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FEATURE
GAMES
Smith reflects on the amount of outreach
and feedback they had from the Dishonored
community after the release of the first game
– especially women, who were sick of seeing
continual gender stereotypes. “To be clear, we
don’t only hear from women that they want a
certain thing. I hear from women who say, ‘I’m
deep into the lore; I love the Victorian stuff;
I love the costumes; I love the characters’,
but I also hear from women that say, ‘I like
chopping dudes’ heads off, because I don’t get
to do that at work. I have to listen to the guys
mansplaining sh-t to me and I just want to cut
guys’ heads off.’
“But in
Dishonored
, we did kind of fall into
the trap a little bit where women had five jobs:
maid, prostitute, queen, little girl, and a witch.
That was pretty much it. As a result of that, for
the
Dishonored
DLC and now for 2, we have
lawyers and union leaders and guard captains.
The women we heard from definitely drove that.”
Our conversation progresses to an interesting
issue about female representation in popular
media, and how there’s the potential for more
females to be drawn to playing video games if
they can see themselves reflected in them.
“I read something, and I can’t remember
who it was by, but he was talking about
growing up on comic books and loving Spider-
Man, and how, as an African-American, Peter
Parker was his hero. However, he knew he
wasn’t quite like him. But then when he had his
own child, Miles Morales is now Spider-Man,
and he saw his son respond to Miles Morales
because he saw a similarity in appearance and
he could relate to that.”
This is how the inclusion of Corvo’s daughter,
Emily, as a playable character came about. “In
that same way, if Emily was a badass assassin
that appealed more to the stealthier players, or
even to women in general, we had the chance
to broaden our audience. We just wanted to
make the game richer and wider as a whole.”
This also meant taking the story further than
simply throwing players back into the same
world a year later, with a bigger, badder boss
to fight.
“One day I thought to myself, ’What if it was
15 years later, and Emily was privileged, well
educated, had the best clothes, ate the best
food, learned from the best tutors, and then
there’s this punctuating event of total f–ing
darkness when she watches a parent die in
front of her, which is what we saw from Corvo’s
perspective in the first game. Soon enough,
it’s like nothing’s changed; she’s back in the
palace, but now she’s had all this battle training
from her father, and she morphs into this
otherworldly assassin. She changes completely.
“In the original
Dishonored,
Emily was this
little girl that the dads of the gaming industry
wanted to protect. We had so many people
come up to us and say, ‘I was playing Corvo and
absolutely butchering everyone, then I got back
and I saw these really disturbing drawings Emily
had done. She was saying awful things as a
result of the graphic way I was playing. It made
me change the way I played.’ It’s very powerful.
We make fun of it, but it’s very
powerful.”
•
Dishonored 2
is out Nov 10
“It definitely takes
inspiration from
physics on which we are
on the brink of understanding,
if a little further down the
track. There are some theories
that describe time itself as
not so much a linear function,
but a circular one, but that
still doesn’t validate the
existence of time travel. The
jury’s still out. There is, of
course, reason to believe it’s
not possible, but there’s also
reason to believe that it is
possible. It may just have a
whole new set of physics. It
is pretty cool, though, for a
game to do it in a way that
isn’t crass; it’s subtle, and
done with a nod to the basics
of physics. It extends what
we know, without completely
ruining it.“
We spoke with Professor David Reilly about
Dishonored 2
’sTimepiece – a device that
allows you to access the same point in a world at different points in time – and if it’s
actually grounded in the realm of quantum physics.
We just wanted
to make the game
richer and wider
as a whole