Each of my previous posts on Harry Potter games has started with the same bracketed statement. It says that “I have donated the total I’ve paid for [title] media including this game to a British charity supporting trans people, as some kind of offset to this post prolonging the reach, by however little, of a series by a leading campaigner against trans people’s human rights.” I’ve made the same kind of donation for this post.
Unlike the previous times I’ve made these posts, this very topic of attention, and offsets, and money, is the subject of current discourse, thanks to the release of a new game based on the series. I think I can reasonably argue that giving a couple of quid to CeX for a fourteen-year-old game no one is thinking about is a bit different from paying people actively making a new game, but, well, I’ve chosen to draw the line somewhere which includes me currently posting about the next #1 of 2009 rather than leaving a gap, so I would say that.
The discussion is happening, obviously, because JK Rowling continues her slide from being a successful author with a sideline in using her platform to attack trans people, to being an anti-trans campaigner with a sideline in publishing that is subservient to the hatred. For me and many others, that’s the context for all of her work now, and for everything that comes from it. That effect is there even separate from any question of directly funding hate campaigns. Harry Potter is a particularly clear-cut example, but there is also no way I could, for example, reread Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials without thinking about when he repeatedly responded to critics of his friend’s work with racialised comparisons to ISIS. I have skipped the recent adaptation of The Amber Spyglass, which for a while was my favourite book.
There is a lot of opportunity to think about such issues when playing Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. After the previous game found a more interesting niche of exploration, it got junked because having something new and Harry Potter was always a bigger priority than the game-as-game. The same Hogwarts grounds are there, but the Marauder’s Map is no longer used and exploration is replaced by being led around through a sequence of mini-games and awkward narrative vignettes which fail to stand alone without wider book and film context. Many of them are there to unconvincingly set up romances as the series accelerates towards the conservative pairing off of its death-of-possibility epilogue.
The mini-games make competent use of the Wii remote, but are thin gruel. Quidditch consists of pointing at speed-up stars to fly through them, and wondering once more about the messed-up mechanics of a sport where most of the action has to take place outside of its grounds. Potion-mixing leans a little too heavily on the appeal of being able to move a vial of liquid around in 3D space, and of doing so many times in sequence. Duelling is actually the best for its even greater simplicity, because at least there’s some kind of physical joy in the winning strategy of constant waggling to let off barrage of curse after curse. Moving round between mini-games, you can point at lights and use the Wii remote pointer to collect bursts of mini-crests, which are beans by any other name.
Even with this game having little to offer of the world it’s set in, once again it has its illuminating moments. At one point, the game has Harry mix a shrinking solution. “Crabbe should take some of this”, he says as an aside, a bit of casual fat-shaming entirely in keeping with the spirit of the books. Soon after that, he faces the boy himself, and has cause to duel him. After you beat him, Harry makes a closing statement: “Now you know how it feels to be bullied”. In a triumphant moment, the hero of the game self-identifies as carrying out bullying. The game carries on, unburdened by any recognition of significance of this moment. Thanks to the films’ greater degree of editorial oversight, it feels slightly surreal to hear Daniel Radcliffe saying the words. It feels much less surreal to hear Harry Potter saying them.
I’ve got used to these games bluntly making the subtext text, but that one line took it to a new level. JK Rowling didn’t write those words, any more than she wrote Ron’s line in Order of the Phoenix about the midgets needing to learn respect. Those are choices which the developers might not have made. It’s not hard to see how that kind of thing could keep happening, though. Games, with their sprawl and their many layers of creative process providing a complicated jigsaw of which narrative is one part, are often less carefully tended in their messages.
Rowling’s books already had a significant line in upholding the status quo and might making right, in any actions being acceptable for protagonists in their assured moral correctness. Those stories attracted people who wrote even more explicit versions of the same as EA’s conveyer belt kept going. Today, the opportunity to build games based on her writing attracts people who employ abusers and anti-semitism. The art points towards the artist, even at a degree of separation.
Top of the charts for week ending 18 July 2009:
