nina freeman
DON’T EXPECT TO FIND GUNS OR CAR-RACING APES IN NINA FREEMAN’S VIDEO GAMES.
Nina Freeman never expected to end up writing video games. “I’ve always loved playing games and played a lot through school, but in undergrad college I was super-focused on poetry,” she says. However, the shift from studying literature to designing and writing games was not so much a leap from one to the other as a collision of the two. “I’ve always written personal stories, so I thought it would be the natural thing to work on in games,” she says. The result is a collection of deeply personal video games exploring sex, intimacy, and the sometimes emotional clusterfuck that is being a young woman.
The catalyst for Nina’s gear change was a spell of post-college uncertainty. Having finished her studies, she started making friends with some New York developers, accompanying them to ‘game jams’ (think musical jam sessions, but for making video games). These new pals introduced her to indie titles such as Gone Home and Kentucky Route Zero – exploration games that focus heavily on story and character development. For Nina, this sparked a revelation. “I was like, ‘Oh, these smaller games kind of feel like what I’ve been doing with poetry, so maybe I can do this kind of storytelling!’ I was so excited by the idea.” She began working with friends to make games in what’s become her signature style: unflinching snapshots of young women’s lived experiences, many of which draw directly from her own. “I care a lot about showing women’s stories as they are,” she says. “There aren’t many games in the mainstream that show sex and intimacy honestly. I do this because it’s been part of my practice for so long, but I also feel good about contributing to a body of work that's really important.” And Nina has contributed a helluva lot, creating projects such as Freshman Year (all about being ditched by a friend at a college bar); Lost Memories Dot Net (exploring teenage crushes while building a teenage girl’s blog); and Cibele (a look at love and sex online, drawing from Nina’s personal archive of photographs, poetry and blog posts). The games bring up big, real and familiar feelings, while also allowing both the player and character a kind of agency that’s tough to achieve through other creative mediums.
“I think games are pretty close to theatre, in that they help the player get into character and read between the lines by using systems,” Nina says. “It’s something poetry can’t really do.” While her focus is primarily on telling good stories, Nina is aware of the cultural lens through which her work is being played. Her references to early 2000s internet culture – anime fanpages, personal websites, chatrooms and blogs – have been criticised by some, despite the fact nearly everyone, from movie studios to console companies, seems to be riding a nostalgia wave these days. “A lot of the dismissal of nostalgic things like old anime, Neopets or Gaia Online is because it’s a woman’s experience – it’s viewed as silly little kid stuff that’s not really that important,” she says. “Funny that for some people the nostalgic references in my work devalue the more universal experiences, like having a middle school crush, all because it’s told in a woman’s space.”
Even in the face of this weird, skewed scrutiny, Nina continues to fill her stories with real-world details, and to create projects with a strong narrative focus. In fact, she now works for The Fullbright Company, who created Gone Home – the game that kicked this whole journey off. “It made perfect sense for me to go to Fullbright,” she says. “It’s a studio that does stuff I’m interested in as a writer, telling stories about real people and not shying away from intimate life stuff. Also, more than half the company are women, so that’s bad-arse.”