[Discussion] Having male and female characters in a game

edited in Questions and Answers
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.

Comments

  • It really depends on the context. If it's a specific character's personal story, then it's a specific character's personal story. If all the specific characters happen to be only male or only sexualised females, well then getting called out for it is only fair.

    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.
    Thanked by 2Zaphire Jelligeth
  • Thanks for the response @Tuism. All of it makes sense and I agree with it but let me give an example and see your response on the more detailed example.

    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?
  • So maybe consider just making your lead a female character? There was a recent study indicating that school girls would significantly prefer female avatars compared to school boys, whereas school boys were much more likely to have no preference.

    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.
  • edited
    I don't mean to preach to the choir, but it all boils down to this: female players don't feel welcome playing games. It's reflected in the game themes, it's reflected in boobtastic fetish-doll character designs, it's reflected in game writing (even "strong female characters" often end up plot-depowered and made into damsels), and it's reflected in the attitudes of players towards their female counterparts.

    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).
  • edited
    So it's not about whether a character should be female or not, it's about avoiding overt sexualisation and objectification. That's why people talk about female representation in games, it's how we as creatives make choices and sculpt characters and how they're represented.

    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 :)
    Thanked by 1dammit
  • Sweet guys. I really think this entire discussion has made me understand the issue of gender a lot more.
    Thanked by 1francoisvn
  • edited
    So in the interest of adding another dimension to the discussion for those that hadn't considered it: gender is not just a binary male/female thing (and is distinct from sexual orientation). There are people that identify with genders in the entire spectrum from male to female.
    Thanked by 2dislekcia dammit
  • simple answer: yes! feature women and men and otherwise in games. just do 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.
  • Just to add to the points made here, or put into context the idea of it's not so much about whether you must have playable female characters but rather how female characters are portrayed, take a look at the Mass Effect series where you were given the option to make the protagonist female from the start, and carried this through all three games. I loved playing as FemShep and having a believable character (with an excellent voice actor) who was a bad-ass but still had realistic flaws, was capable of making poor choices (made by the player) and wasn't just slotted in as eye-candy or as an after-thought.

    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.
  • Love that this discussion is happening :)

    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.
    Thanked by 1dislekcia
  • My favorite male author that does female gender representation very well is Terry Pratchett. His earlier writings tend to be more satirical and often falls a bit flat on this note, but it becomes very observable that as he matured, married, had a daughter, etc, his writing becomes more genuine as well. I agree that writing a character purely based on their gender is not a good place to start, but similarly, ignoring their gender can result in @dammit's example where female characters may end up with ambiguous or unconvincing personalities (I haven't read GoT though).

    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.
  • Jelligeth said:
    ..., ignoring their gender can result in @dammit's example where female characters may end up with ambiguous or unconvincing personalities (I haven't read GoT though)...
    Just going to put a note here that the GoT problem is *because* the author didn't seem to be able to move away from the character's gender that the writing became problematic. As below:
    Cracked writer David Wong notes that even in scenes from Daenerys’ perspective, her breasts get a mention– as if women just walk around thinking about their boobs constantly.

    As Denarys makes her way to a confrontation – not a sexy scene – George Martin describes her as follows: “When she went to the stables, she wore faded sandsilk pants and woven grass sandals. Her small breasts moved freely beneath a painted Dothraki vest ..."

    Wong argues that Martin has written the scene this way because, “when a male writes a female, he assumes that she spends every moment thinking about the size of her breasts and what they are doing…” While this is certainly not true for all male writers, it is true for parts of Game of Thrones – and true for how a number of the female characters are portrayed on the screen, too.
    http://melissamelicious.blogspot.com/2013/10/game-of-thrones-and-feminism.html
  • Oh I see! Yah that's pretty darn weird xD I wonder if he writes about Jon Snows cold nipples as he stands sentinel upon the Wall...

    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.
  • My opinion, Very notably my own opinion, shared on another thread, I proposed exploring diversity away from the normal mould, Particularly in Independent games, as being purely aesthetic.
    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.
    Thanked by 1dammit
  • Just as an aside, Never Alone seriously bothered me from a game design perspective. They set up this really heart-wrenching relationship with the fox and it's pretty torturous when the player OR the fox dies, I had to take over playing because my girlfriend couldn't handle the fox death being her fault... (And this is someone who gleefully stomps people at LoL, so yeah)

    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.
    Thanked by 1Steamhat
  • is Terry Pratchett
    ...was Terry Pratchett?....Oh great here come the waterworks again. Terry was such a big part of my childhood :( More on topic, I totally agree with what @Jelligeth said about how he potrayed woman in his fiction. What a hero.
  • His passing doesn't change his position as my favorite, and will, for the foreseeable future, always remain "is".

    His own motto: Do not fear the reaper. :)
    Thanked by 1FanieG
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