Hey Baby: Playing with Sexism

Update: Lots of new ranty fun to be had with a positive, feminist read at The New Statesman and a somewhat less considered response at The Rights of Man. If anything, I suppose it reconfirms for me the lunacy of our society's value system - that such radically opposed positions can arise from precisely the same facts indicates we've screwed something up somewhere.

Hey Baby is not a good game, but it is a good piece of interactive expression - and that's what this blog is all about. An incredibly basic Unity-developed project, you control a girl walking the streets suffering cat calls from leching men at every corner. Your methods of interaction are either a polite "Thank you, have a great day," or a Mac-10 to the face. Actually playing the game won't get you anything much more than you can get from that sentence apart from, perhaps, a more immediate sense of just how slapdash the whole affair is. And that's important.

The game's prompted some decent ranting that I'm not going to weigh in on, largely because I hold very firm beliefs on that topic and this shouldn't degenerate into an argument about sexual dominance as it has elsewhere. It's also prompted more than enough 'meh's. Costik - usually on the money - over at Play This Thing says:

"Mildly cathartic, perhaps, but one wonders at the mentality of someone who spends this much effort creating something without injecting anything remotely like, you know, actual gameplay."

I certainly agree more could be done with the premise. I'm always a little shocked when female friends relate their horror stories, largely because this sort of behaviour doesn't tend to happen when there's a male friend around, and - regardless of where you sit on the 'they should just rise above it' line - it's very hard for a lad to even imagine how fast approaches in a bar or whistles on the street can get unpleasant. Perhaps a game could bridge that gap quite effectively.

Sticking to the release in question, however, I'd argue this in no way represents wasted time on the part of the developer. While it's very much a one trick pony, there's a very clear message here - 'Men often act in idiotic ways; here's an equally idiotic response'. And here's the thing: it may well be it's impossible for a game (even a more complex game) to fully communicate to a boy what it's like to be a girl; if that's the case, Hey Baby at least manages to communicate how we (the male gender) sometimes make them feel without even realising it.