The female game designers fighting back on abortion rights

Post origi­nal publis­hed in the guar­dian by Laura Hudson

Through video games, live-action role-playing games and inter­ac­tive docu­men­ta­ries, deve­lo­pers are challen­ging the conver­sa­tion around repro­duc­tive rights

Joanne-Aśka Popińska, a Polish woman living in Canada, has crea­ted a virtual reality expe­ri­ence called The Choice.

The year is 1972. You’re part of an under­ground network of femi­nists in Chicago that provide ille­gal (at the time) abor­tion servi­ces to vulne­ra­ble, preg­nant people with few opti­ons. Despite the risk of impri­son­ment, and the ways that your perso­nal expe­ri­en­ces may not always perfectly align with your acti­vism, you persist.

It’s emoti­o­nally compli­ca­ted. It’s poli­ti­cally fraught. It’s a live-action role­playing game by Jon Cole and Kelley Vanda called The Abor­ti­o­nists, which requi­res three players, one faci­li­ta­tor, six hours and a willing­ness to dig deep into the pain­ful history of repro­duc­tive rights in the United States. That history has terrifying rele­vance in 2019, as nume­rous states pass laws that put their resi­dents in a reality where abor­tion is func­ti­o­nally ille­gal. Based on the real-life work of a 1970s acti­vist group called Jane, it challen­ges its parti­ci­pants to think about the “inter­nal lands­ca­pes” of its players, and how they deal with the larger poli­ti­cal and perso­nal lands­cape of their world.

As Alabama, Geor­gia, Kentucky, Missis­sippi and Ohio work to reverse hard-won repro­duc­tive rights with “fetal heart­beat” bills and poten­tial 99-year senten­ces for perfor­ming abor­ti­ons, game desig­ners in the United States – and around the world – are crea­ting inter­ac­tive expe­ri­en­ces that challenge the simplis­tic ways that many people think about abor­tion, and the blunt, often igno­rant cruelty of the laws that poli­ti­ci­ans have draf­ted around their cons­ti­tu­ents’ bodies.

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 Trap­ped began as a card game and aims to make players unders­tand the prac­ti­cal reali­ties of secu­ring an abor­tion.

Trap­ped began as a card game, deve­lo­ped at Women’s Health Speci­a­lists in Cali­for­nia, and expan­ded upon later by parti­ci­pants in the Abor­tion Access Hackat­hon. It exists now as a free brow­ser game, and its goal is simple: to make players unders­tand the prac­ti­cal reali­ties of how diffi­cult it can be to get an abor­tion, parti­cu­larly when econo­mic, poli­ti­cal and cultu­ral factors get in the way.

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Sure, you’ve made the deci­sion that an abor­tion is the only sensi­ble choice for you, but how far away is your nearest clinic? What compli­ca­ti­ons will it create with your job? How much will it cost? What inten­ti­o­nally prohi­bi­tive rules – such as “TRAP” laws, which create arbi­trary and medi­cally unne­ces­sary rules to hams­tring abor­tion provi­ders – mean that clinics can’t even func­tion in your state? In Trap­ped, you wake up in a randomly gene­ra­ted scena­rio where you want to end your preg­nancy and must nego­ti­ate the Kafka­es­que series of rules and fees that accrue.

“I like the idea that you don’t get to control the situ­a­tion that comes at you, ” says Katrina Cantrell, who helped deve­lop the online version via the Abor­tion Access Hackat­hon. “I want people to unders­tand the rela­ti­ons­hip of time and money, and how these two vari­a­bles act on each other. This is why delays in care exist.”

In Choice: Texas, a game that uses the inter­ac­tive fiction tool of Twine to tell its story, you’re also asked to live out a vari­ety of scena­rios through the eyes of five women who disco­ver that they’re preg­nant. They come from diffe­rent econo­mic and voca­ti­o­nal back­grounds; they are diffe­rent ages and races. Each of them runs into diffe­rent compli­ca­ti­ons in Texas, a state where legis­la­tors have acti­vely worked to reduce the opti­ons around repro­duc­tive health­care – parti­cu­larly for the poor and working class.

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 Choice: Texas presents scena­rios through the eyes of five preg­nant women.

Crea­ted by game deve­lo­per and histo­rian Carly Kocu­rek and writer and acti­vist Ally­son Whip­ple, it forces you to decide what you really want, what you are willing to sacri­fice, and what it will mean for your future. Can you afford to have an abor­tion – or afford not to do it? Will your part­ner be suppor­tive? It doesn’t feel easy, any way you play it.

For Polish game desig­ner Alek­san­dra Jarosz, the draco­nian 2016 poli­ti­cal effort to further restrict abor­tion laws in Poland – where abor­tion is alre­ady largely ille­gal outside of excep­ti­ons for rape, incest and fetal abnor­ma­lity – spur­red her to take action. The propo­sed legis­la­tion was spear­he­a­ded by Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of the Law and Justice party, who said it was his goal “to make cases of even very diffi­cult preg­nan­cies, when the child is doomed to die because it is seve­rely defor­med, finish with birth, so that the child can be bapti­sed, buried, given a name.”

Even in the predo­mi­nantly Catho­lic country, this move was a bridge too far. It inspi­red tens of thou­sands of citi­zens to dress in black and take to the stre­ets as well as a strike by women. Days after what was later called the Black Protest, the propo­sed bill was voted down, but many pro-choice acti­vists in Poland consi­de­red it a wake-up call.

As protes­ters marched in the stre­ets, Jarosz – along with Thomas Feicht­meir, Michael Hartinge, and Sebas­tian Merk – crea­ted Fantas­tic Fetus: a game that asks you to imagine being preg­nant in a world where Kaczyńs­ki’s propo­si­ti­ons were law. At first glance, Fantas­tic Fetus looks like a Tama­got­chi-style preg­nancy simu­la­tion filte­red through pixe­la­ted grap­hics, where you manage the health, hunger and emoti­o­nal state of your charac­ter through a wanted preg­nancy.

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 Women take to the stre­ets in Warsaw in March 2018 as part of the Black Protest move­ment against toug­her anti-abor­tion legis­la­tion. Photo­graph: Marcin Obara/EPA

As the months pass, you imagine your child’s future: what he or she will look like, who they might become. But when the baby is born, you disco­ver that it had a fatal gene­tic abnor­ma­lity and no chance of survi­val. Your dreams are shat­te­red, and the reve­la­tion is made more terri­ble by the fact that the state denied you the rele­vant medi­cal infor­ma­tion to make a diffe­rent choice about your preg­nancy that might have abbre­vi­a­ted your suffe­ring or given you any sense of control.

Jarosz says the game, and the deci­sion to include stark images of fetal abnor­ma­lity, were inspi­red by a Catho­lic woman in Poland whose doctor convin­ced her not to termi­nate a preg­nancy despite severe birth defects, falsely promi­sing that it could be addres­sed through surgery later. After giving birth and watching her child suffer for months in a hospice and ulti­ma­tely die, Jarosz says the woman wanted to show a picture of her baby “to everyone who thinks that abor­tion, in any case, is bad”.

Actu­ally seeing the grim reality of a doomed preg­nancy can break through people’s precon­cep­ti­ons and assump­ti­ons, even when they oppose abor­tion, says Jarosz. “After the ending people never just get up and walk away, they always want to stay for a moment think and talk. That is the biggest award we can get.”

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 Fantas­tic Fetus asks you to imagine being preg­nant in a world where Kaczyńs­ki’s propo­sed anti-abor­tion bill had been made law. Photo­graph: Fantas­tic Humans

Joanne-Aśka Popińska, a Polish woman living in Canada, was simi­larly inspi­red by the Black Protest to deve­lop a virtual reality expe­ri­ence called The Choice where parti­ci­pants are faced with first-person accounts of real people who have had abor­ti­ons, liste­ning to their stories about how they felt.

Rather than thin­king of abor­tion as an abstract poli­ti­cal posi­tion, The Choice asks you to look directly into the human faces of people who have faced an unwan­ted preg­nancy. She descri­bes a parti­cu­larly impact­ful play­test of The Choice with a deve­lo­per who had anti-abor­tion poli­ti­cal leanings, and then took off the head­set saying, “Congra­tu­la­ti­ons on doing somet­hing impor­tant … maybe I shouldn’t be so sure.”

Asking people to think, to empat­hise, to recon­si­der what it means to have – or not have – an abor­tion in ways that go beyond poli­ti­cal plati­tu­des is a through­line for this wave of games about repro­duc­tive rights. In Child­free, a live-action role-playing game crea­ted by Axelle Caze­neuve, seven parti­ci­pants act out a deci­sion about whet­her or not to termi­nate a preg­nancy. This game takes place enti­rely within the mind of a ficti­o­nal person whose concerns and conflicts are repre­sen­ted by all of the players collec­ti­vely.

The faci­li­ta­tor takes on the role of the preg­nant person, sitting in a spot­light, while three people in the shadows around them repre­sent distinct elements aspects of “self” (their present situ­a­tion, their dreams, and their needs) and three others repre­sent elements of “soci­ety” (mora­lity, the law, and soci­e­tal expec­ta­ti­ons of mater­nity). The norms invol­ved do not need to resem­ble any parti­cu­lar soci­ety, or any histo­ri­cal one, and can even “become science-fiction” if the players choose.

After answe­ring three rounds of ques­ti­ons by other players to esta­blish their roles, the six elements of the faci­li­ta­tor’s mind can step into the light to either be invi­ted forward to speak or be refu­sed. At the end of the game, the faci­li­ta­tor weighs all the compli­ca­ted and perso­nal factors, and announ­ces their deci­sion. It’s an enga­ging, emoti­o­nally complex look at the knot of inter­nal and exter­nal forces that surround deci­si­ons about termi­na­tion. It expli­citly insists that while conti­nuing a preg­nancy is a perfectly valid choice and that people’s expe­ri­en­ces vary wildly, ending a preg­nancy does not have to be inhe­rently trau­ma­tic.

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 Viewers of The Choice, a VR docu­men­tary, hear stories from people who have chosen to have an abor­tion.

For Caze­neuve, moti­va­tion came from her own expe­ri­ence. When she disco­ve­red that she was preg­nant in early 2011, due to a problem with her IUD, she knew imme­di­a­tely that she wanted an abor­tion. Although she had never wanted to be a parent, she had always feared that she “wouldn’t have ‘the strength’ to abort” if she expe­ri­en­ced an acci­den­tal preg­nancy. When confron­ted with the situ­a­tion, howe­ver, her deci­sion was clear.

“When I became preg­nant, I reali­sed that I, in fact, didn’t have to feel bad about choo­sing an abor­tion, ” says Caze­neuve. “That it was a part of a contra­cep­tive process, the last resort, the step you wish you wouldn’t have to take, but is here anyway, just in case all the rest fails.”

Despite living in France, where it is rela­ti­vely easy to get an abor­tion compa­red with many other coun­tries, she descri­bes her preg­nancy as “an eye-opening expe­ri­ence”.

She began working on a live-action role-playing game that reflec­ted a vari­ety of expe­ri­en­ces around abor­tion, but pivo­ted to crea­ting Child­free when she came across two other Larps that weren’t expli­citly anti-abor­tion but used “the future of the poten­tial child” as narra­tive moti­va­tion. “This felt deeply wrong to me, ” says Caze­neuve. What matte­red more, she felt, what needed to be cente­red and given more weight, was not the “poten­tial” of an embyro but the life of the human being carrying it. “This is a huma­nist issue. Live-action role-playing, as a medium that fosters agency among its players, is a tool we can use to make people more deeply aware of that, ” says Caze­neuve. “Unlike thea­tre, Larp main­tains the agency of the subject – the player playing the preg­nant person – and that was crucial to unders­tand the topic.”

For many people making games that address repro­duc­tive rights, the goal is not to force players to accept a single pers­pec­tive or conclu­sion, but to contend with the nume­rous tangi­ble, perso­nal expe­ri­en­ces of people dealing with unin­ten­ded preg­nan­cies. Most of all, they ask players to consi­der the very real human beings trying to make diffi­cult deci­si­ons about abor­tion. These people are often erased by simplis­tic, judg­men­tal poli­ti­cal stan­ces – or legally preven­ted from making those deci­si­ons alto­get­her.

“What I aim for is just making people more aware of how we receive and process norms, and how deeply we are affec­ted by them, ” says Caze­neuve. “I also aim to show that they always have a choice, even when everyt­hing seems to be against them.”