Girlboss

Curated by Yasmine Batniji April 30, 2023

The theme of this show was more open-ended than others. I really wanted to focus on games that had a variety of meanings of what a “Girlboss” could be. Games that focus on femme experiences, and games that challenge what a femme experience looks like from various creators. This show was by far my most ambitious, with a total of nine games: Final Shot, Girlboss Capitalism Destroyer Simulation, Pacific Takedown, Ponch: Cyberspace Investigator, Morning Makeup Madness, Magical Girl City Takeover, Ineffable Glossolalia, Dungeon Girl Scouts, and Future Dreams.

Final Shot

Arcy

I discovered Final Shot a while ago and felt it was more on the open-ended side of what Girlboss can mean. In this game, you are given a gun and have to shoot at all of the NPCs around you that are trying to kill you, but what separates this game from the classic first-person shooter genre is the mechanics. At any point during the game, either to try again or in order to reload your gun you can rewind time. Every time you rewind, the NPCs do a little dance to signify the change in time. This game took what we understand of first-person shooters and expanded on it, making it a more interesting non-typical experience. The aesthetic of Final Shot, where everything is pink and cute but also deadly, subverts players' expectations of a first-person shooter.

Girlboss Capitalism Destroyer Simulation

Gaslight Gatekeep Girlgame The creators of Girlboss Capitalism Destroyer Simulation, also a first-person shooter, describe the goal as “Destroy micro-transactions at all costs”. The player is in a maze-like environment they have to kill spinning boxes representing micro-transactions that shoot out bullets. The game has a chaotic feel, everything has a hot pink color, and in the sky above you is an eye watching you down below, while uptempo music plays. You have to destroy each box while grabbing loot, and you win once all the micro-transactions are gone. I was initially interested in including this game off of the title alone. It felt as if being a girlboss was not just an aesthetic or a joke, but also a political position that femmes can destroy capitalism together. The idea of destroying capitalism as a girl boss was quite motivational to me.

Pacific Takedown

Catsket, Ashley Eliassaint, Josh Finkel, Dominik Kopiczko, Kaz Li, Nick Portugal, Donovan Robinson, and Ari Zhou As described by the creators:

“Play as the delinquent girl gang leader Mizuki, who’s got a personal vendetta against the sinister mega-corporation Pacific. Pacific has been slowly destroying her cozy seaside town, polluting the waters and taking all the people away into their brutal work schedules. Mizuki has seen enough!” I felt this game overlapped thematically with Girlboss Capitalism Destroyer Simulation. I really loved the narrative idea of embodying a girl who is trying to take her town back by any means possible. In Pacific Takedown, the player has to destroy enemies in the mega-corporation headquarters. She goes through the corporation with her metal baseball bat and destroys enemies by knocking them into walls. I thought this game was important to include because, in a world where youth- and specifically young girls- are some of the most ardent activists fighting against climate change, Pacific Takedown reflected that struggle quite well.

Ponch: Cyberspace Investigator

Jude Ponch: Cyberspace Investigator is a “2.5D cyber noir detective game set in the depraved virtual metropolis, CITYB. Help Ponch, the snarky voice in her head, Blanks, and a crew of masked hackers dig up and expose CITYB's dirty little secrets through point-and-click hacking puzzles.” The game reimagines classic noir tropes, but through a queer lens: it features familiar characters such as the detective, but all of the main characters in this game are lesbians of color. It was important to include this game because it subverted the noir genre with characters we do not get to see in those positions often. With everyone being a badass lesbian solving crime, the game did a great job at exmplifiying the many different ways one can be a girlboss.

Morning Makeup Madness

Jenny Jiao Hsia Morning Makeup Madness is a game where you have only ten seconds to do your makeup. We displayed this game in the cabana, which is a tight enclosed nook apart from the main space at Wonderville. We wanted to create a Sephora-like experience, where you are in a booth, surrounded by actual makeup, and have to do your makeup virtually or you can do it in real life. The game is an absolute scramble as you try to put on mascara, eyeliner, lipstick, eye shadow, and blush in only ten seconds, similar to conditions of people in real life trying to get their makeup done quickly. In the end, you are graded on how well you did as a player in applying makeup. I included this game because I was interested in creating a more physical representation around it, to make the game stand out in the exhibit and create a circular experience. Sometimes a girl boss only has 10 seconds and is in a stressful situation, but they will always get it done.

Magical Girl City Takeover

tassneen bashir Magical Girl City Takeover is a simple but fun coloring-book game where the player is given a black-and-white world and is able to transform it by clicking on the objects and bringing them to life with color, transforming the environment. We displayed this game on the stage projector, so it had a lot of space to be viewed because it was such a visual piece. Instead of using a mouse to play the game, Karl Hohn mapped it to a Wiimote altered to have the appearance of a wand- he attached a long wooden dowel to the remote with a star on top. The player was able to wave the wand around and transform objects in the game, exemplifying the way women, girls, and femmes are constantly transforming the world around them.

Ineffable Glossolalia

Tabitha Nikolai Ineffable Glossolalia attempts to describe trans femme experiences by creating a liminal space in the game world that is “a dreamy conflation inspired by Borges' Library of Babel and the German Institut für Sexualwissenschaft—a Weimar era sexual research clinic which performed seminal transgender studies before being sacked by Nazi youth in 1933.” In this game, you are walking through a lot of visually demanding spaces, many of which include text that tries to convey trans experience alongside text taken from people on the internet who do not understand that experience. You continue to travel in this dream-like environment through these spaces surrounded by more and more text that pops up on the screen. The game progressively gets more visually distorted toward the end. Especially with all the anti-trans legislation being passed in recent history, it's important to show and make games that broaden our understanding of what it means to be a girl boss.

Dungeon Girl Scouts

Nuttatulipa Dungeon Girl Scouts is a Dungeon crawler where you play as a Girl Scout trying her best to sell cookies to monsters. I personally love the idea of taking a familiar game genre and adding a new layer of depth to it. Dungeon Girl Scouts subverts the standard dungeon crawler genre by, instead of slaying enemies, making the player make friends and try to solve a mystery while they move through the dungeon. Embodying a Girl Scout on a dangerous mission in a dungeon felt very girl boss to me- a girl boss is not afraid of anything and can tackle the underworld by herself with her Thin Mints.

Future Dreams by

The Sheeps Meow Future Dreams is a turn-based RPG where you toggle between three different girls as they try to free missing people under the control of their own dreams. The player moves along a map, battling enemies and healing themselves and their teammates. We paired this game up with a touchpad mouse housed in a compact mirror, created by Karl. Playing the game this way adds another fun layer to the experience- the player appears to be looking at a mirror but is actually controlling the game, playing as three girl bosses who are trying to gain control of their city back.