My Approach to Social Inequality in Northanger Abbey: The Game

Tags: posts, from dreamwidth, northanger abbey, my games,

This post goes into the approach I took when creating a queer, diverse visual novel adaptation of Jane Austen's 19th century novel Northanger Abbey, and how players responded. Partly because I think other people might find it interesting or useful, and partly to be able to link back to extra context when I discuss the game I'm currently developing, which is based on Pride and Prejudice.

These novels are set in early 19th century England, which was not a great time to be anything but a rich straight white healthy upper class Englishman. The plots directly explore and critique the gender and class attitudes of the upper classes, but at most obliquely touch on anything to do with ethnicity or disability and don't acknowledge queerness at all. Her characters are all straight, cis, and white, and the main characters all able-bodied and upper class.

Which was understandable for the time! But I'd like to do better, especially since I add same sex romances, so queerness is baked in. At the same time, I don't want to be too ahistorical, or change the text so much it becomes unrecognisable.

Northanger Abbey Pride or Prejudice Demo Some questions about the novel I found myself pondering, that then inspired me to create the game:

1. How would things have played out if the (very naive) protagonist had been more sensible?
2. What if she had fallen for the love interest's sister?
3. What would this story have looked like if the protagonist was a man, but otherwise similar? Would the male love interest have still been interested, and how would that have played out within the social limits of the time?

And for my answers to feel satisfying, I needed to feel like my game was still basically working with the characters and setting of the novel.

So my goal was to as much as possible preserve the original text, both the literal words and things like characterisation and themes, and then to expand on it in an organic way that didn't feel tacked on or jarring. I lightly modernised and condensed the text, removed anything I felt would be too confusing or offensive to a modern audience, and added some diversity. I also added options to play as a different gender to the original protagonist and make different choices etc. But overall my goal was adaption and expansion, not subversion.

When making changes, I asked myself: does this undermine the original story or add to it? Will this improve player's enjoyment and understanding, or detract from it? Sometimes, there was no clear best approach and I had to decide how to balance competing goals.

Also, it's hard to articulate, but: the novel itself is very aware of being a romantic novel. It parodies the tropes of gothic romances, while also pushing back against the moral panic and disdain common towards female novel readers at the time. In turn, my game is aware of being a romance game, and a modern, diverse adaptation of a 19th century novel. There's a few meta-ish jokes about this in the narration, and the game is overall partly intended as an implicit defense of players creating and enjoying romance on our own terms.

What I did

I added more diversity to the cast: the protagonist is of Chinese descent, while the sibling love interests Henry and Eleanor are dark skinned and have a white father and Indian mother. Also, both siblings are explicitly bisexual, one of them uses a wheelchair, and the other is trans. The protagonist's pronouns and presentation are decided by the player, but not their base appearance or name. I did historical research and tried as much to to create characters and dialogue that might have been unusual for the time but not impossible, and rooted as much as possible in the text. For example, the protagonist is described in the novel as having long black hair, while Henry is described as having brown skin and dark colouring. Austen surely didn't intend for that to describe people of Chinese and Indian descent, but it's consistent with the text as written. Making Henry a wheelchair user does contradict the text, but I really wanted to, so ;)

The original story has a female protagonist, Catherine, who encounters a lot of sexism, directed at her and otherwise. When playing a woman this sexism occurs unchanged. When the player character is not a woman (or not perceived as one) the context changes: they are dismissed because of their youth instead of their gender, sexism is directed at women in general but not them, etc.

The basic plot of the book is luckily in some ways relatively genderless: Catherine is a young member of the lower gentry who is invited to hang out with the fashionable set by a rich family friend. She is mistaken for being rich herself, and so two different parents throw their son and daughter at her to be husband and friend respectively. Switching Catherine to Christopher changes which of each brother/sister pair he is expected to dance with and marry, but the overall dynamic remains similar. It's much the same with a non-binary or crossdressing protagonist. You lose some of the specific commentary Austen was making about the experiences of young women, but you still see how gender roles affect the characters, and I think the resulting story still works. You can still see some signs that the protagonist was originally a woman, but hopefully not enough to throw people out of the story.

I added the option to flip everyone's gender and play a version of the story set in a matriarchy.

I made it very slightly more diverse with respect to class: at one point you can talk to a servant, though this was mostly intended as a plot hook for an extra route I never finished. But for the most part the story is too deeply entrenched in the lives of the upper classes to include other perspectives without making it an entirely different story, and that's not the kind of adaptation I was doing.

With race and disability, since there were no overt mentions in the book to deal with, I glossed over the prejudices of the time entirely. The fact that one of the characters uses a wheelchair is not mentioned explicitly at all outside of optional image descriptions. The family background and colouring of the POC characters come up occasionally but never in a negative way. In my head, the prejudices of the time do exist in the world of the story, we just happen never to encounter them. It helps that the POC/disabled characters are seen as rich and powerful, so anyone having prejudiced thoughts would plausibly keep it to themselves. But if a player wants to imagine racism and ableism don't exist in the setting (as I know many people prefer), there's nothing to overtly contradict that.

I didn't change the fact all the characters appear to live fairly typical upper class English lives, including a few Church of England priests. There's no way to play as, say, a muslim character in a head-scarf.

The novel has a repeated theme of contrasting mundane English life with the trashy thrillers the protagonist reads, which are set in an exotified Europe. I toned down anything that felt too xenophobic but otherwise left it the same.

With queer issues, I took an in-between approach: The bi and trans characters are closeted, and worried that those they come out to might react badly, but all the on-screen conversations we see about it are very supportive. In my initial draft, you had to publicly present as a man and only dance with women, or vice versa, but a friend persuaded me let you present in an androgynous way and dance with anyone, with those watching assuming you are the opposite gender to whoever you dance with. If you pick this option, everyone you talk to rolls with your they/them pronouns etc but some implicitly find it odd. I see transphobia and homophobia as closely connected to sexism, so if I'd glossed over them entirely the world would feel too inconsistent to me. Part of me wanted to make the homophobia and transphobia even more overt, but I knew this would undermine a lot of people's enjoyment.

Attitudes to gender and sexuality in 19th century England were very different to now, with no real concept of a queer identity. I decided it would be much more enjoyable for not only players but myself to have all the queer character's self-concepts and descriptions line up approximately with various modern queer identities, but I thought of it as them just happening to have independently ended up thinking of themselves that way, instead of it being How Queerness Has Always Worked. For example: the trans woman character Eleanor is described as a woman whose parents initially thought of her as male. My understanding is that the vast majority of feminine presenting amab people in that era saw themselves as men, just very feminine ones, and would have found the idea that an amab person could be anything but a man hard to understand. But there were some who thought of themselves as women, and Eleanor is one of them, because I couldn't think of any way to be more historically typical that wouldn't feel invalidating to trans women players. I do feel a bit bad for overall erasing the more typical experiences of our queer forebears, but a historically accurate exploration of the 19th century queer (is that even the right word??) experience is beyond the scope of the game and my abilities as a writer.

How people reacted

The reaction to the game's approach has overall been very positive, but I have had some negative feedback.

People seemed mostly ok with the existence of sexism etc in principle, but not how it affected their character.

A few people felt sad that they couldn't openly dance with people of the same gender without cross-dressing and lying. There were a bunch of forms of gender expression I didn't think of and excluded without even realising, like playing a woman in a suit. I eventually added the option to remove gender presentation based restrictions on who you can dance with and legally marry, but couldn't figure out any way to easily remove the other restrictions without effectively rewriting a whole new version of the game with no sexism, or adding a billion different little checks taking into account every possible combo of presentation/pronouns etc. As it was, the code to take into account what options are available got very complicated and fiddly.

I haven't gotten any significant feedback on the approach to disability, or how I write the trans characters other than the protagonist. The general vibe about them is positive.

Nobody but me seemed very excited about the genderflip option.

I had some mixed reactions to the depiction of race: in Welcome to Playing the 18th Century! Critical Prof says some diversity is better than the usual nothing you see in this genre, but they felt the characters' ethnicities were too vague and easy to miss. I added a couple more brief but unambiguous references to their ethnicities. But the (possible) existence of racism is intended to be ambiguous, and that choice limited how much I could talk about culture and ethnicity in depth. I feel like there has to be some better way for me to approach this but am still pondering what.

I haven't seen anyone complain that the game isn't historically accurate enough. Which doesn't surprise me: afaict most people into stories set in this era prefer things to be less historically accurate than suits my personal tastes, not more. And I suspect anyone who's more of a stickler for that sort of thing than me took one look at the game and realised they would either have to suck it up or not play.

So! That's how things seem to me as a developer. If you have questions, or a different perspective on the game or related topics, I'd love to hear from you!

I'm currently working on a post about how I'm applying what I learned from Northanger Abbey to Pride or Prejudice, and the things I'm still not sure how to approach. But if you have feedback on the demo I'd love to hear it!