I've said it before, and I'll likely say it many many more times: I love video games.

That said, there are a lot of problems that the industry has with not taking alternative sexualities or even anything other than guys into consideration when designing games. Sure, that's slowly changing, but it can always use a bit of a push.

This is my idea for a game that could do just that.

The title, of course, is "Gender Identity and You," and the game's focus is on giving people who aren't trans a bit more insight into what it means to be such through means of a simple point and click "adventure" game that could be made relatively easy in a number of different engines: Adventure Maker, Unity, heck even Flash.

The story follows a day in the life of Chris, and is told from a 2D third-person side view, like classic point and click games always are. The character as they are shown to us is a thin, freckle-faced girl with short-ish red hair. Players have two meters on the bottom of their screen: Happiness, which represents how well Chris herself is handling her day and the stresses involved, and Perception, which represents how well Chris is fitting into people's perceptions of who she is supposed to be.

Here's where things get tricky, though: the Chris we see is not the Chris the rest of the world sees, and this is played up the first time Chris passes a mirror, and there in the reflection is the Chris seen by everyone else: a little broader, shorter hair, and much more masculine looking.

This is how the game's dilemma is played out. As you progress through parts of Chris' day -- getting ready for work, going into a public restroom, shopping for new clothes, and even visiting a county fair at the end of the day -- you are faced with having to try and balance Chris' Happiness and how she is Perceived. Happiness is typically increased through Chris allowing herself or being allowed to express herself in ways that fit who she really is, while Perception is lowered by actions or presentation that don't fit with the world's standards for how she's seen by others.

To make this all the more obvious, it is played upon by the player's own perception of the game since we see who Chris really is. Getting ready for work she has both pretty clothes and normal men's clothes in the closet, along with other garments that are more personal (no nudity in the game.) The more femininely Chris dresses the better she feels about herself, but there's a limit on what she'll let herself wear that feels good outside her apartment, and even within what she'll allow there are pieces that can radically hurt her Perception score when she encounters neighbors or people on the bus to work. Likewise any time Chris passes a mirror and faces it she gets a small hit to her Happiness meter. The thing is, to the player's eyes, those clothes that make Chris happy are also the ones that fit her the best, while the masculine clothes that improve the world's Perception of her, to the player, would appear ill-fitting and wrong on the in-game figure, but right on the figure in the mirror.

This would be played on several times through the game and in different ways, when Chris has chances to make choices that either make her feel better or fit with the world's expectations. Sometimes there will be "neutral" choices too, but often the game will boil down to being happy, or fitting in.

This all culminates in the end sequence, a Hall of Mirrors at the fair/carnival thing. The player is tasked with one simple goal: exit the hall by pushing on the mirror with the normal reflection. Most of the mirrors would be super-exaggerations or outright parodies, like monsters or amazons, things that make it obvious that they're the wrong answers to anyone looking. But there would be two mirrors at the very end: one that would show Chris as the world sees her, and the other that shows Chris the way she sees herself, leaving players to decide: which one do you try and push through?

Picking either one takes you to a screen where your overall Happiness and Perception totals are calculated and presented to you, along with a handful of links to information about the transgender community as well as a few small factoids, two or three picked randomly from a collection of about fifty it can show, including suicide statistics, estimations on how many trans people do or do not transition, that kind of thing. Then the game goes back to the title screen.

No game over. No "you win" or "you lose." Just a chance to live another day, making the same sacrifices. An entire game could be played in 20 minutes or less.

It seems like it could really get a lot of good points across in ways that people might not expect, and it would be really easy to make it NOT JUST a game about a MtF, but to have a FtM option as well, simply by flopping most of what registers on the Happiness/Perception meters and switching out the mirror sprite sets for the player sprite sets (or models, if it's rendered in 3D.) The game could even ask before the first day starts "are you a guy? Or are you a girl?" With choosing a guy resulting in the FtM line and choosing a girl the MtF line.

So, what do people think? Would this succeed at helping others see at least a little about what being trans can mean?

Lemme know.

Melanie E.