Norms

Description

This game was created as part of the Gender Game Jam.

Inspired by an article on speedrunning about how challenging rules helped Madison Schmalzer realise their true gender identity, we created a platformer game where you create the rules, and you can use these generated rules to play a single stage however you want. This is a twist on more traditional games (like Mario Maker) where you get to change the level but not the rules.

Around the map there are also some extras you can find by exploring, outside of the main goal. We hope this helps encourage people to find their own joy in the game. Perhaps finding all the hidden scenery items, perhaps speed, perhaps managing to actually complete the level with a really hard settings configuration.

Once you complete the level, you get a "Norm Code" so you can share the settings that you found particularly interesting to others, helping people challenge their own norms and see how you like to experience the game.

Example Codes

Here’s a few “Norm Codes” that we found particularly interesting:

• AgAAAA==AADAQA==AABAQQ==AAA0Qg==AwAAAA==AwAAAA==AwAAAA==
  • Incredibly low gravity and all of your abilities are teleportation, letting you get to the goal pretty quickly if you know the stage, but surprisingly frustrating if you don’t!
• DAAAAA==AACgQQ==AABAQQ==AAA0Qg==AwAAAA==AAAAAA==AQAAAA==
  • Moon-like gravity but watch out, the floor is slippery too because you run way faster, and to make things worse, the gravity’s at an angle!

We hope you have lots of fun challenging your norms and sharing them with friends! Please feel free to share codes in the comments!

Future Work

This is an early prototype of the game, but here are some things we'd like to add given more time:

• more abilities to add more variety to different norm settings
• a more user friendly settings UI
• more interactable items
• more interesting scenery decorations and potentially interactable/collectible scenery, to encourage exploration outside of the main goal
• Customisable graphics (including character colour, theme of the map, etc.)
• Potentially different levels or some additional narrative/ gameplay to more strongly link to themes of gender in a less abstract sense
• Support modding, for example players being able to write code to create their own abilities
• Bug fixes (though we think some bugs help emulate the experience, as exploiting bugs is common in certain types of speed running!)

How To Play

1. Download the .zip file
2. Unzip but make sure you keep all the files together
3. To play the game, open Norms.exe

Credits

During the creation of this work, we used these assets (which are free to use in commercial/ non-commercial projects)

• Cousine Font, Google Fonts
• Kenney.nl Pixel Platformer assets (for reference when creating new assets)

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Thank you for checking out our game!

Taketomo, MrUnsmiley7, Toastie37