In a game industry permeated by katanas, explosions, and big-freaking-guns, Katamari Damacy stands apart as a unique creation. The uniqueness, however, is somewhat difficult to comprehend. Bluntly, it is a very strange game, filled with color and personality. The primary mission is to roll up clutter, litter, people, rainbows—pretty much everything—into giant, amalgamate balls (katamaris) that are supposed to replace the constellations that the King of All Cosmos accidentally knocked out of the sky while under a drunken stupor. While the game certainly captures the aesthetic of “odd,” what kind of appeal does it provide? Is it a masculine game, a feminine game, or an androgynous game?
Fron et al. in the essay “The Hegemony of Play” and Fullerton et al. in the essay “A Game of One’s Own” both criticize the game industry for its male-oriented mechanics in video games, such as violence, warfare, and aggressive competition. Jenkins, in his essay “Complete Freedom of Movement,” reiterates these characteristics as typical of “boy culture.” Though Jenkins does not portray these characteristics as negative (indeed, they are all typical and natural), all three essays agree that they presume an unnecessary dominance of the industry that precludes feminine or cross-gender games. Katamari Damacy manages to avoid many, but not all of these male-centric pitfalls. It is not an action-puzzle game, not a wargame, there are no guns, no explosions, no death (at least not explicitly), and there is no fervent spirit of rivalry and competition (it is mostly single-player, and though 2 players can compete to create the largest katamari, this is not the main feature of the game). In these respects, Damacy manages to escape many of the masculine “ideals” that permeate other games and instead become something new and different.
The game does contain violence (as the katamari grows, it can eventually roll up living beings, including people), but this is more a comic side-effect of the massive, rolling sticky ball. Furthermore, there is no blood and the people themselves are abstract and polygonal. The game itself is rated E for “mild fantasy violence,” reflecting the light-hearted mood of the action involved. While the game veers close to other male-oriented pitfalls outlined by Fullerton et al., such as conquest, danger, and destruction, it manages to avert most of them by its goofy and humorous attitude. The humor, combined with wonky music and cheery color palette (which subverts one of Fullerton et al.’s other complaints about the dreary, monotone appearance of male games), softens the violence and makes Damacy silly and fun—both universal ideals. Also, while at a glance the game may seem destructive, this attribute is also subverted by the game’s narrative, which explains that the giant balls the player makes are being used to recreate the moon and stars. In this way, the game becomes creative instead of destructive, an attribute that is further enhanced by the game, which tracks the types of objects that compose the player’s katamari. The player has control over what they choose to roll up, and the game recognizes this by naming the end product based on its composition.
So Damacy seems to depart drastically from typical male games, but in what direction has it departed? Is it feminine or androgynous? While the game is colorful, it certainly isn’t “pink” (Fullerton et al.’s term for exclusively female games). In some ways, there is the challenge of skill, the achievement driven aspect (i.e. make a katamari that is x big), and the “spatial rotation” puzzles mentioned by Fullerton et al. (in this case, a dual analog stick control system) that all appeal to males. Contrarily, there is appeal to females in many of the ways outlined by Jenkins, such as a sense of exploration as the player wanders through spaces that vary in size from tabletops to continents, or the sense of investigation and discovery of new fun objects that are scattered about, just waiting to be added to the katamari. However, Damacy misses out on other female-preferable characteristics mentioned by Jenkins, such as an emphasis on emotions or interior worlds. Brenda Laurel, in her book Utopian Entrepreneur, adds even more characteristics that Damacy fails to embrace. Using her experimental game project Purple Moon as a case study, Laurel emphasizes the importance of narrative, backstory, relationships, storytelling, and the presence of values. All of these ideals are practically absent from Damacy. One might imagine that there is the value of “don’t pollute” (because of the rampant litter the players gathers up in the Damacy world) or the relationship between the Prince (the player) and his father the King of All Cosmos, but both of these are a stretch and neither is very substantial.
While the attributes mentioned by Laurel and Jenkins are good, they are not for all games. Not every game needs depth of character or narrative (think of Elektroplankton, for instance, or Spore). Damacy thrives on its quirkiness and its humor, and it does so with great success. The game seeks to create a very “silly” aesthetic, and it embraces that silliness in all of its design decisions, from concept to character design to music. Because of this, it ultimately achieves an androgynous type of fun. The main character is a “prince,” but he is represented in such a simple, abstract, and silly manner that his gender is practically meaningless (furthermore, the poor fellow is only 10 cm tall, so you don’t see much of him anyway—which is in itself a subversion of the testosterone-pumped masculine stereotype). Therefore, while it does not perfectly meet the gaming urges of both sides, Katamari Damacy manages to fall somewhere in the middle of the gender spectrum, becoming a game that provides something fun to anyone who experiences it.
--Daniel
Works Cited:Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (aka Ludica) "The Hegemony of Play." In Situated Play: Proceedings of Digital Games Research Association 2007 Conference. Tokyo, Japan, September 2007.
Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (aka Ludica) (2007). "A Game Of Ones Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Game Space." In Proceedings, Digital Arts & Culture 2007, Perth, Australia, September 2007.
Jenkins, Henry. "Complete Freedom of Movement" (1998) in Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (2005). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Laurel, Brenda. (2001). Utopian Entrepreneur. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001
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