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Designer Diary: Jane Austen Dance Party, Pride & Prejudice

  • Writer: ASE
    ASE
  • Mar 31, 2020
  • 2 min read

Updated: May 21, 2020

The choices made in the design of this game attempt to convey a specific kind of experience which stems from my own interpretation of Austen’s fiction. Current popular representations of Austen’s life and times -- Regency England from the point of view of the lower gentry -- sometimes offer a rather benign, somewhat idealized picture of that world: all romance, wit, fancy dresses, dashing wet-shirted men on horses, immaculate manors, garden tea parties, characters that each have their charming flaws but everything ends up right in the end.   Austen's fiction does have these things, and I certainly don't begrudge anyone the pleasure of enjoying them. But for me, the central emotional experience of Austen’s novels is different: anxiety, pain, claustrophobia. The women of Austen’s novels live on an economic, social, and psychological knife’s edge. Their lives were almost entirely dependent, as the famous first line of Pride & Prejudice puts it, on securing marriage with a man of “good fortune.” In Austen’s time, women could not yet attend university, and any woman from the gentry who condescended to work was no longer considered a Lady, and effectively disowned by her social class. In Austen's time. the old aristocratic hierarchy was being dramatically reshaped. Social and economic power was shifting from hereditary land owners to an upwardly mobile mercantile class. The lower gentry, the main subjects of Austen’s fiction, were especially vulnerable to these shifts. Austen’s Ladies lived in a milieu in which any false step could lead to ruin. Reading about, and being placed inside the minds of, Austen’s women as they contort themselves into these social poses has always been, for me, something of a painful experience.   It seems odd to design a game, something played for fun, that tries to simulate this feeling: the players’ dwindling hand of cards represent the gradual narrowing of suitable options, the movement around the dance floor represent the deft maneuvering required to position oneself socially, men and women gossiping among themselves to curry “influence,” the dance cards charting the ways in which a woman must be neither too forward nor too demure, to avoid a bad match. I sincerely do not want to cause players any real anxiety. Rather, I hope that they will derive some pleasure in using their wits and ingenuity, like our heroine Lizzie, to make the best of things. Or, as Lizzie herself puts it: to "laugh to keep from crying."              

 
 
 

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