INTERVIEW WITH ARTIST AND GAME DESIGNER KARA STONE

KARA STONE’S EXPERTISE IN INTERACTIVE ART, AND HOW it can explore and express psychosocial disability, makes her an exciting voice in the world of game design. Kara is an artist and scholar who primarily works within video games and interactive art. She is currently an assistant professor at Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, Canada. I also base the following chapter on her theory of reparative game design. I had a conversation with Kara in October 2021, and the following is an edited version of that conversation.

QUESTION: Your games engage with themes of sexuality, AI, robots, queer identity, mental health, and communication. Who do you imagine is the primary audience for your games? Or, in other words, who do you want playing your games?

KARA: In the process of “making,” we either do or do not have an imagined audience. And then when the thing we made comes out that audience might change! It might not be exactly who we imagine, and people may take it different ways. Coming from an art background and not a design background, I’m often not super focused on the audience. I am making games more as self-expression, communicating certain ideas, or exploring themes that I’m interested in. Rather than communicating something directly to an audience, it is more like I’m participating in an exploration of an idea, and then the audience is invited to explore that idea alongside me. But now that I’ve been making games for eight or nine years, I have a better sense of who I am interested in designing for, and mostly that would be people who experience life similar to how I experience life (or are interested in how I experience life). A lot of my work has been about psychosocial disability, designing in ways that might support psychosocial disability, and exploring different themes that are common to those of us who experience it. My work explores different emotions through games that are commonly not seen in video games.

QUESTION: I remember growing up and trying to explain to friends or family this “thing” I was experiencing, which I would later learn was depersonalization. I could never quite find the words to describe what it was like, what it felt like, or how anxiety-inducing it was. That was the inspiration for me to try to make a game about depersonalization: to try to convey what it felt like. And it failed miserably! My friends and family still didn’t understand! But I found that people online who had experienced depersonalization could really connect with what I was communicating. Have you ever had any experiences like that when making games?

KARA: No, because I haven’t really set out to demonstrate something. I feel like it is a goal that is so easy to fail. The goal of most of my pieces is to create an environment where people can reflect on their own feelings instead of demonstrating my personal experience with psychosocial disability. My goal is to invite people to reflect on their own experiences, their own emotions, and how they’re feeling in relation to whatever topic might be in my games.

QUESTION: In your experience, what does the act of making games offer that other endeavors do not?

KARA: That’s a question that I’ve reflected on so much because I feel that, in game studies, there’s a lot of conversation about legitimizing the practice of game design: what’s so special about it, why is it unique, and why do we all do it? We want to know the reason why we make games, and we want to feel like games are doing something special! But coming from my background in other arts, like theater and film, I don’t really know if there’s anything unique to the power of video games. I don’t believe that audiences can connect with them deeper than other media. People can connect so deeply to novels and film and TV shows and graphic novels! Even with the nonspecialness of video games, there is a specific culture around video games, like who’s interested in playing them, who isn’t interested in playing them, who is our fictionalized version of a gamer, and who is our fictionalized version of a game maker. And I think those are all important places for women, disabled people, and marginalized people in general to make interventions.

I am interested in computational technology, like computers and phones, and how we can create for them differently, like subverting expectations of what you can download on the app store, what you see on Steam, and what sort of emotional engagement can you get from these little computers in our pockets. My personal interest in games is more about how cultural expectations have limited these devices, what kind of games are made, and what sort of art we see or don’t see on our phones and computers.

QUESTION: Does the act of making games feel different from making other art?

KARA: It definitely feels different on my body, in like a physical sense. When I was making my first game, Medication Meditation (2014), which came out maybe eight or nine years ago, I had (and still have today) real back problems, neck problems, and chronic pain. It’s definitely not helped by sitting at a computer so much. I explored that through a few different art pieces. I worked with Rekha Ramachandran, Julia Gingrich, and Kathleen McLeod as part of the Haunts Collective, and we made this interactive installation that was broken down computer pieces and crafted pieces. We would craft objects, break down computers, and hang them in a row. Like on one side there was the frame of a keyboard from a broken computer and the other side was a crafted version of the keyboard. And we were looking at the history of technology and its connection to crafting and women’s work. Crafting often means sitting and doing repetitive motions, but it is often with other people in a community and feeling the sensation of it, whereas being on the computer means often zoning out and then snapping back like three hours later to find my body in pain. To me that is a huge difference, and it may be overlooked in how we think differently about the making of different media, especially how a screen can suck you in.

QUESTION: There has been a lot of criticism of what some call “empathy games,” even from those games’ own creators. Do you feel that games exploring queer identity or disabled identity can help players of various backgrounds empathize with queer and disabled folk?

KARA: I think they probably can create empathy, but then the important questions really are “What is empathy?” and “What is its social use?” and “What results does it have in the world?” Lauren Berlant edited a book called Compassion, and it provides a history of the term “empathy,” where it came from, its associations with compassion, and what it can do for social justice. Maybe an art piece can create empathy for another human being, but then what happens from there? I think the more important question is not if games can create empathy but what happens with that feeling. And I think often nothing happens. Some people will be like, “Oh, good for me! I felt empathy! This is some personal growth!” And that’s fine, but will it translate to the change needed to support the lives of the people who made those games? In my work on psychosocial disability, I’m not so interested in focusing on a nondisabled audience. I’m much more interested in creating spaces for people to engage in what many psychosocially disabled people need: making space for reflection and the creation of radical acceptance. The idea that empathy will somehow foster social change through nondisabled people orients nondisabled people as the agents of change. But the truth is disabled people are the ones who have historically pushed for all the social change that has happened so far.