So I haven't updated for a while! The reason behind this is multiple; mainly it comes down to artistic nerves and nonsense about various bits of work not being good enough.
I mean, there's truth behind this- a lot of what I've been doing has been scraps, flittering from section to section never quite finishing up each one. Most of my written work is bullet points that don't make sense without having read it all! But, I'm getting past these excuses and trying to focus.
I've been using my house mate, Liz Edwards, as a sounding board for my ideas. She and I share a similar enough approach to design to not create a conflict of vision but she has a different enough way about her to make it interesting. One of the things we were discussing was about female presence in the adventure game genre, something I hadn't really given much thought over to.
Onwards!
Our main conclusions were thus:
- There is a terrible lack of 'the every woman', that is, a character that is feminine for reasons that aren't related to romance or tokenism. We examined reasons behind this; the reasons usually cited for this, such as the lack of female NPCs in FPS, is usually sexist, either citing the lack of female soldiers (highly untrue and a great disservice to the brave women fighting for us) or the false idea that there needs to be a separate rig for female npcs. Gentlemen, we concluded, did not know shit about women running in a battle zone. Look at footage of soldiers running with full gear on; you cannot try to sell us the idea that women wiggle their behinds enough that you need to make a sultry animation.
- Women in adventure games suffer at the hands of outdated stock characters. Mystery novels and crime novels are usually based on the same few archetypes. There's nothing inherently wrong with archetypical, since it is commonly established that there can only be so many characters and stories in the world, but this becomes a problem when you start thinking that the detective absolutely needs to be a man or that 'at the centre of every problem there's a woman' (we heard this on Star Trek, then didn't have the heart to trudge through all the bull on the internet to find out where Picard got this quote from so apologies if that's paraphrased). Even worse were the ideas that somehow women weren't capable of being funny, or older, or ugly. We tried to think of examples of women that weren't solely used to appeal to the masculine gaze- Nurse Jackie as opposed to House was about as far as we got. I don't think it particularly counts, either, since Nurse Jackie is actually pretty bad at her job where as House inevitably saves the day.
- Attractiveness doesn't come in one bottle. There are a lot of ways to be attractive and male, but if you want to be an attractive female character you have to be hourglassed, make-upped with long flowing hair. Not correct. If the internet has taught us anything, it's that humans don't really need that much help finding things arousing. As women haven't had the luxury of having our tastes catered to sexually until recently, they are somewhat at an advantage in this mentality, but it's time for the male gaze to catch up. You know what's sexy? When female soldiers have practical hair do's. When female soldiers don't waste precious time they could be spending captaining their vessels and saving the world from Reapers putting on make-up.
- Keeping a dialogue open about this, and approaching the subject with an open mind is what needs to happen. Women need to be normalised; they are 50% of the population and play games as much as men. People such as Anita Sarkeesian, Lesley Kinzel, websites such as gaygamers.com all help to bring up issues within the community, but there needs to be a greater involvement. The problem is somewhat of an ouroboros that I find difficult putting into words concisely; the common person thinks that it's ridiculous that women in games has to be an issue, so they just live their lives being who they are and not letting women be an issue. Then the vocal person wins; the person who thinks that their narrowly defined view should override decency. The loudest person is always, in these arguments, the person crying 'tokenism' and 'reverse-sexism' as a means to deflect logical discussion. An example of this can be seen recently in the hullabaloo involving Jennifer Hepler.
Another issue brought up under this general topic was the need to stand up for people trying to open dialogues- it is often the nature of these discussions that the people (usually women) are accused of being nagging, being a bitch ect. ect. We talked about how men can take their part in these discussions without speaking over the experiences of women (without much conclusions) and also about this comic (by a dude) about women in the comic industry that can also be applied to the games industry.
- Why make an indie game sexist? It is understandable that triple A titles are at the beck and call of their publishers who will want to go with the 'safe' option. Chris Hecker has done presentations on the need for indie games to play to their strengths rather then emulate the marketing done by larger corporations; if you build it they will come.
There was a lot of other issues spoken about; this is a topic that I'm sure sets a lot of our hackles up and you can go on ad neusum about the various branches of the subject. We're all facing our own problems with sexism, and mine at this juncture is battling with how to write a concise version of these bullet points without seeming like I'm 'over-reacting', even if that's a response that I know I've been trained to have to further the patriarchy.
I'll try and write up my other business before Friday, but if I don't, have a good weekend, fellows!
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