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As a summary of my main takeaways from Bonnie Ruberg’s article “Straightwashing Undertale: Video games and the limits of LGBTQ representation” I made a little Twine, which tries to playfully engage with the concepts of “reading between the lines” of popular reviews and with erasing, muddling and perverting the queer messages present in the game proper.

It’s late evening on a weekday and I decide to unwind by playing the team-based shooter Overwatch for a couple of hours. I start the game and wait for my (cis male) friend, with whom I always play together, to join me. Once we’re in a group, we go into Quick Play (the most popular game mode that consists of casual games, taking much less time and generally less effort than ranked competitive sessions), and it asks us to select roles we would like to play as. The available choices are: “Tank” (characters with significantly increased health and some way of shielding from or negating attacks, able to absorb more damage and protect other members of the team), “Damage” (various characters whose main goal is to attack members of the other team) and “Support” (a.k.a. “healers” – more fragile characters able to restore health to other members of the team). Once we join a game, we’ll be locked into a particular role for the duration of the game, and will only be able to choose characters of that particular category (one of the 8 tanks, one of the 17 damage dealers, or one of the 7 healers).

Without any contemplation, with a learned gesture, I choose “Damage” and “Support” and press “Ready.” My friend selects all three roles and presses “Ready” as well. We wait for a bit and are added to a game that’s about to start. I’m locked into the “Support” role, and my friend is locked into the “Tank.” I play as one of the four female characters available to me – the other three I like the designs and mechanics for, but I know I’m not very good with them, and I am intimidated by the possibility of being a burden on my team. We play a few games like that: always as a healer for me, and a tank for my friend. It’s not surprising for us, since every single evening of Overwatch playing goes like this. After a bit we get tired of these roles – we go into Role Select again and deselect the ones we’ve been playing as this entire time. I’m now queued as “Damage” only, and my friend as “Damage” or “Support”. After a significantly longer wait time we’re finally added to a game – I’m playing as a damage dealer, and my friend as a healer. We do this for a little while, until my friend gets tired of healing and switches to “Damage”-only as well.

As I went over this experience in my head, I realized more and more the very urgent need for complex feminist analysis of issues related to support characters in multiplayer games. There is a long-standing stereotype, in Overwatch as well as other team-based games, that female players play mostly as support characters and healers. It’s generally hard to test the accuracy of this statement without conducting massive community surveys and interviews, because games rarely if ever directly ask players to disclose their gender (though, of course, other players can make judgements based on indirect cues, such as someone’s timbre in voice chat).

Nevertheless, it’s widespread and supported by anecdotal evidence enough that I’ve discovered many attempts to explain this phenomenon online. For example, this insightful Reddit thread discusses five different factors that could play into women choosing support characters more often: gendered childplay practices that reward women for taking on caretaking roles, gendered marketing of particular games and characters, gendered character design (even in Overwatch, which offers a relatively diverse array of characters, Support is the only role dominated by female heroines), cultural norms that make women more likely to compromise and take on roles nobody else likes, and fear of stereotype reinforcement – when unsuccessful experiments with new characters and mechanics are taken as evidence of women having no talent for games, rather than simple inexperience.

On its own this stereotype would have been relatively benign, but it’s often combined with another, more insidious one: that healers are easier to play and require less “skill” from players, whatever this arbitrary concept means for the gaming community. Thus, the argument goes, players who tend to mainly choose support characters deserve less respect and are also the main reason anything in the game goes wrong. A (cuttingly sarcastic) recounting of such complaints can be found in this article, along with an extensive list of counterarguments, the main of them being that healers simply require mastering a different set of skills from damage dealers and tanks, such as teamwork, good communication and quick triaging (i.e. determining the priority of helping various team members in need).

Making such judgements about what constitutes “skilled” play and what doesn’t plays into what Mia Consalvo calls gaining a certain “gaming capital” – becoming a respected and celebrated member of the gaming community. Like with all kinds of cultural capital, many of the factors that play into this process can be invisible or completely intangible. For example, there are certain structural issues in Overwatch as a game that explicitly prioritize damage-dealers over other roles. The simplest way to see this is through the in-game system of awarding the title of “Play of the Game” to a certain episode masterfully done by a particular character. It’s extremely rare to see a healer rewarded in this way for impressive healing and effective triaging, or a tank – for effectively holding the line or disabling the enemy team, but it’s very typical to see damage-dealers rewarded for killing lots of enemies in quick succession. The skill that is held in highest regard by many players as a result is precise aiming. These conversations regarding challenge and skill are further fuelled by the in-game “difficulty” rating, which assigns one to three stars to every character based on how complex their skill-set is to pick up for a complete beginner. There is a lot of speculation regarding how this system translates into the level of challenge in mastering a particular hero, and as a result creates (frequently toxic) comparisons between players preferring differently tiered characters.

As one user on this Overwatch forum thread half-jokingly suggested, Mercy (the most famous healer character in Overwatch, who is assigned one star in the in-game difficulty rating) should have been given three “mental” stars in difficulty, not to designate her as a complex character or to suggest that she requires a high amount of “player skill,” but to signal the exceptional mental fortitude that is needed to be able to endure the toxic attitudes many players used to display towards those who preferred to play Mercy regularly. An idea along similar lines is voiced by the heroines of this Cecilia D’Anastasio’s piece: that playing support heroes in Overwatch requires large amounts of emotional labour, and often is done (by the interviewees and by other women) not because they particularly like playing as healers, but because nobody else is willing to step up to the task.

These systemic issues and stereotypes are long-standing (as Jennifer Jenson and Suzanne de Castell discuss in Gamer-hate and the “Problem” of Women: Feminism in Games, nothing is really new in the area of discriminating against and silencing female voices, including the particular “techniques” used in gaming communities), and I’ve been on the receiving end of some of these attitudes myself, with other players:

complaining in the team chat that the healer (me) was criminally unskilled, or deliberately ignored them, or both;

switching to a non-healing character in the middle of the game, leaving the team to quickly perish;

obnoxiously spamming the “I need healing” call-sign while being separated from the rest of the team, with no way for a healer to get to them without dying themselves;

and engaging in many other less and more disruptive behaviours.

The system of role queueing that I described in the beginning is relatively recent, and was added specifically to address some of these problems. Before explicit roles started being enforced, players were able to choose characters after their teams were already assembled, with the game pointing out that no healers would almost certainly guarantee a loss, but allowing such team composition nonetheless. The recent change allowed players to commit to certain roles from the start of the game, ensuring that those who are more willing to compromise their own desires for the benefit of the team didn’t have to pick support characters just because nobody else wanted to play them. It also both encouraged and forced more players into support roles (by having significantly shorter wait-times if you are willing to play tank or healer, as well as sometimes literally offering in-game rewards for choosing non-damage roles), hopefully broadening the perspectives of those who never tried these characters before due to various biases. 

And yet, after paying close attention to my own emotions during this observed play I realized that I play Overwatch very differently (and with less excitement) now, compared to before these changes were introduced. A lot of the thrill of playing healers and tanks for me before (and those were virtually the only characters I played before role selection was established) was in feeling useful and supportive of the team effort, utilizing a set of skills that didn’t rely on murder quite as much as on healing and protection. There was something powerful, almost to the level of power fantasy, in being able to (sometimes, perhaps, self-sacrificially) choose a character (so frequently a female one) that was essential for the team but that nobody else wanted to pick. Now, with the role-selection system in place it became patently obvious that prejudice against healers is still very deeply entrenched (as the game has to offer rewards to have enough players willing to even consider choosing them). At the same time, being locked into the role of a healer from the start feels like the expectation of “skill” and “good play” is now extended to these characters as well, where previously that was the prerogative of damage-dealers. If I experiment with a healer I’m unfamiliar with, I’m not helping my team by providing support, I’m letting them down by not taking my role seriously after explicitly stating I’m willing to take it on.

All of this is not to suggest that these changes are objectively bad. If anything, the pleasure of self-sacrifice (through choosing a character nobody else wants to play) is in itself very messy and discernibly gendered. Rather, it’s to contemplate how much untrodden ground there is still left to explore for game scholars willing to apply feminist critical perspectives.

References:

Meet the gamers who love playing healer, Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

The Power of Healers in Competitive Gaming, Jennifer Anderson

I Paid Women To Play Overwatch With Me, And It Was Fantastic, Cecilia D'Anastasio

Why women tend to main support or healers in multiplayer or team games -- Comprehensive deep dive, Ammers10

Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames, Mia Consalvo

For this post I’m doing summaries of Johan Huizinga’s Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon – a chapter from his book Homo Ludens (1938); and Roger Caillois’s Classification of Games – a chapter from Man, Play and Games (1958). For Huizinga I made a flowchart that helps one define whether something is play or not, as my main takeaway from his chapter was that it’s hard to come up with a workable definition of play, but it’s possible to discuss various qualities that play possesses that makes it a distinct phenomenon.

Summary

Let’s Plays – video recordings of gameplay – are a diverse type of media produced at the intersection of game playing, video production, media analysis and community building through participation in fan activities. LPs provide participants with spaces for learning, training and engaging in multiple literacy practices – both digital-born and not – such as interpreting media texts, creating and editing multimedia products, navigating the legal and political areas of remixing practices and professionalizing gaming paratexts, among many others. With the level of involvement in literacy practices LPs facilitate, literacy scholars and instructors would benefit greatly from viewing them as potential objects of analysis and, even more importantly, future learning tools.

Analytical notes

While the arguments the authors are making are, in my opinion, worth defending, the “let’s see” approach they are suggesting still seems to largely rely on an outsider perspective, even if one dedicated to understanding the practices in question as fully as possible (a problem that seems that much more frustrating considering that one of the simplest solutions would be to collaborate on the research project with members of the community as co-investigators). This view potentially ignores many issues that are inherent in the LP production culture: for example, without tracing the relationships content producers have with their viewers, with the industry at large, and with the political landscape they exist in (and many of these relationships are only truly visible to genuine community members), scholars and teachers run the risk of misunderstanding the culture and seeming like impostors, further alienating students who might already engage with these spaces specifically to avoid instruction and schooling.

Question

A home video for a birthday party, a love poem, an instagram selfie – there are so many examples in our daily lives of media and art we create not as a statement, or an expression of beauty for consumption, but to capture a moment in time or tell a loved one we’re thinking of them. And slowly but surely technology marches on to provide us with tools that allow us to do these little things even when our mastery of a certain medium is otherwise negligible. We’ve seen the advent of cheap photo cameras, easy-to-use audio and video editing software, personal blogging and online publishing, widely available printing services and more – all to “democratize” the creative process and make it accessible for complete beginners.

But is a similar process possible with video games, which are rapidly becoming the main expressive medium of the twenty-first century? To answer this question this chapter will look at several attempts by game development studios, both big and small, to introduce products that simplify game making to a few customization choices and tools. It will focus in particular on Electronic Arts’ Sims Carnival and the patterns of use its Wizard and Swapper tools enjoy.

The game I looked at for my review was Eliza, a 2019 visual novel by Zachtronics, built on the premise that in the very nearest future the field of individual psychotherapy, in an attempt to battle the current “mental health epidemic”, will become completely dominated by tech giants competing to automate counselling through artificial intelligence and machine learning. One of these companies, the maker of the titular psychotherapeutic tool Eliza (named after the 60’s MIT natural language processing program), puts an original spin on their creation. Whatever questions, care and advice is offered by the computer program to its clients is delivered in-person through “proxies” – real humans (contract workers on minimum wage) that read prompts off of their augmented reality visors. You play as Evelyn, one of these “proxies” and former engineer working on Eliza, who, after taking a prolonged break from the tech world, comes back to see what her creation turned into and what kinds of people and in what circumstances use this intervention.

I wanted to like this game really badly, and there were many good reasons to do so. It combines two very pertinent topics – mental health and big tech, – and offers surprisingly profound insights into both. The people in charge of Eliza’s development couldn’t be further from the vision of universal and affordable mental health care their corporation supposedly propagates, and, even more importantly, they no longer even have mental health professionals in their midst – the chief psychologist, himself a sad and sleazy alcoholic in private, has recently left to found his own startup, based around technologically-induced lucid dreaming. The decisions engineers and managers make regarding the extremely personal information clients share with Eliza are profoundly unethical, and their responses to pointing that out usually amount to “at least I’m a good and rational person, someone else would do something even worse”. The lackluster and laughably uniform recommendations Eliza offers (“do some breathing exercises and get a prescription for antidepressants from your doctor”) are fundamentally unsuited to the very real problems that clients hope it can resolve. Every one of these is a conversation worth having, and the game takes great effort to not entirely vilify any of the people representing these issues: you might disagree with their arguments, but you still see where they are coming from.

In addition to thematic relevance, all of this is delivered not simply through dialogue, but also with more subtle environmental storytelling (what apps are installed on your phone and others; what emails, receipts, news articles and notifications you periodically get from your colleagues and your previous engagements; and what objects Evelyn finds note-worthy in her surroundings in the rare moments when she is left alone to ponder her situation). I like this (uniquely gamic) style of presenting the narrative (though, of course, this is very far from the first time a game does it this way – see, for example, famous indie titles Cibele, Her Story or Emily is Away). And, as can be seen from the screenshots, the art style is (fittingly) subdued but very pleasing.

But with all of these good qualities, I’m still left with the feeling that something is missing. The most powerful sections of the game for me were the ones where Evelyn had to participate in actual Eliza sessions – listening to (well-written and well-acted) problems of actual people: an aspiring artist struggling and failing to turn her passion into a career, an upcoming young father who is heavily hinted to have recently realized his bisexuality and is struggling to commit to his wife in the face of big life changes, an older woman struggling to get out of debt who comes to Eliza simply seeking out company. It’s profoundly upsetting to listen to their understandable problems and not be able to offer them even a sympathetic ear, let alone actionable advice or real help, – as both the player and Evelyn in-game are strictly limited to the responses Eliza generates. It’s a powerful procedural argument about the failure of both big tech (“it’s possible by abstracting enough to find a generalized solution that fits everyone”) and the contemporary extremely individualized approach to mental health (“it’s on you that you are depressed and you are personally responsible for getting better”) to treat problems created through structural and highly institutionalized means – it’s no coincidence that the very first client Evelyn encounters suffers from severe environmental grief.

But even as Evelyn leaves these sessions and comes back to her own life, she still experiences the same inability to make any impact on the world around her: even though the player is sometimes given options to choose from in conversations, Evelyn (and thus the player) can never respond to any of the arguments put before them, and the narrative of the game is still almost entirely linear, with the multiple endings being decided by a single choice at the very end – to return to big tech, become a licensed counselor or leave all of it behind. Because of this I ended up seeing Eliza’s argument as individualistic and pessimistic at heart: the problems it raises are clearly structural and political in nature, and through the course of the game the player can clearly see that none of them can be solved alone. This is a lesson that I appreciate Eliza teaching. What I don’t agree with is how it seems to stop right before taking the last step: the fact that these issues cannot be solved alone doesn’t mean they can’t be solved at all or that we should stop trying.

Links:

Silicon Valley is Not Your Friend – Jonathan Taplin, New York Times (17 October, 2017)

Big Data is so large, it’s raising privacy & ethical issues – Megan Ray Nichols, EuroScientist (15 November, 2018)

Google cancels AI ethics board in response to outcry – Kelsey Piper, Vox (4 April, 2019)

There Is No Cure for Existence: On the Medicalization of Psychological Distress – Albarracin, Dolores & Ducousso-Lacaze, Alain & Cohen, David & Gonon, François & Keller, Pascal & Minard, Michel. (2016). Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry. 17. 149-158. 10.1891/1559-4343.17.3.149.

Exercise 1.3: Your Life as a Game: List five areas of your life that could be games. Then briefly describe a possible underlying game structure for each.

With the way this exercise is phrased I’ve thought of three different ways to interpret it:

imagining ways in which some areas of my life could be gamified, adding a playful structure to an otherwise boring, difficult or routine task,

coming up with ways some of the aspects of my everyday life and experiences could be incorporated into a game,

or basing a game off of the interests and proficiencies I’ve gained throughout my life (the flimsiest interpretation of the literal phrasing of the exercise, but the most fitting with what the Fullerton chapter it’s located in describes).

Instead of choosing one interpretation, I decided to think of a couple of examples for each of them.

Gamification

I’ve been presenting with a lot of ADHD symptoms throughout my entire life, which is one of the reasons I was intensely interested in gamification back around 2012 when it started getting increasingly popular, so gamifying my life has been a thing I’ve been doing since I can first remember having responsibilities. This is also one of the ways I learned through personal experience that simply adding rewards and achievements to pursue through a game-like structure only helps with tedious tasks for about a month at the most.

The two most obvious areas of continuous gamification efforts for me have been:

Exercising – the first gaming console I ever owned was Nintendo Wii, and the only game I played on it regularly was Wii Fit. I had to come up with my own additional challenges on top of the ones the game already provides to continue playing – e.g. I had to get a particular pattern on the graph that kept track of the types of exercise I did each day, or I had to get a certain number of stamps on a calendar in a row. These days I’m attempting to go through the Age of Pandora fitness quest to stay somewhat functional throughout the pandemic.

Food – preparation and (more importantly) eating. Healthy eating is a struggle, but one of the ways I managed to alleviate some of it for a while was keeping a food journal online – I would set challenges for myself (such as drink enough water or consume enough iron), and they would help me keep going.

The Youtube channel How to ADHD has many other suggestions for the various ways in which real-life routines can be turned into games to be more manageable.

Areas of life as a game

Two areas of my life that are already (quite unfun and frequently unfair) games in their own right are academia and immigration – it would be relatively easy to formalize some aspects of them into an actual ludic system. For example, “publish or perish” sounds like a perfect description for a timed arcade game where you need to manage and rearrange bits and pieces of writing and descriptions of various projects and send them off to publishers before the timer runs out and you inevitably “perish”.

Similarly, immigration involves a lot of “jumping through the hoops” to complete tasks you didn’t even know existed, let alone were necessary, which makes me think of memory games that make the player repeat a constantly increasing number of arbitrary actions in a particular order.

(By the way, check out Papers, Please – a famous game about the inhumanity of being a border officer for an authoritarian regime)

Previous life experience as inspiration

One game that I would really love to play would be a literal walking simulator. I was a member of a hiking club back when I was in middle school – the club itself being somewhat of a holdover from Soviet times when hiking was a recognized sport (it still is in Russia, but a lot of the underlying rules and classifications date back to USSR). It would be interesting to spend the majority of the game walking around and admiring the scenery (we all already use Skyrim and Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey for this anyway), while dedicating some time to resource management, path-finding and route-creation, making sure that the hiking trip you propose to the responsible governing body adheres to all regulations and brings you closer to the coveted title of a Master of Sports.

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Exercise 2.6: Challenge: Name three games that you find particularly challenging and describe why.

While thinking through this I realized that I can’t name any particular computer games I find challenging – when I find a computer game too difficult, I simply lose interest. However, I can name a few board-games that I’ve played many times but find too challenging for me, since I usually play board-games with other people for the purposes of socialization rather than simply to enjoy the gameplay.

Three of these games are:

Cyclades – I find it extremely challenging because the core mechanic of the game revolves around an auction (players vying for the favour of various gods), and it’s hard for me to gauge the relative value of resources and to not ridiculously overpay or bid way too low from the beginning and quickly lose the chance to participate.

Dune – a classic boardgame based on the famous sci-fi novel of the same name, whose social mechanics are made specifically to make me cry. I find this game very challenging to the point of being incapable of playing it more often than once a year, because the politics of the in-game system require players to make alliances (as it’s near impossible to win on your own), exploit their allies for resources and then betray them when they’re no longer of use. The developers recreated the novel’s atmosphere of always expecting a knife in the back so well that the game is nearly unplayable for me.

Galaxy Trucker – a game about spending a few minutes building a semi-operational spaceship out of random parts and then flying it into random space adventures where it’s inevitably broken into pieces. While I like games that require you to connect random tiles to adhere to certain patterns and limitations – I find it satisfying to build something compact yet complex in those situations – I absolutely cannot do something like this on a time limit and then spend half an hour being shamed for not making the construct perfect. So the challenge in this game for me comes not from the core mechanics, but from the fact that I need to deal with the consequences of my imperfect designs for the rest of the game.

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Exercise 2.7: Premise: What are the premises for the games Risk, Clue, Pit, and Guitar Hero? If you don’t know these games, pick games that you are more familiar with.

As out of the four I only know the premise of Clue, I decided to instead describe four games that I know well and whose premises I find enjoyable.

Firewatch – after your wife develops early-onset dementia, you seek out a lonely contract job as a fire lookout in the wilderness of a national park in Wyoming, spending time alone in your watchtower or completing tasks directed by your supervisor reachable only through a walkie-talkie.

Elsinore – you are Ophelia in the world of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. After discovering the tragic death of your father and drowning in a river under mysterious circumstances you wake up a few days earlier to discover that you are stuck in a time loop that allows you to relive the events of the play and untangle the web of causes and consequences that lead to the tragic ending. Armed with this knowledge you set out to prevent the death of your father and resolve the mystery of your circumstances along the way.

Spirit Island – you are a god granting your favour to the indigenous population of an island in the Pacific ocean, and your home is being invaded by European colonizers. You need to use your powers to scare the invaders into leaving and cleanse the island of their influence.

Tobago – you are a treasure hunter possessing bits and pieces of treasure maps pointing you towards particular landmarks. You are competing against other hunters like you to combine the hints you all have in order to triangulate the location of various treasures to a single spot on a map.

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Exercise 2.8: Story: Have any stories within a game ever gripped you, moved you emotionally, or sparked your imagination? If so, why? If not, why not?

Indeed they have, I even wrote a Master’s thesis about it. One of the games I discuss there is Beyond: Two Souls – a Quantic Dream game in the genre that’s sometimes called “interactive movie,” or a largely cinematic piece of media that the player can subtly influence through performing quick-time events. This game follows a young woman, Jodie, who possesses a mysterious connection to a disembodied entity she calls Aiden, through the extremely traumatizing events of her life, as she’s first sent off to a research facility by her adoptive parents, and then forcibly recruited by the CIA to work as a secret agent due to the superhuman abilities she possesses thanks to her connection with Aiden.

Beyond: Two Souls has been heavily criticized for its apparent lineriality and the low level of agency it affords its players. However, when I played it, I found it extremely touching specifically because of how it incorporated its mechanics with its narrative. The lack of agency and the feeling of disempowerment are important parts of Jodie’s story – as a matter of fact, almost every vignette in her life the player gets to interact with portrays some way in which her life robbed her of a chance to make her own choices and live her own life. This (unusual for games) way Beyond approached player freedom made me empathize with Jodie more and caused me to celebrate the little ways she reinforced her own agency even more fiercely.

But in addition to this approach, and even more importantly, the game features a two-player mode where one player can take the role of Jodie, while the other plays as Aiden – the disembodied entity that follows Jodie around and proves a frustratingly ubiquitous presence, but at the same time frequently defends her and protects her from harm. As I played Beyond with a good friend of mine, the scenes where Jodie was disempowered and had to be protected by Aiden didn’t feel victimizing – instead, I felt supported and cared for by the player sitting next to me, just as invested as I was in Jodie’ well-being. In a way, this combination of narrative and mechanics made the argument Anna Anthropy based her game Queers in Love at the End of the World on: “If we have each other, we have everything.” 

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Exercise 3.2: Three-Player Tic-Tac-Toe: Create a version of tic-tac-toe that works for three players. You might need to change the size of the board or other elements of the game to do this.

I came up with two different versions of tic-tac-toe for three people, with different player interaction models.

The first version is the three players playing in pairs on three different boards simultaneously: every player plays separate games with their two opponents, with the caveat that whatever move you make, you make it on both boards you’re playing on at the same time. So if you put your token (say there are now three of them – naughts, crosses and starts, for example) in the upper left corner on one board, it automatically materializes in the exact same spot on the other board. Every player’s goal is to win as many games out of the two they’re playing as possible.

In their article Digital Games for Education: When Meanings Play Jennifer Jenson and Suzanne de Castell explore the meaning of “content” as it relates to educational games, and the resulting challenges of developing games that effectively facilitate learning. As they define it, content is “educationally valuable knowledge,” i.e. what the game developers set out to teach their players by creating a particular product. The way content is frequently approached in the development of educational games is by treating it as separate from the game itself and its underlying mechanics. For example, in a fantasy math learning game you might still have the exact same arithmetic problems you would find in school as your content, but now you need to solve them because it’s a magic spell needed to defeat the dragon, as part of a game.

As Jenson and de Castell argue, often this approach is undertaken because the developers of educational games need to approach learning in a quantifiable way – the developer has to be able to list with conviction all the things the player learned throughout their gaming session. Such an approach frequently results in games that don’t fulfill their educational function: they might end up so unengaging that players stop playing them, or the educational content is lost entirely to the gamic parts, or a myriad other ways the game is unsuccessful.

Take, for example, All Aboard: Trackin’ through Canada, from the Games section of the CBC Kids’ website. With its visuals focusing a beautiful locomotive in a picturesque landscape and the little advertising blurb inviting you to “Create train routes to make your way across Canada,” it at first glance gives no indication that in reality it’s simply a train-themed re-skin of the 1989 classic Pipe Mania. It’s a simple, if engaging, time-based puzzle that asks you to connect two points using randomly-generated tracks before the train runs and inevitably crashes at an ill-advisedly built intersection.

Did I spend 20 minutes trying to earn 3 stars on the tricky New Foundland map? Yes, I did. Did I learn anything at all about the (engaging and deeply problematic) Canadian railway history or the (fraught with controversies) state of the Canadian passenger railroads today? Definitely not, and it’s really a shame.

There isn’t really anything about this game that wouldn’t allow the developers to make it both fun and educational. For example, even with the same track-laying mechanic, some of the added challenges could be the fact that the majority of Canadian tracks nowadays are privately-owned by companies that profit from freight. Or, alternatively, the game could invite players to ponder the role of the government in massive seizures of indigenous lands to build “the railroads of tomorrow”.