Harmonix on gender, self-expression in Dance Central
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Leigh Alexander, for Gamasutra, talking with project director for Dance Central Matt Boch.
The Dance Central games offer the player the chance to select an on-screen avatar that feeds players’ performance back to them, versus a literal representation of the player’s own self on screen. “We implicate the players’ identity in their body in a novel way, in an unfamiliar way, and I think a lot of that experience is what’s so much fun about Dance Central,” explains Boch.
“But the risk there is you can put people in situations where you might be giving them instructions or content that is unfamiliar to them, or uncomfortable for them, or somehow inconsistent with their own notion of their identities.”
In the early days of prototyping Dance Central, Boch noticed some players hesitating on dance moves that felt “sexy” or “hip-focused”, or traditionally feminine — not only male players, but female participants who seemed to feel uncomfortable expressing themselves in that particular way. The design challenge was to find a way to allow players to perform the dance moves without requiring them to undertake certain subtleties that might be at odds with a person’s sense of self.
A Harvard-educated artist, Boch has long believed that gender is performance. “I myself consider myself a queer man, and I was not about to sit by… in a situation where only these characters can play those songs, or — god forbid — have male-female designations for each piece of content,” he explains.
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“It’s sad to me to think that we’re the entertainment industry, and we’re the most technologically advanced of all the entertainment industries, and yet we seem to be lacking in a social progressivism that matches our technological progressivism,” Boch reflects. “I want to turn that around.”
