Pageant

It's been a while since I played a title that made me go "Yep, I've been there."

Pageant by Autumn Chen is one of the most authentic descriptions of what it feels to be a closeted queer Chinese person. You roleplay as Karen Zhao whose parents came from China and immigrated to the United States. And they asked you to do a simple thing: attend a pageant.

While it seems ridiculous of a premise, I honestly feel like it isn't too far off from the stories I've heard during Chinese New Year. And the game commits to this "what does it mean to be Chinese" quite well, ranging from sexuality to "the need" to translate Chinese to simply taking a million AP classes and doing homework.

The game is very much a "raising" sim. I've played Chen's recreation of Bee with the support of Emily Short and I was pleased to see the familiar interface here. In the context of Bee, the mechanics are used to restrict the player and make them think on what they should do next. The free time in homeschooling can disappear so quickly. But here, it's freer: Karen is simply preparing for a pageant and she can look up Wikipedia or ask some friends to help her out. You are raising her stats while perhaps having a fling or two with her friends.

But Karen isn't brave. She may be smart, but her self-deprecation can turn into self-loathing quickly. Karen's a closeted queer Chinese woman whose only stressors in life are exams, classes, and Bible study. Her interactions with the girls she can date really bring out her awkwardness: she's genuine, but she doesn't know how to react. When the player gets deeper into Emily's route for example and learns (Spoiler - click to show)that Emily is trans, her choice of responses is -- let's just say -- not the best to choose from. I had to think on what to say without worsening the situation.

And that's precisely what I like about this game: Karen feels like a real person I could have met on one cumbersome Chinese banquet. She reflects a lot of the frustration and self-hatred young Chinese diaspora feel. Her actions, lines, and thoughts are things I think about too. She gets criticized by her parents, even when she follows orders. She does Science Olympiads and labwork because she has the "opportunity" her parents gave her, but she doesn't know what she wants to do. The "family dinner" section , in particular, really resonated with me: (Spoiler - click to show)I have heard all these stories about the atrocities that happened in China and, just like Karen, started to belittle myself for feeling isolated. There's no way my pain would be able to compare to the pain experienced by survivors of mass murders. It's hard to feel like you matter in a family dinner. I get why Karen's closeted and hates herself because I'm kinda the same too.

It's very hard for me to not write about Karen, which is funny since the title is supposed to be a dating sim. I should be writing about how Emily is cute for example, but the real star is the protagonist here. I enjoy the writing a lot and how truthful it is. I look forward to the sequel when I get to it.

P.S. I laughed at the mention of the mahjong anime mention. It's actually a favorite anime of mine, though I definitely agree it could have been more explicit with the lesbian characters.

Having played many recent Autumn Chen games in the last year or two, I saw a lot of references to Pageant, and thought, 'I don't really remember that game well'.

Turns out, I never played it! I mixed it up with another game and never even tried it.

Having tried it, it's pretty great. It's clearly influenced by Emily Short's Bee; both use the same system (one from when it was a semi-commercial system and another after it became Dendry). Both are based on quality-based narratives that play out over several weeks, both are about a certain type of rigorous, conservative upbringing, one by fundamentalist Christians and oene by Chinese diaspora parents.

However, this is certainly not just a retread of familiar material. Our main heroine, Karen (whom I recognize from several other games) has a unique and complex approach to life that makes choices not straightforward. Karen is thoughtful and compassionate but also is under enormous stress and has social anxiety at times that makes intended choices (like responding and so on) impossible to actually carry out.

One fundamental aspect is that Karen is extremely competent but does not see herself that way. She does 95% of what a human is capable of doing, but only sees that 5% gap. She works with adult research scientists but only sees her ineptness; she is told frequently she is beautiful but only sees awkwardness; she is loved by others but only fears rejection.

But the key is that she acts in spite of these fears; she just keeps on trucking.

Having played other 'pageantverse' games I immediately narrowed in on interacting with (Spoiler - click to show)Emily as much as possible. This game explores young trans interactions quite a bit: what does a trans relationship look like? Actually, that's not true; this game isn't about 'trans relationships' first; it's just about relationships, and what happens when someone being trans is thrown in the mix. Some of the tensest moments in the game for me were switching between private moments with my friend being able to express herself however she wanted and public moments with her family where the expectation was 'be normal or get punished'.

Overall, I'm glad that this wasn't a 'downer ending' game. I was able to succeed in my goals (being close to someone and doing good in pageant + research while being mediocre in science olympiad and basically ignoring family).

A strong game, and it's clear why it spawned several good followups.

Pageant follows Qiuyi Karen Zhao, a Chinese American teenager deep in the grind of trying to look good on college applications. She's worrying about her grades, her SAT scores, her number of AP classes, her internship with a research scientist, how many medals her Science Olympiad team is going to win. And then her mother announces she's signed her up for a beauty pageant, to make her look more well-rounded. It'll stand out, probably—how many would-be biologists applying to MIT have done beauty pageants? But of course, this is a world that the nerdy Karen is completely unfamiliar with, and prepping for the various facets of the pageant is hard to juggle on top of all the balls she already has in the air.

It's clear even before seeing the list of inspirations at the end that the game is deeply indebted to Emily Short's Bee, but while the premise and gameplay are similar, there's a different tone. While both Karen and the nameless protagonist of Bee are trying to cope with the weight of expectations placed upon them by their parents and community while chafing against the conservative and sexist aspects of that community, the protagonist of Bee seems pretty well-adjusted for all that; her conflicts are mostly external. Karen, however, is her own worst enemy.

Playing Pageant took me very vividly back to the experience of being a closeted queer teenager dealing with undiagnosed/untreated mental illness (and possibly a neurodevelopmental condition as well—or rather, I definitely had one, but while I think the text supports a reading of Karen as autistic, it's not unambiguous). I was in a different family/community situation and the pressures on me were not the same, but there’s a lot in Karen’s dysfunctional thought patterns and negative view of herself that I recognize on a level that makes it hard to talk about in any detail without feeling like I’m massively oversharing.

I think that for people who don’t have this experience, being in Karen’s shoes might be deeply frustrating (which is fair, because actually being that person is often deeply frustrating as well). If you’re the kind of player who hates to look at a set of dialogue options and go “wow, I don’t want to say any of that,” you are unlikely to enjoy this game. But if you’re unbothered by that, this is a well-drawn portrait of a struggling, self-loathing teenager dealing with familial pressures and navigating her identity as a queer member of the Chinese diaspora. And the situation doesn’t feel totally hopeless; it’s clear no amount of success in school, work, or extracurriculars is going to make a dent in the self-loathing, but you can lean on Karen a bit to form some human connections and that seems to help.

The downside of playing Pageant after many of Autumn Chen’s later games is that the lack of polish is pretty evident; there are a fair number of typos, and at a certain point the algorithm calculating your chances of winning the pageant seemed to break for me and it would just say (roughly paraphrased) “According to this algorithm you found on the internet, your chances of winning are ” followed by a line break. And from a game design perspective, while I’m sympathetic to the choice of not having constantly displayed stats like Bee does, I did wish the option to review how you were doing at various things came up a little more often. But then, maybe Karen can’t handle that much introspection.