Hyacinth

Queerly Represent Me spoke with Hyacinth, a freelance game developer and designer.

QRM: Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do in the games industry?

Hyacinth: My name is Hyacinth and I am a freelance game designer and developer. I also co-run a small studio called Abyssal Uncreations, which focuses on small queer narrative horror games. I’m a bit of a generalist, mostly oscillating between gameplay programming, game and narrative design, and audio design for most of the things that I work on, though that depends on what a client needs from me.

QRM: How long have you been involved in the game industry, and what projects have you worked on? What are you working on currently?

Hyacinth: I’ve worked in the games industry in a “professional” context for only about 4 years but I’ve been making games for a very long time. I can’t really talk about most of the projects that I’ve worked on for clients, as they’re either unreleased, or not something I’m actively working on but many have been small-to-mid-sized educational games (which is what my background is in) for nonprofits and museums. When it comes to more traditional games, the company I co-run released our first commercial game this past October, called _transfer. It’s a posthuman horror narrative game inspired simultaneously by my collaborator's and my experiences as nonbinary people, as well as the nature of memory, all wrapped up in an extremely cyberpunk story about artificially intelligent life forms trying to make sense of the world around them. Additionally, a friend and I released a game back in February called David Lynch Teaches Typing that was way more successful than I was anticipating it being.

QRM: What inspired you to get started in the games industry?

Hyacinth: There was never an “aha” moment with me, really. I’ve always loved and have been in awe of the ways that different systems fit together in games. Historically I’ve played everything that I could (though more recently I haven’t had the chance to play as much as I would like). I was having a rough time in the summer of 2010 and decided I’d start learning how to program games to alleviate things. At this point I hadn’t really considered that as a viable career path, in part because people around me suggested it wasn’t and in part because I didn’t have the fullest sense that making games was something that people like me (e.g. queer, trans, and older than most folks are when they “decide what they want to do with their lives”) could reasonably achieve. Fast forward a year or so and I was accepted into a Masters’ program for educational game design (at this point I had been teaching for many many years)—this was an attempt to blend my interests in education with game design/development. I wanted to somehow help change learning through game design. Around this time, I also began working on _transfer, a game that was wholly unlike the sorts of games I was working on at school. I think it was around the time that we exhibited _transfer at E3 when things clicked and I thought, “Oh okay I’m a game developer,” even though I had been making a living from making games and teaching game design for several years prior.

QRM: In what ways do you feel your experiences as a queer person manifest in the games you work on, and influence the work you do?

Hyacinth: For the games that I make independently, it influences almost every design decision. With _transfer for instance, we wanted to write and design a queer narrative that wasn’t overtly autobiographical. We started by asking ourselves “what would things be like if you had no internal sense of self and had to construct your sense of self based on your interactions with other people?” This through-line informed most of the way the narrative and gameplay was structured throughout.

I can’t help being a queer person, so my queerness definitely informs and influences everything I make, even if I didn’t conceptualize it entirely. For contract work, I like to try to suggest queer and trans representation where possible (having a trans person in your game is better than having none in my opinion, but having multiple is even better). Additionally, inclusive language is something that’s very important to me. I also work to ensure that the mechanics and overall design that I’m building for them aren’t saying anything bad and easily avoided with regards to queerness, race, gender, etc. (e.g. not giving different stat bonuses based on a character’s race and/or gender as that quickly falls back to racist and sexist stereotypes). Simultaneously, the easiest (if we aren’t planning for any kind of voice acting), and most specific way that my queerness informs my design is allowing for at least one gender neutral pronoun option (if selecting your gender up front makes sense for the design). Even in tiny, minute long experiences I’ve made that require a character to talk to the player, I make sure that you can pick what kind of pronouns you want.

QRM: Do you have a favourite queer character—in games or media more generally? If so, what is it about them that makes them your favourite?
Question asked by @kamienw.

Hyacinth: Okay, so, this one is tough for multiple reasons—the first and probably most unfortunate is that there really aren’t very many good queer characters in games. I could go on forever about how, in my head, 2B from NieR: Automata is queer but that’s really just conjecture and isn’t in the actual text much. To be honest, I have a lot of fond feelings towards Naoto from Persona 4 even though the game is monumentally unkind to him. He was maybe the first canon trans person I ever saw in a game and that meant a lot at the time.

If we were going to broaden this question to include all media, I’d go to the floor over Odo from Deep Space 9 being a nonbinary character who is forced to conform to a form that they’re uncomfortable with and that is actively exhausting to maintain. But that also brings up questions around what gender and queerness even are that I’m not prepared to dive into right now, especially considering how linked to the human experience gender and sexuality are. When considering that Odo is a nonhuman person, our conceptualization of gender and what that means breaks down a bit.

QRM: Have you ever encountered roadblocks in trying to include queer characters in games? What do you think is preventing greater diversity within games?
Question asked by @dustinalex91.

Hyacinth: I’m in a pretty privileged position in that I have full creative control of most of the games I make independently, and I try to work with teams of queer folks wherever possible who are usually receptive to adding queer characters. For instance, the other day while meeting with a person I’m making a game with, I decided that the main character should be trans, which they were entirely on board with. The largest roadblocks, for me personally, come in the form of decisions that were made before I was brought on board. As a freelancer, I might be hired to build a prototype of a design that has already been created or help with integrating a system. Sometimes I will have more creative control, as when I’m working on the design and implementation of narrative systems in a game, but for the most part I’m hired to make smaller pieces of games that may or may not even interact with the characters that the game deals with.

QRM: Why do you think it is important that queer audiences are able to see themselves represented in the games they play, and in the developers who make the games they see? What can we do to improve the industry for queer audiences and devs?

Hyacinth: The obvious answers here are that it’s broadly important to see media about yourself in some capacity. Media can serve a lot of different functions for a lot of different people, but something games are particularly good at is allowing people to partake in all kinds of different fantasies. That being said, what good is a fantasy to me if huge chunks of my existence are excluded from it. Games can be playgrounds for identities and modes of presentation and can allow players to try out and experiment with, but we’ve so far allowed only a very narrow band of human experience to be represented in them. Add to that, more queer devs will almost inevitably mean more queer stories being foregrounded. I know that I’m not alone in being deathly exhausted with sad trans stories about sad trans people with hard lives. That’s not to say that our lives aren’t hard as a direct result of how violent and degrading policies and social norms are that interact with us, but there are more trans stories than just that one, and I’d love to see more of them make their way into games. For instance, I’ve been playing Battletech, and since that game’s really great about things like pronoun options and not having explicitly gendered clothing/character appearances, I’ve been roleplaying as a ferocious and angry transfemme lesbian mechwarrior whose queerness is extremely prominent but is also just one of several things that informs their personality and relationships. I want more stories like that to be in the main text of more games.

QRM: Have you ever mentored somebody in your role in games, or been mentored? If so, what made these experiences worthwhile for you?
Question asked by @pepelanova.

Hyacinth: I’ve never had the opportunity to mentor anyone, though I have chatted with (usually younger) folks who had questions about how to proceed as queer game developers, and how to start working in the industry. However, it’s pretty notable that mentorship isn’t the end all and be all of amplifying queer voices, especially when we’re trying to break through and get recognition in non-queer spaces. Lara Hogan wrote a really good blog post about how sponsorship is more effective than mentorship in terms of materially assisting marginalized people. It can be found here.

QRM: In what ways can non-queer folk increase and support queer diversity present within games, as well as in the industry more broadly? How can we all work to support intersectional approaches to diversity, and why is this important?

Hyacinth: Assuming we’re talking about folks who do want to see more diversity in games and who want to support queer creators, do just that. Monetary support lets us continue doing the kinds of stuff that we want to do without having to pad out our income as much with less interesting/invigorating contract work. Find a few creators that you like and if you’re able, buy their games. This is most effective for solo creators and small teams as we see a very direct and tangible impact when people buy our games. If you’re unable, tell folks about the games from queer creators that you like. When it comes to larger teams playing in this space, I always encourage people to signal boost the things in those games that are working for them. As I’ve previously mentioned, Hairbrained Schemes has done some really good and subtle things to make Battletech inclusive of all manners of identity while still fundamentally being a game about titanic walking tanks punching each other into dust. Additionally, we should encourage larger developers to hire more queer folks. Realistically, we need to start seeing more diverse people hired into management positions across the board but there’s not a ton that anyone can do from the outside as most game companies are giant black boxes. The best advice I can give on that front is buy and talk about and write about games that do things like representation well, while being critical of where they fail. We should all be willing to hold a company’s feet to the fire when they make a game with bad representational elements, or when their hiring and/or labor practices work to actively suppress the voices of queer/PoC/trans/disabled/etc. developers.

QRM: Is there a message that you would like to share with the queer game players, game studies researchers, and other interested folks who comprise the Queerly Represent Me community?

Hyacinth: I couldn't do this without the support of people like this community, so first I want to thank all of you. It's going to be a weird few years going forwards—there's a lot set against us between larger marketplaces looking to rid themselves of queer games and all of the potential money leaving the indie space (and that's saying nothing of the broader societal issues facing our community) but we'll adapt. Queer developers now are carving out little niches for themselves that are so specific that there isn't any competition from outside. It's a different sort of thing than it was like ten years ago, but it's not bad. Games are going to change and we're going to change alongside them while continuing to made rad as hell things. All I ask is that you continue to have an open mind about what you play, as I feel games, especially in this space, are going to get weirder still.

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You can find Hyacinth on Twitter and play their games on itch.io.