Collaborative Thought Experiment: what would a game targeted at Anita Sarkeesian look like?

[Penguin_Factory]

I think a lot of the outrage directed at Anita Sarkeesian and her criticism of video games has to do with the fact that it is, well, criticism. It's not typically constructive or instructive; for the most part, she establishes a framework for tearing down video games with little apparent interest in building them up or pushing them forward.

I don't see why anyone would think this given that her her criticisms are a) extremely mild and b) generally accompanied by constructive advice for the industry.

1. What existing games would attract the attention of Anita Sarkeesian, and why?

This seems like a slightly weird exercise given that she frequently talks about games that appeal to her in her videos. Why not just watch those and then get your answer?

It's not high-pressure, anxiety-producing, or competitive in any way.

While Sarkeesian has (justifiably, in my opinion) often criticized the trend of most games using violence as their primary or sole gameplay mechanic, I don't recall her ever expressing a dislike for games that are high-pressure, anxiety inducing or competitive. In fact she's indicated she likes Spelunky, which is about as high pressure as you can get.

More complicated interactions with characters and environments simply don't translate very well. In fact, such interactions are usually stilted and off-putting - and subsequently financially ruinous for publishers.

If this was true the RPG and adventure game genres wouldn't exist, nor would strategy games like Crusader Kings or Civilization or even MMOs like EVE Online. I don't know which fantasy version of the industry you're reacting to here, but it doesn't seem to resemble the real one a whole lot.

Regarding the lack of female-focused (or Anita-focused) AAA titles: if Gone Home is what I picture Anita playing

You're picturing this wrong. Seriously, she's stated pretty clearly that what she mainly wants are games just like the one we have now, but with more women in non-demeaning roles and as protagonists.

[quote[aren't we dangerously close to emulating other media? I mean it's a walk-around simulator, right? There's very little that might be strictly defined as "gameplay" in Gone Home, and what's there might be easily removed or skipped over in similar offerings. At what point does it cross over into simply being an actual movie or graphic novel?[/quote]

The entire gameplay appeal of Gone Home is the ability to interact with a highly detailed environment; that's not possible at all in a movie or graphic novel. Sure, you could tell the *story* of Gone Home in another medium just fine, more easily than most game stories, but you couldn't replicate the experience of playing it.

Have you actually played Gone Home? Because your characterisation of it really isn't very accurate.

In fact while we're at it, have you actually watched the Tropes vs Women videos? Because a lot of these points are addressed directly in them. I don't see what the purpose is of sitting around speculating on what Sarkeesian's views might be like she's some mysterious black box when her opinions on a lot of this stuff are readily available. For example, the point about console and mobile gaming- she's stated several times that she wants to see more "core" games made by big publishers on consoles which are more inclusive to women.

One of the reactions to this whole situation I'm tired of seeing is BUT THE FEMINISTS ARE SO CONFUSING WHAT IS IT THEY WANT????? when just listening to what they're saying could give you all the answers.

 

[Uhura]

Just make her play Thomas Was Alone, both male and female characters are just squares of differing sizes. I don't see how anyone could complain about that.

I'm sure she has played it. She featured it in her most recent video (as a positive example) and she has gushed about Thomas Was Alone fan art on her twitter.

I haven't been following the whole Anita thing because frankly I think it's being blown way out of proportions, but I do vaguely recall seeing a picture ages ago of her next to the stack of games she bought from Kickstater or something and noticing Dreamfall: The Longest Journey was in that pile. Has she ever commented on it? I'll admit I haven't watched her videos and I certainly haven't been paying any attention to the media surrounding them, but if she really is for strong empowered female protagonists in gaming then The Longest Journey and its sequel Dreamfall seem like they'd be her ideal games.

She backed the recent Dreamfall Kickstarter and called it a "long-awaited sequel", so it sounds like she has played and liked it.
https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/302885079686975488

OT: She has mentioned several games she enjoys and she has written a quick video game story suggestion so I don't see how it would be difficult to fathom what kind of video games she might like. I mean one of her favorite shows is Buffy the Vampire Slayer so it's not like she hates all kinds of violence either.

 

[DrOswald]

saying no female led game will ever succeed because one game didn't, is like saying macho bravado games featuring white guys with guns wont work because Duke Nukem Forever failed

Except Duke Nukem Forever didn't fail It actually made a profit.

Oh, yeah, sure... It was a bad game, got bad reviews, and there nothing new I can say development cycle...

Still made money.

Think about that. A bad game with a misogynist main character made money while a better game (not good, but better than DNF) with a good female character failed.

Imagine you're an executive at a major AAA publisher, and you're looking at this data, seeing how even terrible, cliched, half-assed shooters with male leads still do better than well developed, original games with female leads. What kinds of projects do you green-light? Who do you bet on?

You bet on Duke! Always bet on Duke!

If a publisher thinks that Duke sold because it was about a man then they fundamentally misunderstand the video game industry. It sold because it was Duke Nukem Forever, riding on the combined wave of desperate hope and the promise of a good train wreck if everything went to hell, and Duke will never sell for that reason again. If another Duke game came out 6 months from now it would not sell at all.

Remember me, on the other hand, was just an average game with nothing notable at all to sell it. It probably isn't a terrible game, but literally the only thing interesting about it is that it has a female lead and was released exactly when it was. If it was released 3 months later or earlier no one would even have ever known it existed. And they didn't even market it well. I can't remember a single ad for it, I never even saw the main character except in reviews. I was not even sure what kind of game it was until it was released and I read reviews. And this was a game that was on my radar, that I was specifically looking out for news about.

 

[BiscuitTrouser]

I thought the point of Anitas videos isnt to attack single games but to use single games as an example of over used tropes that generally paint a negative view of women.

As in the message I always got was "Have ALL these games full of half naked women makes the industry send a negative message about what women should be" instead of "NO GAMES should have half naked women because it sends a bad message". The point is that women need variety and depth in games. We need a bigger range of character archeotypes across games. I LIKE some games with sexualised women like Beyonetta. I just want some more exploration of female characters. Heres a quote I think sums up what I, and i guess Anita, wants.

People seem so incapable of understanding this concept that an industry can be terrible but still full of great games if those great games explore an incredibly small area of artistic value. 1000000 pictures of a beach can be uniquely beautiful but fuck me sideways how about some pictures of the sky? Nothing wrong with beaches on there own and yeah lets have some no matter what but how about a few less of them and a few more sky pictures!

"Screw writing ?strong? women. Write interesting women. Write well-rounded women. Write complicated women. Write a woman who kicks ass, write a woman who cowers in a corner. Write a woman who?s desperate for a husband. Write a woman who doesn?t need a man. Write women who cry, women who rant, women who are shy, women who don?t take no shit, women who need validation and women who don?t care what anybody thinks. They are all okay, and all those things could exist in the same woman. Women shouldn?t be valued because we are strong, or kick-ass, but because we are people. So don?t focus on writing characters who are strong. Write characters who are people."

As long as you do that it doesnt matter what a female character is like. As long as we dont have the almost endless use of a handful of tropes with a few exceptional outliers. I imagine Anita just wants a game that shows more aspects of women. The stereotypical "strong" but shallow woman in every game is equally as bad in my view. Moving from one trope to another is equally as shitty. Make shit more diverse I say. Have many women in a single game, that talk and behave like PEOPLE to eachother and men. Who are capable of fear and cowardice and bravery. At least pass the freaking bechdel test jegus. The fact that shit isnt in more movies, games and books disturbs me greatly.

 

[gamer_parent]

I have a hard time imagining her problem being with anything more than characterization and narrative issues, to be honest.

 

[Phrozenflame500]

To clarify, are we talking about a gaming company aiming a game at Anita's demographic or a game that would be made to her ideals?

If it's the former, it would be a poorly written pile of slop that try's to be "progressive" and shit and accidentally ends up being more sexist then it otherwise would (basically what happens whenever the game industry tries something different).

If it's the latter, it'll probably be a normal game except all the males are female and all the females are males.

 

[LittleBlondeGoth]

Honestly, I think the Mass Effect series is pretty damn close as it is. Shepard can be male or female, it doesn't stop him / her kicking arse and saving the galaxy. You can save your team mates. You can kill them. You can pursue romance with men, women, aliens or no-one. Your gender is almost irrelevant. Which is kind of how it should be. Shep's behaviour isn't intentionally feminised or made girly if you choose to play as a woman. Personally, I loved it.

I think the only real issue I (and Anita) had with it was with the marketing, not the game. The default, male Shep was the one that was always presented to the public. And I get it, games need a face, and Sheploo is what they went with. But if FemShep had been the one on all the posters and covers... I think that would fulfill the criteria specified in the OP.

 

[EternallyBored]

Honestly, I think the Mass Effect series is pretty damn close as it is. Shepard can be male or female, it doesn't stop him / her kicking arse and saving the galaxy. You can save your team mates. You can kill them. You can pursue romance with men, women, aliens or no-one. Your gender is almost irrelevant. Which is kind of how it should be. Shep's behaviour isn't intentionally feminised or made girly if you choose to play as a woman. Personally, I loved it.

I think the only real issue I (and Anita) had with it was with the marketing, not the game. The default, male Shep was the one that was always presented to the public. And I get it, games need a face, and Sheploo is what they went with. But if FemShep had been the one on all the posters and covers... I think that would fulfill the criteria specified in the OP.

Yeah, I think Anita would probably like most of the Mass Effect games. The only things I can really see her having a problem with is the skimpy battle armor for female characters in 2 and 3 (although to be fair, by 3 Bioware had the sense to give us alternate costumes for female characters that tended to be more armor like), and the cutscene cameras tendency to focus on Miranda and Jack's ass and cleavage regardless of you playing male or female Shepard. I think she would probably like femshep as a character, she is still allowed to be feminine in some scenes while being a kickass soldier, so she may be a blank slate, but she isn't just entirely male Shepard with breasts either.

She's also mentioned that she likes Spelunky, so slap a female avatar in that and we can be done here. No? ok fine, as others have mentioned, she's also talked about supporting the Dreamfall kickstarter, so we can add point and click adventure games to the list of things Anita apparently likes.

OT: Really, this whole topic is operating on that tired false premise that, "she's not saying anything constuctive, if she doesn't have anything she likes she should just shut up." This is of course, conveniently ignoring that she has stated that she has liked several games, and even the games she criticizes, she has couched her criticism in platitudes of "Just because a game uses a negative female trope doesn't automatically make it a bad game, or even a sexist game".

I'm not a fan of Anita, I think her videos are boring, and involve too much rehashing of information that can be easily found on T.V. tropes, she's also a little too quick to lump things into negative tropes sans context. She isn't, however making solely negative comments, she was invited by EA to talk about female characters for the production of Mirror's Edge 2, and her other presentations after her kickstarter blew up do contain information on the things she likes, and what she enjoys about stories and gaming. She isn't some mysterious critic, only slinging invectives, never satisfied by anything made by developers, she gives a pretty clear image of the types of things she likes. Whether you agree with those preferences is entirely your choice, but let's not sit around and pretend that a game that appeals to Anita is some great complex mystery.

It's like that old lie about female romance and sexuality being this mysterious and complex thing compared to men.

 

[FieryTrainwreck]

This seems like a slightly weird exercise given that she frequently talks about games that appeal to her in her videos. Why not just watch those and then get your answer?

If there are enough games doing exactly what she wants them to do, why do her videos exist?

If this was true the RPG and adventure game genres wouldn't exist, nor would strategy games like Crusader Kings or Civilization or even MMOs like EVE Online. I don't know which fantasy version of the industry you're reacting to here, but it doesn't seem to resemble the real one a whole lot.

Again, if the industry isn't lacking in the sorts of intelligent games Anita Sarkeesian wants, why do her videos exist?

You're picturing this wrong. Seriously, she's stated pretty clearly that what she mainly wants are games just like the one we have now, but with more women in non-demeaning roles and as protagonists.

Most of the people outside of the protagonist in video games tend to serve the protagonist's story. Whether they are male or female could almost be a flip of the coin. Not enough female protagonists is, by in large, a AAA issue - and the AAA industry is both bursting under its own weight and no longer emblematic of the industry as a whole.

The entire gameplay appeal of Gone Home is the ability to interact with a highly detailed environment; that's not possible at all in a movie or graphic novel. Sure, you could tell the *story* of Gone Home in another medium just fine, more easily than most game stories, but you couldn't replicate the experience of playing it.

Have you actually played Gone Home? Because your characterisation of it really isn't very accurate.

Your interactions are almost entirely limited to "pick up, rotate, read". There are no choices or challenges, so the gameplay is pretty much illusory. The experience is more immersive than your average movie or book because you're steering the camera, but that's about it. It's also not a design that can sustain an entire demographic; if "Gone Home" is the sort of game that reaches out to the larger market place, how satisfied is that market going to be with a bunch of walking-around simulators? How will other games expand on those mechanics to develop depth? Will the added mechanics genuinely break new ground or mimic what we already have in countless other games?

In fact while we're at it, have you actually watched the Tropes vs Women videos? Because a lot of these points are addressed directly in them. I don't see what the purpose is of sitting around speculating on what Sarkeesian's views might be like she's some mysterious black box when her opinions on a lot of this stuff are readily available. For example, the point about console and mobile gaming- she's stated several times that she wants to see more "core" games made by big publishers on consoles which are more inclusive to women.

I understand that completely. I'm openly wondering what those games might actually look like. How would they play? What sort of story and gameplay elements would they bring to the table? How would they differ, exactly, from what we already have? And would they require the sort of horsepower associated with AAA gaming in the first place?

It's really not as simple as just saying "I wish they'd spend hundreds of millions of dollars creating games aimed squarely at me" because that's myopic and, frankly, idiotic. Or rather, it's incredibly delusional and self-centered to think that anyone is entitled to such expectations given how many niche demographics exist in the world - demographics who are every bit as entitled as Anita to hundred million dollar productions. That is to say, not entitled at all. I mean if that's how the issue is being framed, Anita's plight is no different than mine given how dissatisfied I've been with most AAA productions the last few years...

One of the reactions to this whole situation I'm tired of seeing is BUT THE FEMINISTS ARE SO CONFUSING WHAT IS IT THEY WANT????? when just listening to what they're saying could give you all the answers.

Yeah, this thread is more about coming up with some concrete ideas that would actually invite new demos and expand the market in truth rather than shifting development capital (numbered in the billions) towards unknown shores.

 

[FieryTrainwreck]

snip

Here's a concept, off the top of my head.

Post-apocalyptic survival shooter, action/adventure oriented, sort of in the vein of Fallout 3/NV, only in a more serious setting. Main protagonist is a mother of two boys, one 13 and one 10. The 10 year old has been blinded by events in the crapsack world they inhabit.

Mother is trying to find her husband, who disappeared pre-game for plot-related reasons we get to at the end of the second act or so. Family had been trying to reach safe haven somewhere before Dad ghosted. Plot follows Mother as she searches the road for clues, trying to keep her boys safe from the myriad dangers of the world. She has a gun but ammunition is scarce, violence can be effective but is extremely risky. 13 year old can get himself in trouble trying to help, 10 year old will panic and freak out in any exceptionally hairy situations. Many groups are simply too large for Mother to handle with her rifle. Best bet is usually for Mother to outsmart opponents or try to convince them to see reason, though there are myriad ways to approach any particular problem.

Part of the game mechanics include the emotional states of Mother and the boys - they draw strength from each other, but their nerves can fray from all the stresses of the world. Fear, anger, depression can each have different effects on the characters, causing them to react to different encounters in different ways. The 13 year old, in particular, has a bit of a chip on his shoulder, trying to be 'the man of the house' so to speak - he will try to influence Mother's decisions, and can be difficult if he isn't managed properly.

Edit: Additional afterthought. Potential mechanics for building bonds between Mother and boys - ability to choose to sing to them, ability to tell them bedtime stories, etc. Boys can bring Mother random gifts - flowers, found jewelry, etc. Maybe collectible storybooks litter the world as sort of a scavenger hunt mechanic, unlocking new tales for Mother to tell.

Are you sure you're in the right place, friend? I'm pretty sure you responded with exactly the sort of thing I was looking for instead of freezing at the mere mention of the topic and devolving the conversation into the same tired bullshit I explicitly tried not to dredge up. Is there maybe a better forum you should be posting to?

More seriously: that's a fantastic concept! I can see that pulling in a ton of new players. It honestly sounds like something I could get my 62 year old mom and her friends to play. It's also a concept that would benefit from high-end PC/console production values - not just another mobile gaming fad. I also think a game like this could accomplish some interesting things in terms of education and family dynamics. I mean if it really puts you in the shoes of a mother, that's a pretty fascinating experience for non-mothers.

TLDR: Love this idea.

 

[superpandasauras]

snip

snipper snap.

As a woman, I'd play the hell out of this and then some. I always wondered what a game like TLoU would look like with the genders switched.

As a man, I'd play the everloving shit out of this. It sounds amazing!

 

[Coakle]

Despite my invocation of Anita Sarkeesian, I really don't want this to turn into one of those threads.

You, uh, don't have the best username for this thread then.

OT: I haven't watched any of her videos, I just saw your username and the topic. What about Binding of Isaac? It's fun and does an alright job incorporating the theme of catholic guilt and grief.

 

[FieryTrainwreck]

Despite my invocation of Anita Sarkeesian, I really don't want this to turn into one of those threads.

You, uh, don't have the best username for this thread then.

OT: I haven't watched any of her videos, I just saw your username and the topic. What about Binding of Isaac? It's fun and does an alright job incorporating the theme of catholic guilt and grief.

So your contribution to the thread, after admitting you haven't bothered to watch the source material or (it appears) read the OP, amounts to basically an ad hominem attack based on something as meaningless as a forum handle.

Thanks for coming?

 

[FoolKiller]

So where do games like Neptunia and Senran Kagura stand for her? There are a lot of strong independant girls there.

Neptunia got invalidated during the first cutscene where Nintendo calls Microsoft "thunder tits"

 

[Boogie Knight]

Nothing will make Anita Sarkessian happy because her livelihood hinges on misery. No matter what you do, you are trapped.

 

[T_ConX]

Except your wrong...

Excuse me for a second. I have to do my relaxed breathing exercises.

...the only thing your links show is that DNF beat the sales expectations of a single marketing firm, after they cut their expectations in half post launch...

Wedbush Securities(formerly Wedbush Morgan Securities) isn't a marketing firm. It's a financial services and investment firm. It says that right in the article.

...the expectations weren't even posted by Take 2. This also conveniently forgets the tens of millions of dollars that was sunk into the project before Take 2 sued the rights away from 3D Realms, due to breach of contract, and 3D realms going bankrupt, and pushed it off on to Gearbox to cobble together 10 years of code in less than a year.

The reason Take-Two tends to conveniently ignore the millions that went into DNFs development is because it was not their money.

So when Broussard and Miller began work on Duke Nukem Forever, they decided to fund its development themselves. They arranged for a publisher, GT Interactive, to help with marketing and physically shipping the CDs, but they took only a tiny $400,000 advance. (Later, Take-Two Interactive ? famous for publishing the Grand Theft Auto games ? bought the rights from GT Interactive and became the publisher for Duke Nukem Forever.)

...

But the money was finally running out. Broussard and Miller had spent some $20 million of their own cash on Duke Nukem Forever - and their current development team would likely burn through another several million dollars a year. Miller and Broussard were forced to break their cardinal rule: They went to Take-Two with hat in hand, asking for $6 million to help finish the game.

In court documents both companies later filed, Broussard and Miller claim that Take-Two initially agreed, then quickly backtracked, offering only $2.5 million. Take-Two officials dispute this: They claim they were sufficiently dubious that they offered only $2.5 million up front, agreeing to give another $2.5 million when the game was completed. Either way, Broussard and Miller rejected the counteroffer.

With the negotiations at an impasse, Broussard and Miller decided the end had come. On May 6, they announced that they were disbanding all development at 3D Realms. They would continue to hire other developers to make other games for them, but 3D Realms would cease to create anything itself. Broussard took that last photo and then bid his creative staff good-bye.

SOURCE

Whatever profit Take 2 made was because they basically got the license for almost nothing and the game still had to have its sales expectations cut in half to make a profit.

I don't think capitalism works that way. You don't generate a profit by cutting expectations in half.

Of course, this also ignores the wonky way companies report profit and expectations, DNF was profitable with less than 2 million sales, but Dead Space gets put on ice for selling 3 times what DNF did.

Dead Space 1 and 2 did much better than DNF.

Dead Space 3 bombed.

All of this is irrelevant anyway, people bought DNF to be part of the spectacle of a game that reached a sort of unique development hell nirvana. They wanted to see the monster of a game that had been in development for 10+ years, that's why people were posting pictures of their preorder tickets from 2002 on places like Reddit. You can't make any reliable statements, negative or positive, about male or female protagonists in games from DNF, it is an anomaly. People weren't buying DNF because of anything to do with his gender, they bought it to witness one of gaming's most sublime trainwrecks since Daikatana.

Crap game with train wreck development cycle more likely to sell than good game with female lead. My point exactly!

If you want to use relevant examples, male protagonists fail all the time. The medal of Honor series has pretty much been frozen by EA in favor of Battlefield. There are Male protagonist shooters that die every year due to shitty sales: Haze, Dark Void, Saboteur, Singularity, I can do this all day for pretty much every genre.

Batting averages. Male protagonists tend to hit more often then females. That doesn't mean they never miss, they're just less likely to.

The catch 22 with this is that we really don't have enough data to make statements about the success of female protagonists in games. On one hand, we've got metrics for games like Mass Effect, where only 20% of players used female Shepard, but that doesn't actually make any concrete statements about how willing gamers are to play a female protagonist.

Really? I'd think giving players a choice between a male and female character while counting how many picked female would be a good way to find out how many players would want to play as a female.

On the other hand, we've seen a few female protagonists succeed in the AAA space. Lara Croft managed to perform as well as Nathan Drake with the last tomb raider (actually selling better than Uncharted 3, but Tomb Raider was a multi-platform, so that's not nearly as impressive).

Could you please stop making shit up.

The only reason anyone questioned its financial success was because it got saddled with the unfair expectations of being lumped in with all of Square-Enix's other properties of the year. These same fucked up sales expectations also kill many male protagonists as well (RIP Isaac Clarke, maybe EA will unfreeze your corpse sometime in the future).

What females do we actually have in the AAA arena to pull our data from? Mirror's Edge? that's a first person parkour game, not even close to a mainstream title, the gameplay was pretty much untested by any other popular title, male or female protagonist, the game didn't even have an A game budget, much less a AAA budget, EA only marketed it as part of their effort at the time to change their image, the only real success they had with that entire initiative, male or female protagonist, was Dead Space. Remember Me? please, that game was hardly AAA, it got attention for some of its mechanics, and eventually their statements about how hard it was to get a publisher behind them, but again, it was a niche playstyle that wasn't high paced action, and mixed some half-assed RPG and combo mechanics in. Tomb Raider? Actually, the Tomb Raider reboot is getting another sequel, while Dead Space is currently in limbo, so yeah, there seems to be at least one female protagonist that guys seem to be willing to play.

Indeed. If Anita and her cult wants to see change in the industry, they have to be willing to put their money where their mouth is. Just be prepared to buy some stinkers along the way.

 

[EternallyBored]

So where do games like Neptunia and Senran Kagura stand for her? There are a lot of strong independant girls there.

Neptunia got invalidated during the first cutscene where Nintendo calls Microsoft "thunder tits"

Neptunia has the issue so many other Japanese games have, it pastes fanservice over everything, in Neptunias case, that's actually an advertised part of the game, they are trying to attract horny otakus. Not to mention the characters are walking anime cliches when it comes to their personality, but maybe that's just because I found the characters boring as hell trying to slog my way through the game, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

OT: Actually, I want to apologize to the OP here, this is my third post in this thread, and even if I am annoyed by people being snarky about silly things involving a mediocre youtube celebrity, that's no excuse to completely ignore the thread topic without even a token effort to contribute, so here's my idea on a game that might appeal to the "Anita" demographic.

How about a sci-fi action/adventure mixed with a mystery focus and an investigative puzzle component, sort of like L.A. Noire with the aesthetic of Dead Space. Set the game on a remote space station orbiting a mining planet, there's no FTL travel so the station is mostly massive and isolated, developing a sort of wild culture all its own with millions of people idling their time away with escapist distractions (with personal simulations and games being popular). The protagonist is an older woman (40s maybe) who works as a private investigator for people on the station, catching cheating spouses and uncovering insurance fraud scams. Have her stumble on a murder when one of her jobs unwittingly forces her into the notice of the organized crime syndicate aboard the station. These are the guys that smuggle drugs and weapons under the officials noses, and are ultimately murdering people to keep their activities quiet. The game revolves around the protagonist trying to solve the murders and ultimately uncover the activities and scope of the syndicate organization aboard the station (she doesn't start out the game aware of their existence).

She gets help from the station police and security, which is where she runs into her partner/contact/future love interest/rival/etc. She meets the police investigator for the murders who is turning to her for help in bypassing the corrupt police stalling his investigation. She does eventually develop a romance with him, through both of their cynicism, isolation, and fear, they realize that it may be too late for either of them to settle down and have a family, but by the end of the game, they've grown to emotionally rely on each other as this influential crime syndicate uses thugs, assassins, and corrupt police to try and stop them from exposing their crimes.

The core of the investigations will involve getting into various crime scenes and ultimately finding information by diving into either the victims or the suspects personal simulation space (like through a computer or terminal in their apartment or something using a tool provided by her partner). Think of it sort of like the various minds in the Psychonauts game, except instead of deep inner psyche, it is an idealized world the user creates to fulfill their fantasies and desire while they are stuck in an isolated space station trillions of miles from Earth. Imagine what worlds people could create if they were allowed to exist in an environment where there was no limits or consequences to their actions. The lowly janitor, whose simulation is him in an epic space battle with an alien menace, the gruff soldier whose simulation is a cartoon kingdom, with talking animals and magic princesses, the syndicate assassin, whose simulation is a macabre horror story meant to slake their bloodlust or assuage their guilt, the writer, whose simulation is a cliche 1920's detective noir. When the protagonist dives in, she takes the role of the person who owns the simulation, so she becomes the ace space pilot hero, or the brave cartoon prince, or the depraved psycho murderer, or the grizzled detective. Her appearance doesn't change in the simulation, but as far as the NPCs are concerned, she's the designated protagonist of the simulation. The ultimate objective being to search the simulation for clues as to what's really going on. Things like finding the janitor's blackmail note stored on the alien mothership, the soldier's alibi being kept by the magic princess of the kingdom, and so on.

Gameplay outside the simulations will be about putting clues and alibis together to try and get closer to the truth. You work with and develop your relationship with your partner and the other police officers on the investigation throughout the game. Combat outside simulations will be exceedingly rare, maybe only a dozen or so, and killing actual humans on the station will be treated as a last resort. Combat will be brutal and desperate, punctuating the nature of fighting in an enclosed space in locations where one stray bullet could expose the entire room to the vacuum of space.

So yeah feel free to tear this idea apart, this is apparently what comes to my head after an all-nighter and way too much coffee.