Alice Flynn, Artistic Director at Dogmouth Theatre, talks to us about bringing Sluts With Consoles to Edinburgh Fringe, and how they started getting involved in the Fringe.
Where: Delhi Belly at Underbelly, Cowgate
When: 2 – 10 Aug
Ticket link: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/sluts-with-consoles
So, what’s Sluts With Consoles about and what inspired it?
Sluts With Consoles isn’t really about gaming. It’s about girlhood, loneliness, and confronting your own internalised misogyny.
Subculture and ‘nerd’ spaces have always been an appealing retreat for people who feel othered or isolated, but those spaces have also always been incredibly gendered.
When you’re really young you don’t notice it’s happening, but when I was around 14 or 15, I remember finding out that the nerdy, shy, ‘nice guys’ I’d considered friends at the time viewed me as a sex object and not an equal.
Conversely, after I tried to confront them about it, I remember being labelled an attention whore and a slut because of this attention I was getting – attention that I didn’t even want.
There is so much pressure on women, especially teenage girls, in subculture spaces like the gaming community to be feminine enough so that you can be easily fetishised, but not too feminine, otherwise they’ll assume you’re faking your interest and you’ll be othered.
This show is about that struggle to fit in, that desire for marginal acceptance over none at all, and how we can sometimes unwittingly become enforcers of the patriarchy in our quest to save ourselves from it.
The video gaming community always feels very ‘blokely’ to me, but are times changing?
I think it depends how you look at it. Women have always been part of the gaming industry, but many prolific women who worked on early games in the 80’s and 90’s have been largely written out of history.
We’ve always been here, but since GamerGate, there’s been more pushback to that and we’re starting to see more women working in the industry getting their flowers.
We’re seeing more games that are made for, by and about women getting the recognition they deserve, and in turn that’s helped make women and girls in the community feel more comfortable coming out of the woodwork.
Yes, the gaming community has a dark underbelly, but at the end of the day, we are all here because we like playing video games, and it’s a lot easier to just have a conversation with someone about gaming now without feeling like you’re going to be interrogated or hit on as a default.
How did you make a start in the business?
Ushering. My first job after University was a Front Of House team member for Greenside Venues back when they still had a site at Nicholson Square.
What are you looking forward to in Edinburgh?
So many shows, so much good veggie food, and so many pints in the Bristo Square bar after the show. Mostly the shows.
One of our team is a complete Fringe virgin and I’m really looking forward to taking her to John Robertson’s The Dark Room for the first time. She has no idea what she’s in for!
What’s next for the show?
We’ve got some Arts Council funding to take the show on tour – our next stop is Camden Fringe, then Cardiff and Oxford.
After that, we’ll be developing a playable digital version of the show that audiences can own on Steam or a similar gaming platform.
Joe [Strickland], our creative technologist, has begun building it in RPG Maker, and it’s looking really cool.
It feels very surreal that the show is going to become something like an actual playable video game!