shame, and terror, life is a horror
story. Chase has no material means to fight back, for to commit violence would be to commit
violence to himself. Instead, he can breathe, ground himself amidst turmoil, and diffuse the
shame within himself. Restoration as a ludic strategy is the application of nonviolence through
potentially violent contexts for nonviolent results.
Reflection as Hearing a New Voice in Nature.
When looking to get men to open up about their feelings, there is evidence to suggest
trading a clinical setting for the outdoors is a meaningful avenue that can yield significant
31
results34 . As it relates to gamers, especially those from minority populations, access to the
outdoors can represent a financial burden35. However, games have the unique ability and,
especially among indie games and AAA Character Action games, the track record to deliver one
of the staple elements of the great outdoors to these populations through their products—peace,
quiet, and solitude. In Courier: Dragons Within, these moments of calm are leveraged as
moments of reflection, for the player to linger in as they see fit. Rest and reflection are not inert
experiences, but opportunities for dynamic engagement. Producing a naturalistic environment
for the player and the player character to linger in is to bypass certain barriers of connection with
the great outdoors and affords them engagement in these internal verbs in pursuit of selfdefinition.
Reflection in our game is the performance of observing Chase’s inner dialogue,
encountering statements of that dialogue in the 3d world space, and breathing on them to
reframe them and reframe Chase’s assumption about dragons, masculinity, and his own
34 Scheinfeld, David E., Aaron B. Rochlen, and Sam J. Buser. “Adventure Therapy: A
Supplementary Group Therapy Approach for Men.” Psychology of Men & Masculinity 12, no. 2 (2011):
188–94. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022041.
35 Robinson, Tila, Noelle Robertson, Ffion Curtis, Natalie Darko, and Ceri R. Jones. “Examining
Psychosocial and Economic Barriers to Green Space Access for Racialised Individuals and Families: A
Narrative Literature Review of the Evidence to Date.” International Journal of Environmental Research
and Public Health 20, no. 1 (December 31, 2022): 745. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20010745.
32
potential. Whereas mediation was a journey inward to confront and supplant a fundamental
misbelief about Chase’s worthiness, reflection is about being present in the world, and practicing
curiosity about one’s conclusions about a particular subject outside of Chase’s physical form.
This is identified as part of our core loop and the central justification of Chase’s story taking
place outside of familiar, urban settings36. To borrow from Truby, if one’s environment
constitutes a “Story World,”37 then dislocating a presumably urban or suburban Chase into the
outdoors of national parks is to expose him to the seeds of a new story—the world speaks back
36Paul, Annie Murphy. The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain.
(HarperCollins, 2021.) 109-110.
There is a particularly powerful justification in the pages of the above citation for the wilderness’s
ability to promote creativity in thinking while away from the distracting trappings of both screens and the
status quo trappings. Dubbed “The Three Day Effect” by psychologist David Strayer, the mind begins to
comprehend its smallness in nature in a way that promotes awe within the individual—currently in
opposition to the smallness promoted by the limited nature of screens (and arguably, the 2D design
paradigm).
37 Truby, The Anatomy of Genres. No page number, as every genre Truby identifies in this text
has its own story world--he considered genre as a philosophical artifice which leaves a trail on our history
of storytelling. A story-world is not merely a setting in the artifice of a narrative, but the underlying loops of
each person’s psychology. Presumptions, known things, and other hauntings which ring in the recesses of
our psychological landscapes. The world is more story than real.
33
to him in a voice he hasn’t heard before. This is significant, because new ideas require new
contexts and a departure from the status quo.
The Bicycle as a Model of Nonviolent Exertion
We wanted the bike to be a symbol of the nonviolent man in physical exertion. In cycling
there is no contest with the earth, although there is contact with the elements. When riding a
bike outdoors, you are consenting to a certain degree of exposure. Wind, rain, road conditions,
heat, and UV rays. When powering a bike, we muster our own physical energy to power
ourselves forward. We are tapping into the same potential and kinetic energies used in fights,
shouting matches, episodes of dominance and abuse. But no fights materialize externally. No
abuse occurs. Catharsis is achieved, but no harm is done.
One could argue that the construction of a bicycle is a violent process. I would concede
to that point and add that there is a hope to be found here: that within the legacy of violence,
nonviolence can still be a method of being. Nonviolence does not require a full and permanent
departure from society. Nonviolence can be a viable strategy in a violent status quo.
Compared to cycling in games, running is (or nearly is) what I would call “solved” as a
problem of traversal. To the player, running is a near frictionless experience, synonymous with
games in the character action genre. Cycling on the other hand is an experience rife with friction.
If we think of the player as being “behind the camera,” our heuristics for the camera’s placement
require too much distance between them and being on the bike itself, so that the experience is
not one of being “on a bike”; conversely, putting the camera between the handlebars feels as
though we are riding the bike with horse blinders on–the frame itself becomes a barrier to
control, and the player stumbles to elegantly control both the bike and the camera. This tension
34
means that effort is required to connect with the player character on a gameplay level. This effort
is what we aimed to leverage in our experience beyond our narrative set up.
By situating both bicycles and a dragon in the same narrative domain, we begin to ask
questions about our relationship with myth and fantasy. It could be argued that the fables and
myths represent a specific relationship with the outside world, with the unknown, that is not
inconsistent with the work of deconstructing what we have once said is known and is yet
unsatisfactory for our modern purposes. The dragon is spiritual first: Chase's relationship with
the dragon requires a confrontation to adopt a new understanding of the world and of the self in
the world. This means leaving behind preconceived notions about what is and is not real or
appropriate performance or way of being for men. It is when a new story is born.
Tag’s job for the last 10 years has been to ferry men to their dragons. He is a man who
lives in multiple worlds–the world where Chase comes from and the world beyond where Chase
is being led to. As a result, he becomes a mythic figure, much like our Gods, having crossed
boundaries from the unreal to the real world. To construct a new identity, one must construct a
new story of the self. For Chase to become a new version of himself he must begin to tell a new
story, and that story must be radically different, and that difference requires contending with that
which is unknown or fantastical. In a way, he needs a teacher. In making this game I had to fail
at disentangling masculinity from the hero’s journey.
35
Pursuing Nonviolence in the Design of the Adventure Game Genre.
A new masculinity requires a new rite of passage, and so our game tells a rite of
passage narrative – “Searching for Dragons” in Big Sur is like “Tracking the Mammoth” on the
Tundra. There is a test to be had.
The Rite-of-Passage narrative here comes with its own expectation of violence. We are
trained to expect a contest between man and beast, but that is not what we produce. The tests
that Chase goes through are emotional in nature: it is not his resolve that is tested, but his
assumptions of himself and who he is allowed to be. This is not a test one simply passes. As
Tag says, many are devoured by their shadow. It is possible to fail this test, and men often do.
Chase’s quest to “shed his skin”, to free himself of the old understanding of his potential and
worthiness as a man, is an urgent one to move his crisis towards catharsis. By making the
adventure externally situated but internally confronted, the player’s loop extends both within and
without himself. His answer is to both look inward and outward with new eyes. These spaces
serve as places of confrontation and acknowledgment. That is a sufficient premise of an
adventure.
I do think we have many genres of play and of gaming that would be considered violent:
the violent domination of the Earth as model through 4X games and resource and system
builders; the violent exchanges of certain character action games because action is too readily
conflated with violence; violence in the design of games of chess and the idea that we can have
a “formal and just war”; the violence of the games of territory like go and the idea that we can
supplant territory (property, by another word) to remove people's influence.
36
Nonviolence does not necessarily mean an absence of conflict, but the employment of
viable strategies to navigate conflict nonviolently, regardless of whether the person has violent
means or intent. I do not believe that when non-violence succeeds, it is a conquering, but a
revelation. It is a new understanding. Therefore, the Catharsis I seek through my designs are
closer to revelation than they are to destruction.
37
Conclusions: What about Masculinity?
To expand the male warrior [myth] to all male heroes...is to reduce both men and
women to a narrow view of what it means to be human and heroic...[Joseph
Campbell’s] monomyth is a subform of the Myth Genre... in spite of the continued
worldwide financial success of this male warrior subgenre, people are beginning
to realize how limited and predictable it is. And it is certainly not the only way to
tell a story.38
This game was designed with the targeted Male in mind. As I see it, both the largest
game studios and far right recruitment efforts both exploit competition as a primary engagement
mode for the cis-male video gamer. They both identify the patterns of contest and domination
inherent in fixed competition models, and exploit the gamer through a system of rewards and
punishments– game studios reward effective maneuvering and killings with juice, feedback, and
in-game currencies, and recruiters for the far-right exploit episodes of perceived bullying to
reinforce the competition between ideological groups, often waiting for shaming episodes from
perceived others for not being sufficiently politically correct. When the gamer engages in both
online communities and in single player character action games predicated on violent verbs,
they are implicitly exposed to narratives, verbs, and community structures which may reinforce
conflict paradigms that escalate and seek to dominate other members.
Broadly speaking, the male gamer is being done a disservice with a dearth of male
models that exist beyond the template of domination. There are not sufficient representations of
38 Truby, The Anatomy of Genres, 135.
38
masculinity where men are community builders, healers, emotionally literate, or sites of relief or
joy. There are too few sufficiently engaging systems where the verbs of peace-making, bridgebuilding, emotional attunement, or music making are situated as “adventures.” There are too few
design paradigms where the player is expected to do something other than killing, stealing, and
destroying. There are too few character action protagonists who are driven by their hopes and
loves and desires to heal in comparison to revenge quests, fending off invasions, “spreading
democracy”, or punishing a previously identified evil doer. Our representations of men are
defined more often by how they are wronged than the rightness they seek they share. I worry
that we are running towards an inability to see men as something other than inherently
dangerous, if left to his own devices. But it doesn’t need to be this way.
Is Masculinity Fragile? If so, what do we do about it?
In his book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and
What To Do About It, Richard Reeves asks the question “Is your child a dandelion, or an
orchid?”39 He goes on to explain the difference as being “between children who are pretty
resilient, mostly able to cope with adversity and stress (dandelions), and those who are more
39 Reeves, Richard. Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and
What to Do about It. (Brookings Institution Press, 2022.) 70.
39
sensitive to their conditions (orchids)”40. He also holds the position that “manhood is fragile”41,
determined as much by behavior as it does biology, and that “The making of masculinity is an
important cultural task in any society, especially during periods of rapid social upheaval”42.
Through his evidence and analysis, Reeves seems to think that what constitutes a sufficient
definition of masculinity is not a given in society but found, and I tend to agree. It should be
noted that “fragility” must not be associated with personal weakness, nor is a definition of
masculinity that is culturally constructed anything to be ashamed of, or to sneer at; masculinity
did not cease to be fragile when men have been their most brutal.
“What it means to be a man” is a conversation in flux, and due to the advancements in
feminist thought, automation of manual labor, and economic society, we require a reevaluation
of what constitutes appropriate models of masculinity throughout both youth and adulthood. The
common wisdom of our fathers, if we have them, often prove insufficient as trades and skills
rapidly vacillate in value, as the roles of men both in and out of the home have become
unmoored from their previous definitions. How men have previously defined themselves in the
recent era of industrialization are insufficient, and we are out to sea without sail.
40 ibid.
41 ibid, 95.
42 ibid, 96.
40
Sophie Strand talks about Revision as a state of decay43, a natural and beneficial
process to the earth, its ecology, and its inhabitants. We lean into the metaphor of new life and
“skin shedding” as a form of decay to look at masculinity as being separate from the template of
domination, and the internal revolution within that precedes this sloughing off of a no-longernecessary paradigm of expressing or playing. Masculinity should be under revision. Something
unneeded is dying, and this may even be beneficial. So it is for our protagonist, and it will be for
Tag, and should be for every man who lives long enough to see his happiness evolve over time.
Men may live one life, but they should see the many lives they must lead as a good and right
thing.
bell hooks speaks to the need for “blueprints of change” as an imperative for the
masculine form to find itself way back to itself44; Gillette and Moore see the pathway to
masculine maturity being based in welcome and affection and made complete through the self43 Strand, The Flowering Wand, 28.
44 hooks, bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. (Simon and Schuster, 2004,) xvii.
She writes, ”I want to hear his voice forever. I don’t want him to die, [this man]... who receives my love and
loves me back. Understanding him, I understand myself better. To claim my power as woman, I have to
claim him. We belong together.”
41
recognition as possessing nurturing and generative qualities45. Schulman stresses that we
employ strategies that deescalate rather than escalate conflict, reminding us that bridgebuilding
and peacemaking as operationalized nonviolence is not for the faint of heart. The verbs of this
game aims to use the model of the hero's journey and the genre conventions of myth to propose
an interactive template beyond domination where rhetoric and ludism meet to knit together an
experientially based understanding of what one can do and be prompted to do. This blueprint
endeavors to begin to explore present a new architecture of choice for the player within the
expectation of the Character-Adventure genre.
As for the role of the game designer in this work to remake the magic circle ethically and
compassionately, I return to Sophie Strand:
Do we want to give the masculine the sword or the wand? The sword slices,
divides, and subdues… it does not connect. It does not ask questions… it is not
an instrument of intimacy…. The wand, on the other hand, creates connections…
the wand encircles us with protection during biological rites of passage from birth
45 Moore and Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, xix. ”We need to learn to love and be loved
by the mature masculine.” And later, heartbreakingly:
The crisis in mature masculinity is very much upon us. Lacking adequate models of
mature men... most of us fall by the wayside, with no idea what it was that was the
goal...we just know we are anxious, on the verge of feeling impotent...unloved...often
ashamed of being masculine. We just know that our creativity was attacked, that our
initiative was met with hostility, that we were ignored, belittled, and left holding the empty
bag of our lost self-esteem. We cave into a dog-eat-dog world, trying to keep our work
and our relationships afloat, losing energy, or missing the mark. Many of us seek the
generative, affirming, an empowering father (though most of us don’t know it), the father
who, for most of us, never existed in our actual lives and won’t appear, no matter how
hard we try to make him appear. 7.
42
to marriage to death. It draws us to water… It mends broken bodies, knits
wounds, and softens minds...46
A game designer is a member of their community—they can further empower the instruments of
war and oppression and the worst instincts of a people, or design to dislocate them. They do not
merely create chaos—they work to make the hidden palimpsests of past experiences known
again, to demonstrate and operationalize knowledges demagogues prefer to declare
nonexistent. Masculinity is fragile—not like a bomb, but like anything feverishly fighting for life
and to live. A game designer is a powerful artist—they must practice their art with great intention
and care. If any of the voices I've cited agree on one thing, our societal, relational, and
ecological fate depend on it.
46 Strand, The Flowering Wand, 23. Emphasis mine.
43
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45
Appendix A: Design Documentation
Meditation Design Documentation
Last Updated: April 8, 2024
Player Mechanics: Moving (analogue), Breathing (squeeze right trigger to inhale, release
trigger to exhale)
Summary
Meditation comprises two parts: the approach and confrontation. The approach is an
audio/visual excursion, where Chase wades through a labyrinth laden with invisible collision
triggers and gates which require the player inhale/exhale to unlock.
The labyrinth borrows from the meditative practice of finger labyrinths and garden mazes
of antiquity and religious practices. The purpose of wandering through them has been used for
keeping things locked in, but also for letting the mind wander.
The breathing gates and collisions release audio that plague him with past episodes of
cruelty; some where he is a victim, and some where he is the abuser. The purpose of this is
feature is to illustrate within Chase how his own internal world in a minefield, where he can trip
up memories he rather forget, and to highlight the effects of how masculinity, overly defined by
its emotional illiteracy and callousness, engenders violence, as it defines violence as its only
appropriate emotionally expressive mode.
46
Figure 1--A depiction of Meditation's Approach, (Ely Labyrith Pattern).
As a companion to approach, confrontation is where the pathway of the labyrinth is
removed, and the player faces off against an underlying misbelief which powers the malignant
memories. This, conventionally speaking, resembles the bullet hell interactive paradigm: the
player faces off against his misbelief, and wades through ammunition which trigger and agitate
the memories.
These misbeliefs, the blue bud which expells bullets which arm the episodes in Chase's
memory, are the “Virus” in our character’s psychology. They are common to every person—the
feeling that we are not enough, that the world is against us, that we are one step removed from
monsters, that no good will come from us. They drift around, polluting our mindset, and shoot
bullets that wither our strength and will. However, “defeating them” is not about killing those
beliefs, but unmasking their true nature—turning “I’ll never be enough” to “I’ll always already be
enough.”
Getting hit by the bullets has a material effect of increasing the intensity of the
soundscapes and slowing the player to a halt. This resembles as a micro loop the effect of
feeling paralyzed and besieged by one’s own thoughts.
47
The player’s agency is again found in the breath—in inhaling with the right controller
trigger and exhaling by releasing it. In doing so, the player lowers the intensity of the audio
scape, regains their movement, and gains a foothold with the confrontation space.
Figure 2—Confrontation.
Comparison: Nier Automata
Figure 3--Nier Automata's “Hacking Mode.”
Nier: Automata’s “hacking mode” is a metaphorical penetration into the psyche of
androids and robots who are developing higher consciousness to cause harm and force initiate
48
self-destruct sequences. It is a spiritual and existential harm that kills the victim produces long
term madness in the player character. What does a nonviolent bullet hell game mode look like?
How does it behave differently? To what end does the designer aim for, away from
representations of harm?
Reflection Design Documentation
Last Updated: April 6, 2024. Player Mechanics: Moving (analogue), Breathing (squeeze
right trigger to inhale, release trigger to exhale)
Summary
In this mechanic, the player will guide chase to a vista, where the camera shifts from
over the shoulder to a first-person perspective. While the player and Chase observe the
scenery, Chase will begin to process some of the things he has spoken about with Tag. As
Chase does, new thoughts begin to emerge from the scenery. The player will guide their cursor
over them, inhale and exhale using the right trigger, and Chase will breathe.
49
Figure 4--Reflection--when the player approaches a thought in the world.
Figure 5--Reflection-- the player breathes on the thought, and it begins to dissipate.
50
Figure 6--Reflection--when the thought begins to reappear, reframed.
Figure 7--Reflection-- the thought, reframed.
Those thoughts will then reframe themselves, revealing Chase’s hopes and desires, and
speaking back to him. The player will complete this loop three times a vista, to materially show
how Chase’s considerations are evolving.
Abstract (if available)
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Courier: Dragons Within, a video game. An exploration into the magic circle as healing circle: restorative game design for a masculine framework free from the template of domination [document]
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