Enter: Reshmi

Reshmi is the player character in the current game I'm working on. Smart, sassy and kind, she doesn't take any crap from anyone. Instead she works to find the killer diligently and efficiently, by methodologically searching for evidence and questioning potential suspects.

After deciding what made Reshmi, well, Reshmi, I had to academically justify why I had made those descisions.

The decision to make Reshmi my protagonist wasn’t a hard one. Once I had decided to decide what I know, she fell into place quite quickly. Before Reshmi I had different ideas for what I wanted my protagonist to show. Following Butler’s theory on gender, I knew I wanted Reshmi’s gender to intersect with “racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities” (3). These modalities lead me to question her appearance, alongside these intersections, and what she would be representing. Would she identify as heterosexual or homosexual? What race, or ethnicity would she represent? Would she exude sexuality? Or would the character be non-binary? These questions started to overwhelm me and I started to panic. Did I really know enough about gender to be making a game that explored it? I felt the need to pull back, and just explore what I know. Therefore Reshmi became what I knew. She was a brown girl living in a western society. She was passionate, and loved what she did for a living. I was conscious of the fact that Reshmi could easily have turned into a symbol of non-white feminism. Ahmed examines how bodies of colour can lead themselves to tension, and I wanted to exploit this tension. “The body of color is attributed as the cause of becoming tense, which is also the loss of a shared atmosphere. hooks shows how as a feminist of color you do not even have to say anything to cause tension” (Ahmed, 5). She wasn’t a representation of me, just someone I felt comfortable enough with to get under their skin. Someone I knew I could do justice to. Once I was comfortable with Reshmi, I moved on to the supporting characters. 


References:

Ahmed, Sara. "Happiness and Queer Politics." World Pictures 3 (2009): 1-19.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print