[Discussion] Having male and female characters in a game
Hello everyone,
I was thinking about a lot of things regarding game design after I read articles about sexism, female characters not in a game and even the latest topic in the Make Games SA forum (This one)
I have read a lot of issues around games that do not offer female characters but one of the big issues as a indie game developer is that time and money is limited so making 2 characters for a game with lets say 40 animations is not really very easy.
What do you guys think about only having a male/female character to choose from and if you feel its a must to have both sexes?
Would also like if anyone has a link to tutorials for Unity on making one character with different hair and face textures to fake male and female selections.
I was thinking about a lot of things regarding game design after I read articles about sexism, female characters not in a game and even the latest topic in the Make Games SA forum (This one)
I have read a lot of issues around games that do not offer female characters but one of the big issues as a indie game developer is that time and money is limited so making 2 characters for a game with lets say 40 animations is not really very easy.
What do you guys think about only having a male/female character to choose from and if you feel its a must to have both sexes?
Would also like if anyone has a link to tutorials for Unity on making one character with different hair and face textures to fake male and female selections.
Comments
Some games don't even have gender attached to characters. There's a new one called Wildfire coming up where it's a feature that the main character is androgynous so there's no traditional male/female attachment to "it". (I had the idea too but I hadn't put it into anything yet :P)
Even Broforce has girls, which both breaks their own lore and is a brilliant move at breaking the definition of "bro" - it's not about gender but being a balls-out (which is an unfortnate term to use... Privates out?) ridiculous action flick stunty action hero.
So... it's an issue that should be thought about, but the default answer isn't "double your workload". It's to think about it and deal with it smartly and responsibly, IMHO.
Lets take a game like DayZ (Has male and female) and Rust (Only has naked males). Both of those games have no purpose for the game to be only Male characters because there is no story behind it and its not like they are vikings or something that in history books were only Male.
Do you think it is fine for games like those to ONLY have one gender to choose from or do you think it is a MUST that they should put both genders as an option. Another thing is it acceptable to have naked male characters in the game which rust has?
I'd say that if you have to choose, go with a female lead, but ultimately having both or some form of a non-gendered lead would be better.
It's just really annoying that people often default to a male lead without any consideration, and then defend their decision as if it's good in a business or design sense, when this is just not true.
I think it's less about having playable female characters as a mandatory politically-correct marketing checkbox, and more about making an effort to welcome a long-excluded subset of game fans by using something immediately accessible and relatable to them - a player avatar of their gender. Based on the few female players I know, they don't necessarily care about what gender they *play* as (although they do appreciate female avatars), but more how their gender is represented in the game as a whole. If the representation is thematically sound, no issue. If the representation is pandering sexy-for-the-sexy perv-o-fuel empowerment fantasy for teenage boys that has nothing to do with the game's mechanics, theme or plot context, you can understand why they might have a problem with it. You might understand why non-teenage-boys may have an issue with it too.
Above all, it's the spirit of the thing, and the context (as Tuism says). It's about respecting your potential players enough not to pander, and to consider the impact of your representations within social and thematic context, rather than plonking an extra girl character in there just for the hell of it (though to be sure - female players will probably appreciate the gesture a lot).
Any character can be anything. The thing to avoid is making ALL your female characters shallow stereotypes or eye candy, fodder for gratuitous butt or cleavage shots that have nothing to do with your actual gameplay, etc. Watch Feminist Frequency as a starting point to understand common tropes and how those affect players and designers.
Make characters that are believable, that have other things going on than their bra size or their queerness or their hair colour. Part of that is to realise that we're trained to ignore certain kinds of benign sexism: Crowds with 37% women are perceived as having over 50% women in them; "historically accurate" male-dominated environments actually weren't, they were just recorded that way by historians; A "perfectly natural" "meritocratic" office situation with only 1 or 2 women as part of a team of 20 is neither; etc.
A good exercise is to assign gender randomly and write around that :)
most artist's worth their salt can simple reuse animation on a new character with sprites or models switched out. or you can use multiple shallow assets to just make a sort of matter of fact-nature to a character being a variable gender.
I see alternative choices in character as mostly aesthetic in indie development, and in which case, breaking the mould of our defaults is simply a challenge, one which particularly artists, should take the challenge of.
An interesting discussion with Mass Effect is whether FemShep should have had almost all the same experiences as ManShep, or if it would've been a better narrative experience for her to have to fight harder to be taken seriously by her superiors and crew. Coming back to the original point though, and on the converse side of female representation in Mass Effect, you have the Asari - an entirely female race that conforms to traditional ideals of physical attractiveness and behaviours, with three life stages that fit old-world views of acceptable roles for women in society (the Maiden, Mother and Matriarch). That and being strippers in galactic bars. Among other examples you also have the gratuitous butt-shots provided by the camera whenever you interact with the character Miranda (created by her father as the 'perfect woman'), resulting in a number of humorous comics and memes.
So yeah, character portrayal as the more important aspect than just having gender (or race, sexual preference etc.) representation.
What I would throw in here is that it's important not to focus on the fact that your character is male or female. Having a female lead doesn't mean you now have to focus on what you might stereotypically think of as "the female experience." After our gamergate discussion in a cape town meetup some months back, someone said to me that they can't write/create female characters because they have no idea what it's like to be female, have babies etc. This negates the fact that females are actually firstly *humans* having *human experiences*, expressing an array of *human emotions*. If women are capable of writing believable male characters, males are just as capable of writing believable female characters. Just stop focusing on the gender side.
An example of a poor execution of this is the Game of Thrones books where the author describes the experiences of his female characters as if they are teenage boys inside of a female body. A good example might be Agatha Christie's writing on her lead male detectives.
*Note one: These are just names that spring to mind off the top of my head. I'm sure there are better and worse examples
*Note two: you can replace any mention of female or male gender with any other gender identification and the same still applies.
The best advice I can think of is to write from experience, and this can be difficult because personal experience is easily tainted by opinion, misinterpretation, perspective, etc. But the best ability for a writer and creative to have is, I think, the ability to empathize. If you want to write about a woman, or a man, or someone androgynous, or someone asexual, or bisexual, or pansexual, etc etc etc, then the best thing you can probably do is TALK to people who are. Or if you can't, then read up about their experiences.
You see, gender representation doesn't just end with male and female. We are increasingly beginning to understand that gender is a spectrum, it's not binary. So the best you can do is just try to be honest. Your main character doesn't have to represent EVERYONE on the planet, but if you do decide to include a female, minority, or whatever, playable or NPC, make them genuine and relatable to people who ARE those things, just don't resort to cliches or stereotypes or tropes.
But yea, that's why it's important to write genuine people. Remembering that a female, male, androgynous, or whatever, character is a real person would help improve characterization, and based on whatever environment you are placing these characters in, perhaps their gender would influence how they interact with the world and vice versa. For example, in Pratchett's books, while his characters are all uniquely their own, they are also very evidently influenced by the world around them due to their appearance, their physical sex, their clothing, smell, height, etc, eg the way other people perceive them. Even though he doesn't attempt to cover every demographic in existence, the ones that he does, he attempts to be honest and genuine about them, there is depth to his characters, they don't simply exist in a singular dimension. Even his bystanders have believable reactions, they are all preoccupied people who have lives of their own to worry about, or their own curiosities, greeds, prejudices or motives, however exaggerated or absurd.
While we, a society of white cishet males mostly, have the ability to mostly write from such a perspective, we can represent a simplified human experience that isn't totally gender or race or sexuality exclusive, we understand basic communication and interaction, we observe the world not entirely through an exclusive lens. So with that we can make characters, and then their details of race gender and sexuality, are simply matter of fact. and so what does it matter that they be non-white, or elderly, or youthful, or somewhere unexpected on the gender spectrum.
There are definitely Indie projects that are sensitive to cultures or non-male perspectives, with stories written around them, Never Alone and The Cat Lady come to mind for such an example.
But in response: we have Transistor or Limbo, which have stories told from characters that could simply be aesthetically changed, and the same story would happen, as their specifics could be interchangeable. Red could have been Indian and homosexual, and a few other aesthetic changes (including audio) and the story or game does not change. Similarly the main character of Limbo could have been an elderly woman, and the experience would be perceived differently, but the given experience would perhaps not fundamentally change.
And then they go and design all these levels where you're trying to avoid death because it's so horrible, but the only way to find out what to do is to die horribly... Ugh. Not cool, game. And then when they changed the thing into the other thing we lost interest completely. So yes, cool effort, yay for more inclusion, boo for mechanics that aren't integrated into the setting/story well in terms of character investment.
His own motto: Do not fear the reaper. :)