This post is an analysis of the fun (stress inducing fun) and informative game: Hair Nah
If you have 5 min of free time, play the game before reading this! https://hairnah.com
Hair Nah is a game created by Momo Pixel where the player must prevent people from touching their textured hair. While some games are created primarily for enjoyment, Hair Nah intends to impart meaning in the action of swatting away millions (that’s a hyperbole) of hands as they try to rake their fingers through your hair.
As Christopher Patterson and Tara Fickle put it in their book, Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) about Us, games usually will add characters of colour for a diversity win. Hair Nah subverts this, as it is a game created to represent people of colour as its main purpose.
Before I get into the positives of the game, I'd like to briefly impart one small criticism.
While Hair Nah has the widest variety of darker skin tones I have ever seen in any game, there is no option for white skin, nor different colors of hair. You may be asking yourself, “This is a game to represent black people, why would there need to be light skin?”
Well, here is the reason.
If you’ve never seen a “white” person with texture hair before, this person has a condition called albinism. Albinism genetic condition that results in a lack of melanin, which gives colour to your eyes, skin, and hair. More melanin -> darker skin, Lack of melanin -> lighter skin. The woman pictured above is a black woman with albinism. While she may appear white, she is Black.
This comment of mine isn’t meant to discredit the game, but to encourage more options for character customization. This will allow even more representation and possibility of critical play, where players can see that texture plays a large part in the fascination of Black hair.
Moving on to the game itself...
It’s interesting that going to an airport to catch your flight is picked as the location of interest in the game, as that is the place where you will find all different kinds of people who may have never seen the hair of the character the player controls. So, they try to touch it. I told my sister about this strange phenomenon, and she was in shock that anyone would try to touch another person’s hair. It's absurd that this is even an issue that Black people have to deal with, but it's an unfortunate reality.
Patterson and Fickle wrote something interesting, how one can only speculate on other lives and thoughts they’ve been excluded from. Hair Nah allows the player to feel the stress that Black women go through throughout their lives, where strangers gawk at their natural hair. The initial annoyance will evolve into stress as the more levels you progress through, more hands appear more frequently.
This game gives the player a peek into the perspective of a Black woman, and if the player is a Black woman themselves, allows them to feel seen in a way that shows that they are not alone.
In the book Behind the Movement to Create More Black Video Game Characters by J. Nailah Avery, Avery says that 2% of people in the American gaming industry are Black. Now imagine how much representation of that group is added to games (without the intention of simply getting more players aka more money); not a whole lot, right? So when a game is created to represent a marginalized group of people who all share in the same experience, it’s important to bring it to the surface of gaming and expose it to as many people as possible. Black and other marginalized peoples deserve to have their voices heard, especially in the white-dominated gaming industry.
SPOILERS FOR THE ACE ATTORNEY TRILOGY (I literally just finished it)
inspired by the lgbtq game archive: https://lgbtqgamearchive.com/2016/05/25/jean-armstrong-in-phoenix-wright-ace-attorney-trials-and-tribulations/
This blog post will examine and critically analyze Ace Attorney's depiction of gender and sexuality.
Jean Armstrong is portrayed as an effeminate man who flirts with every man around him. He exaggerates his movements and mannerisms, using a fake french accent in his daily life. He owns a restaurant that is decorated in a “girlish” way, filled with roses and accents of pink. He sells perfume on the side, adding to the “girly” things he does.
Throughout the game, characters question his gender identity. It is not explicitly mentioned, but it is implied that Jean is a cisgender gay man who likes to dress in drag.
Ace Attorney is not a game where the designer was trying to express a message pertaining to gender and sexuality, rather it was to make fun of gender expressions outside the norm. The characters outright asking him if he’s a woman is meant to be humorous, although it just shows that in the game and the culture surrounding it, acting feminine equates to being a woman. The game perpetuates gender stereotypes in this way.
It is important to note that Max Galactica, a magician in a circus, is not criticized for his feminine appearance like Armstrong. With his long flowing pink hair, shiny pink clothes, and flamboyant accents on those clothes, one could argue that Max also dresses in drag.
When looking at Armstrong, the characters call him a woman due to his feminine appearance. It could also be because he flirts with men, as "something a woman would do." Perhaps Max does not receive the same jokes as Armstrong because he is straight (and in love with a 16-year old who acts like a child but let's not talk about that right now), has his chest exposed (which only a man is allowed to do), and works at a circus (where it's expected for people to act strangely).
Moving onto sexuality, the Ace Attorney fandom ships two main characters, Phoenix Wright and Miles Edgeworth.
Here is the main reason.
Here is another reason.
...enough said.
okay, one more
oh and proof that phoenix is bi
he was in love with and dated a woman
see image below
In a game where queerness is laughed at, the game "accidentally" (?) created characters with serious feelings for each other that no one in the game acknowledges or makes jokes out of.
AA is the embodiment of queer players unraveling the clear queer undertones in the game. Playing queerly, a term Bo Ruberg mentions in their article, "Video games have always been queer" (NYU Press, 2019), "imagine alternative ways of being and to make space within structures of power for resistance through play". Setting aside Jean Armstrong, Max Galactica, and WrightWorth for a moment, AA is a game where Phoenix Wright explores the world through a queer lens. He finds unconventional methods to prove his clients innocent in court, thinking outside the box while never straying from his morals (except for straight up lying to a witness to make them admit that they knew what the bottle of poison looked like but that was valid okay? not legal tho lol). Phoenix Wright plays queerly, encouraging the player to play queerly as well.
Getting back to the queer characters in a game, one can laugh at the fact that in attempting to make a laughable queer character (Jean Armstrong), the joke was ultimately on the creators as they created one of the queerest games ever.
Ace Attorney, while a highly enjoyable game, is not exempt from critiques on its handling of sexism, gender, and sexuality.
Some characters were made with the female gaze in mind... If I am not mistaken all character designs were passed around to the women in capcom for review... And in fact This guy?
Was made with the Yaoi fandom in mind. When the games came out, Tatsuro Iwamoto found out that the games were popular with a lot of Yaoi fans, so he read Yaoi Manga for design inspo. Ron Delite was based on Yaoi Manga character designs, to make the softest soft boy one could make, which is why Desiree looks like a dommy mommy - They mirror each other - soft boi and strong woman.
That's why a lot of Ace Attorney shifted to take queerness more seriously in most games too - they realized the queer community enjoys the game and characters, so they chose to give as many nods to the LGBTQIA+ within the Japanese censors of the time.
Also, Armstrong, at least in Japanese, is not a directly insulting character. He's an "okama" which initially is an insulting stereotype of gay men who act overly effeminate and dress in drag (overly in the eyes of the general cishet public), but evolved into a sort of subculture in Japan. So although for the time it may have been a jab, it turned into a representation of that subculture.
Which is why I am not surprised they also started doing more WrightWorth representation - the team became more and more open to the LGBTQIA+ Community, and realized the gays and fujoshis see a tension beyond rivalry between those two, so, hey, why not feed the fandom a bit?
So yea, rocky start, much better going down the line.
SPOILERS FOR THE ACE ATTORNEY TRILOGY (I literally just finished it)
inspired by the lgbtq game archive: https://lgbtqgamearchive.com/2016/05/25/jean-armstrong-in-phoenix-wright-ace-attorney-trials-and-tribulations/
This blog post will examine and critically analyze Ace Attorney's depiction of gender and sexuality.
Jean Armstrong is portrayed as an effeminate man who flirts with every man around him. He exaggerates his movements and mannerisms, using a fake french accent in his daily life. He owns a restaurant that is decorated in a “girlish” way, filled with roses and accents of pink. He sells perfume on the side, adding to the “girly” things he does.
Throughout the game, characters question his gender identity. It is not explicitly mentioned, but it is implied that Jean is a cisgender gay man who likes to dress in drag.
Ace Attorney is not a game where the designer was trying to express a message pertaining to gender and sexuality, rather it was to make fun of gender expressions outside the norm. The characters outright asking him if he’s a woman is meant to be humorous, although it just shows that in the game and the culture surrounding it, acting feminine equates to being a woman. The game perpetuates gender stereotypes in this way.
It is important to note that Max Galactica, a magician in a circus, is not criticized for his feminine appearance like Armstrong. With his long flowing pink hair, shiny pink clothes, and flamboyant accents on those clothes, one could argue that Max also dresses in drag.
When looking at Armstrong, the characters call him a woman due to his feminine appearance. It could also be because he flirts with men, as "something a woman would do." Perhaps Max does not receive the same jokes as Armstrong because he is straight (and in love with a 16-year old who acts like a child but let's not talk about that right now), has his chest exposed (which only a man is allowed to do), and works at a circus (where it's expected for people to act strangely).
Moving onto sexuality, the Ace Attorney fandom ships two main characters, Phoenix Wright and Miles Edgeworth.
Here is the main reason.
Here is another reason.
...enough said.
okay, one more
oh and proof that phoenix is bi
he was in love with and dated a woman
see image below
In a game where queerness is laughed at, the game "accidentally" (?) created characters with serious feelings for each other that no one in the game acknowledges or makes jokes out of.
AA is the embodiment of queer players unraveling the clear queer undertones in the game. Playing queerly, a term Bo Ruberg mentions in their article, "Video games have always been queer" (NYU Press, 2019), "imagine alternative ways of being and to make space within structures of power for resistance through play". Setting aside Jean Armstrong, Max Galactica, and WrightWorth for a moment, AA is a game where Phoenix Wright explores the world through a queer lens. He finds unconventional methods to prove his clients innocent in court, thinking outside the box while never straying from his morals (except for straight up lying to a witness to make them admit that they knew what the bottle of poison looked like but that was valid okay? not legal tho lol). Phoenix Wright plays queerly, encouraging the player to play queerly as well.
Getting back to the queer characters in a game, one can laugh at the fact that in attempting to make a laughable queer character (Jean Armstrong), the joke was ultimately on the creators as they created one of the queerest games ever.
Ace Attorney, while a highly enjoyable game, is not exempt from critiques on its handling of sexism, gender, and sexuality.
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