Pageant

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.