Happy Pride! Choice of Games is proud to be gender-inclusive and LGBTQ+-affirming all year round, but during the month of June, we’re featuring writers whose work connects especially closely with those themes.

Today we’re sitting down with Harris Powell-Smith, author of five titles for Choice of Games, including the hit Crème de la Crème series.

The Crème de la Crème series plays with a setting that is traditionally single-gender – boarding school – but that in your world is gender-inclusive. Can you talk about that journey and how you arrived at the gender dynamics that you did for your gameworld?

Back when I was first figuring out the game, I considered creating a setting in which the player’s choice of gender affected the wider cultural setting. In an early CoG game, Choice of Broadsides, you can play as a male sea captain fighting while women aren’t involved with warfare, or as a female captain while men remain on shore. So a player’s choice of gender would shift the setting: if they played as a male student going to Gallatin, it would be a boarding school for boys, who were socially expected to conform to passive, decorative etiquette rules.

In the end I decided to go for a different approach because I didn’t feel confident in handling characters outside a male/female gender binary, or other non-cis characters in such a setting. Instead I embraced high social stakes unrelated to gender and orientation.

Once I decided to remove sexism, homophobia, and transphobia from the equation, it was clear to me that societal mores would present differently than they do in our world – so, for example, inheritance of titles, property, and wealth is very important in these societies, but genetic bloodline is less of a concern than ensuring you can trace your family’s title back for at least a couple of centuries. And some cultures in the setting include legal polyamorous marriages while others don’t, and so on.

All of this doesn’t mean the games are free of injustice! Inequality and unfairness of various kinds is rife in the Creme de la Creme universe, and it’s the player’s choice how they want to engage with that, which perspectives they sympathise with, and in what directions they want to shift their surroundings. The game world is a place where queer and non-queer characters alike can have plenty of dark-academia social and romantic drama that’s much more about their place in the world, personality clashes, romantic tastes, and the ever-present looming factors of class, wealth and reputation.

You’ve done a lot of excellent work in community building through your “IF Seal” Q&A column, moderation on the ChoiceScript forum, and fostering an active fan community. What kind of reader interactions are your favorites? Can you talk about a fan interaction that surprised you?

Thank you so much! IF Seal is on hiatus at the moment, but I hope the archives are useful for people with similar problems coming up. I’m planning to bring it back when things are a little less hectic!

I love hearing what players have to say about my games, and how they feel about their experiences playing. Sometimes it opens my eyes to perspectives I hadn’t considered but once I see it, it feels entirely intuitive.

Something really special is when fans are inspired by my work to write their own stories or games. I absolutely love hearing that and feel really fortunate whenever it happens.

I’ve also been incredibly touched and delighted when I’ve heard that something I wrote helped someone realise an aspect of their identity, or it helped them through a real-life experience. Someone told me that playing Honor Bound helped them while they were recovering from a hospital visit and that absolutely blew me away.

One of the recent posts on your wonderfully informative blog is about writing trans characters. Who are some authors of interactive or noninteractive fiction that you think are doing especially good work in that area?

I could spend days chatting away about trans characters but here is a small selection of authors’ work I’ve enjoyed that show trans characters, queer cultures, and trans people interacting with the setting they’re written in:

• Maya Deane – Wrath Goddess Sing is an excellent queer and trans Trojan War retelling
  
• Isaac Fellman – I’ve greatly enjoyed Dead Collections, an urban fantasy about vampires, and Notes from a Regicide, a science fantasy family saga; the characters feel very grounded both in their transness while the speculative elements tie in with it really well
  
• Athar Fikry – I really enjoy how this author’s worldbuilding interacts with queerness and transness around relationships, bodies, and destiny. In particular An Imp and an Imposter feels like a very queer and trans story to me, with reclamation of physicality and magical power
  
• Rien Gray – a brilliantly evocative writer whose exploration of trans characters in queernormative cultures (the Out of True sapphic Arthuriana series) as well as grimmer settings (The Scales of Seduction, a Medusa retelling; the Fatal Fidelity noir/romantic suspense series) are exemplary
  
• May Peterson – the Sacred Dark fantasy series is a great example of queer and trans characters surviving, thriving, and finding community and connection in repressive settings while having very dramatic fantasy adventures
  
• Malin Rydén – in the Fallen Hero IF series, the journey of the former-superhero clawing for agency and bodily autonomy resonates strongly through a trans lens

We’re asking all of our authors this: How has your representation of LGBTQ+ themes in your writing evolved over the course of your career?

Lately I’m exploring writing LGBTQ+ themes with more specificity. When I first started writing queernormative settings I wanted queer characters and families to feel “unmarked” rather than cis and straight characters being the norm and queer ones being unusual. I still very much enjoy writing in these kinds of settings, but I’ve been exploring in more detail about what it’s like living in them, how it feels to be trans in a non-misogynistic, non-transphobic culture, how healthcare works in such cultures, and so on. So in my recent games – in particular Honor Bound and my fantasy work in progress The Earth Has Teeth – I’ve enjoyed going into more depth with that, and thinking more about how characters’ gender and sexuality affects how they engage with the world.

I’ve also been exploring how LGBTQ+ characters handle living in less welcoming settings. In the past I wanted to write purely escapist settings with no bigotry, but in one project I’m working on, I’m writing in the contemporary world. It felt appropriate there to show some realities of being queer right now, negative and positive, and balancing both elements so that playing as a queer PC felt recognisable without being overshadowed with misery. It’s a very different approach and once that project’s announced I’ll be very interested to see how it lands!

Finally: how are you celebrating Pride this year?

Exploring my city, meeting up with friends, and probably buying more arts and crafts from queer makers than I have room for!