{"id":352,"date":"2015-07-19T23:10:00","date_gmt":"2015-07-19T23:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/briebeau.com\/thoughty\/2015\/07\/19\/five-or-so-questions-with-moyra-turkington-on-war-birds\/"},"modified":"2021-11-16T00:41:50","modified_gmt":"2021-11-16T05:41:50","slug":"five-or-so-questions-with-moyra-turkington-on-war-birds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/briebeau.com\/thoughty\/2015\/07\/five-or-so-questions-with-moyra-turkington-on-war-birds\/","title":{"rendered":"Five or So Questions with Moyra Turkington on War Birds"},"content":{"rendered":"
Today I have an interview with Moyra Turkington of Unruly Designs talking about her amazing project, War Birds, currently on Kickstarter<\/a>. <\/div>\n
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Tell me a little about War Birds. What excites you about it?<\/b><\/p>\n

War Birds is a gigantic passion project for me, and so just about everything about it gets me excited. J<\/p>\n

It was going on twelve years ago that I was in a discussion about what makes a flying ace a flying ace (It\u2019s generally five aerial kills, but rules vary based on country). I did what all internet era folks do and looked it up on Wikipedia. There I found a list of flying aces of World War II and in it was a name that sparked immediate interest: Lydia Litvak. A female flying ace??!! How on earth didn\u2019t I know about that? The link was red though (there was no bio page for her) so I started feverously searching the internet. Not only was she a flying ace, she was a flying ace way back in WWII! The White Lily of Stalingrad – part of the 586th Fighter Regiment of the Air Defense Force of the Soviet Union, and there were others, lots and lots of others that flew with her!<\/p>\n

This started a very long fascination for me about WWII and history in general – about what women did and really what we were and are. The more I read, the more I wanted to know. When I was in school and they taught the history of Women and War, it was an addendum – one story. Rosie the Riveter, the middle class white woman who came to work in the factories to free a man to fight and through that, heralded a new era of economic independence for women. But that\u2019s an extremely narrow story, and not an entirely true one.<\/p>\n

The stories I read were about women who served on the front lines as nurses and as ambulance drivers, snipers and tankers, spies and code-breakers! And of course I read about the prisoners and POWs and civilian women whohad the war come down on their heads. As I read, a much fuller multiplicity of women\u2019s experience in the era started to unfold before me. I started to think about how we choose whose stories get told, and how we determine who the heroes are. I started thinking of the hardships of women on the home front, I started thinking about the courage of women in war zones. And I started thinking that I had to do something to make that story wider. To let other women experience the joy I had in finding out that we were always greater than I\u2019d been taught we were.<\/b><\/p>\n

And larp and freeform is a fantastic way to give people access to that experience. To become it, to feel it thumping in your chest. To really understand the courage, the compassion, and the resilience of the women whose shoulders we stand on.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s just one of the things I love about this project.<\/p>\n


When Against the Grain is happening, how does the structure and any mechanization of the game promote the vibe of the game and interaction between players?<\/b>
The aim in Against the Grain was to create a story that was emotionally engaging and satisfying to play, that also acted as an exploratory model of how intersectional bias works. The game isn\u2019t just about a moment in history where a bunch of random racists decided to launch a hate strike. It\u2019s about everyday people that are a complex product of an unequal and unfair system, that have real struggles and who think they\u2019re just doing what they need to survive. And it\u2019s about how they will end up marginalizing others for what they think is their own survival. It\u2019s about how what we want and think we need is often in direct opposition with equality because we\u2019ve never been taught to find a better way.<\/p>\n

To support that, in designing the structure of the game I contextualized the characters to help modern players feel like they could advocate for their character goals \u2014 even when they strongly disagree with them \u2014 to allow them to play functionally and in doing so, to create a situation of dramatic tension. I carefully calibrated the characters into a position of scarcity to ensure that the game wouldn\u2019t result in easy answers, and I encouraged embodiment and emotional investment in that scarcity with physical mechanics that keep the pressure on. I borrowed on Nordic larp techniques to put tools in the facilitator\u2019s hands to ensure the players could not escape the pressures and social context of their world. Perhaps most importantly in a game with particularly difficult subject matter, I framed the whole game in a context of transparency, safety and community to help players approach the game vulnerably and take as much away from the experience as possible.<\/p>\n

You have some amazing stretch goals, and some great goals already hit. When looking for creators and authors for games, what did you look for, and what did you expect from them in theme and development?<\/b>
I looked for passion \u2014 people that were really excited about the stories of women in the era, and people who could really connect with the goals of the project. I also tried my best to look for diversity across multiple axis points: in designers, in games, in the stories we were telling and who and how they were being represented. The base framework I put down in front of the designers was this: each game should explore a story about an experience or contribution that was real for women in WWII. The game should explore what opportunities the war provided to the women involved and also to look at the costs of the opportunity. The game should illustrate how it affected who the women were, how society\u2019s view of them changed, what they could do, and what they could become. <\/p>\n

What is your favorite moment in the experience of creation, research, and application of the games in War Birds?<\/b><\/div>\n

Favorites are too hard! I\u2019ll have to give you a few:<\/div>\n