Indie game designers were refashioning the Regency long before Bridgerton

polygon.com:

“Is Catherine Morland… East Asian?”

After saying this, Emily Kugler, my collaborator in all things Jane Austen and games, reread the dialogue text in Spiral Atlas’ Northanger Abbey. We were walking through the character customization of our protagonist, who could be Kit or Catherine Morland, male, female, or nonbinary. Our now-nonbinary protagonist “Kit” sported a jaunty top hat bedecked with flowers and a flowing, dress-like topcoat, somewhere between the femme dress or masculine suit also on offer. We were now being directed to decide whether we saw ourselves as “thin and awkward” or “lithe and delicate”; our skin “sallow and without colour” or “ethereal and golden,” hair “dark and lank” or “like a river of ebony.” The answers to these questions didn’t change the avatar, merely our perception of them. And it was at this point that Emily, who is East Asian/Japanese and uses she/they pronouns, wondered if game designer Spiral Atlas had chosen to alter the language in Austen’s novel.

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Turns out, not exactly; the first option in each of the pairs is a direct quote from Austen’s first description of Catherine Morland as a child: “thin awkward figure, a sallow skin without colour, dark lank hair, and strong features.” What the game did was draw our attention to the ways in which, as Emily noted, “if you don’t presume whiteness,” the source text could be read to allow for a new vision of our young protagonist — one that allowed Emily to see herself in the Regency.

This was a moment of surprise and delight during our exploration of dozens of games set in the 18th an 19th centuries. What started as an