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In the sentence immediately after the sentence I quoted, you attack an unnamed poster. That poster was me. What response did you expect from the poster you had just attacked, a hug?
No, you hyperbolized it. I pointed out that the thing you had said was so far from the truth that, even when you adjust for hyperbole, it’s still wrong. Very wrong. And if you didn’t like the swear word, well, if you’re going to be hyperbolic in your dismissal of someone’s critique of sexism, you really ought not to be so sensitive to the kind of language you get in response. Which is more extreme, “fuck” or “The two greatest threats of our time are definitely Health & Safety and Political Correction”?
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I’m not sure you can say ‘the marketplace will decide what works best’ in an interactive fiction forum with a straight face, bro.
I agree, completely, that it’s the author’s discretion. (Including how much to listen to critics, and to which.) The discretion, the responsibility; ultimately, the blame. Authors can, and often do, make bad decisions.
(Except when, as is the norm in big-budget games, artistic freedom is not the province of any one person; decisions are made, if not precisely by committee, then by a great many people with a lot of different interests. You don’t get to modify your game to fit what the CEO and the CFO and the creative director and the marketing department want, then turn around and say ‘what? suggesting I change the game to make it less hostile to women? But my pure untrammeled artistic prerogative!’)
And the reader, in turn, is not obliged to agree with the author’s decisions. They can say whatever they like about the author. If the author’s discretion leads to bad results, it’s right and proper to complain about it.
It is in the nature of minorities that when they have a grievance, they have to complain loudly; otherwise nobody will pay it any attention. (Yes, of course some grievances are trivial, imaginary, or illegitimate. I’m not sure how that changes things.)
OK, look: there’s no such thing as ‘just folklore.’ Folklore comes in many versions. Folklore is inherently a form without canonical versions, a form that evolves. Authors change it to fit their needs, which are always contemporary needs. As you say, it’s often raw and brutal: and it comes with politics baked in, and sometimes those politics are pretty horrible. And if you accept the whole package, you’re responsible for the whole package.
Like, if you’re writing a story about Thor, you have a lot of different versions. Are you going for the watered-down Thor that you read about in your kid-lit Norse Myths And Legends anthology? The bloody brute of the Lay of Harbard, who brags about his rapes and murders and threatens to kill his own father over a minor disagreement? The oafish straight-man in the Lay of Thrym? The Romantic Germanic-identity version? The clean-cut Marvel version? What attitude are you taking to the guy? The choice is not made for you. And the choice is always made with modern sensibilities, whether you mean to or not.
Was Thor a random example? If so that’s a bizarre coincidence, because Marvel’s Thor is female now, and female in a strong, positive way, which is cool.
I love this quote from the series writer, Jason Aaron:
“This is not She-Thor. This is not Lady Thor. This is not Thorita. This is THOR."
It seems like you’re disagreeing with my argument in a spoiler tag upthread, but you’re not directly responding to it. Using MUDs to introduce people to IF? Did you see that argument? (The spoiler tag makes it easy to overlook.)
Anyway, it’s not spoiling anything to say that the (dead) mother dies in the non-interactive intro of the game. The movie fade-cuts from her death to the little brother weeping at her grave.
We call that a “disposable woman,” a woman who dies as a plot device to motivate a male character.
As for the other woman you mention, in the most charitable light, you’d call her a “damsel in distress.”
We give these roles names because they are extremely common. They are not positive portrayals of women, especially because they are so common. (And let’s not forget the other portrayal of a woman in this game, which I think we can all agree is a negative portrayal.)
But, as I argued above, Brothers takes these tropes further by juxtaposing the (dead) mother and the damsel with male characters who can be trusted to help. (And then tosses in an achievement for being pointlessly cruel to a little girl, just to put a cherry on the cake.)
Okay. I believe you.
It looked to me as if you were using Brothers as an example for the general case, rather than a specific instance separated from the general case, which is why I reacted as sharply as I did. I have (very) strong opinions on the general case.
However, I don’t have an educated opinion on Brothers specifically, since I haven’t played it yet.
OK. I’m not yet in the mood for a virtual handshake, but I’ll accept the apology.
Well look, let’s just say that the term “Political Correctness” for various reasons is very troublesome to me – because I think that it’s often used to demand that other people turn off their sexism/whatever detectors, or to stop expressing criticism of perceived sexism/whatever – and that they bother me a lot more than swear words on the internet. I could’ve expressed my point more tactfully, and I apologize for that.
I don’t call for censorship, but I know why it seems similar to you. People who apply political criticism of art often call for laws to ban certain kinds of art.
I don’t call for censorship, but I do call for artists to make their art less sexist.
I don’t call for censorship, but if you (like me) enjoy a lot of sexist art, especially nostalgically, you might worry that people would take me seriously and stop making it, cutting themselves off from a rich tradition of art that is sexist, but very good despite that. You might be worried that something of value to you (and others like you) would be lost if we cut ourselves off from sexist traditions.
Artists might make a lot fewer sexist games some day. I think something would be lost if that happened; some of us would miss having a strong connection to traditional culture. But the loss would be far outweighed by the benefit to everyone else. (Even the men.)
(It looks like you’ve dropped the spoiler tag on this topic, so I will, too; anyone reading this far knows what’s up by now.)
Let’s start by agreeing that she starts off as a “woman,” as you call her, not just an unthinking animal. She converses with the brothers; they understand what she says, and she understands what they say. She thinks. She solve problems with good ideas. “The woman assists in many ways.” She is a woman.
In her spider form, you say “there’s nothing human or female about it,” but she still has the woman’s head and torso. The author could have used a spider’s head and body, with four pairs of fuzzy inhuman eyes, but he wanted to make sure you knew that this spider is the same woman you were just talking to. The spider is a woman, too. Just look at her face!
And anyway, that’s the whole problem: sexists think of women as non-human objects, unworthy of empathy or respect. So representing a woman who turns out to be a non-person is exactly the sort of portrayal we ought to criticize, precisely because “that woman isn’t even human” is the point of view we’re trying to combat.
I think we agree that the folklore is sexist, and we may even agree that building a story based on sexist folklore is also sexist. The question then becomes, is it OK for a story to be sexist if it’s based on sexist folklore? Is sexism in art OK in cases like this?
Which is to say, yes, this art is sexist. Maybe it’s OK to be sexist in this case, but that doesn’t make it non-sexist.
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I think you’re sincere in your doubt that there’s a gender problem in games. I’m asking you to re-examine that.
Recently there was a study about accuracy in estimating gender ratios. You put a bunch of men and women together into a room on some pretext, then take them out again, and ask them what the percentage of women was.
Turns out that men seriously overestimate the proportion of women. When women made up 20-25% of a group, men generally estimate that it was about half. When you raise that to a third, men estimate that women are in the majority. So I think that a lot of guys sincerely don’t see a problem in videogames, or in the tech industry, or whatever industry - they look around, see 20% women, subconsciously estimate it as 50%, and feel that everything’s fine. If you come to them with the stats, they get angry, because their own estimates have built up an impression that women are already equally represented, and they think you’re asking for overrepresentation.
This is why it’s important to do your research, rather than relying on your impressions. Because that’s what informed, intelligent people do.
To expand on that a little:
If you’re coming from the assumption that there’s no real problem with inclusion and representation of gender in computer games, and that works that are sexist and damaging are rare anomalies, then it doesn’t make a lot of sense to look closely at depictions of gender in every game, unless that game is all ‘hey! I want to talk about this!’ Accusing a game of having sexist elements becomes a strong and extraordinary claim - if genuinely sexist games are rare, their authors must be extraordinarily sexist, right?
If, on the other hand, you come from the assumption that gender inclusion and representation is a pervasive and serious problem, then it makes sense to apply a closer level of scrutiny. Individual games should be considered, not just on their own merits, but as products of and contributors to a larger pattern. Depictions of women become, not a special thing that any given artist may, or may not have a particular interest in; they’re something that every artist has a responsibility to consider, because a perfectly well-intentioned artist may end up doing really sexist things just because they’re the norm.
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To take the discussion in a slightly different direction, what could the game have done differently without losing its core? I think the troll couple could have traded places easily - that wouldn’t have made any difference to the story. (But as I said earlier, those two characters felt pretty equal to me anyway.) The inventor with the flying machine could also have been a woman without hurting the story in any way. His gender doesn’t matter, so he’s just “default male”. Those changes could have dealt with much of dfabulich’s objections, while not at all damaging the game that I and Peter loved.
The spider and the mother on the other hand would change things a lot if they were changed. (I’m out of my depth in this discussion, so I’ll stop there.)
Theoretically it could, but the image of the male mad inventor is rather ingrained in our imaginarium. You think of a mad inventor, you come up with a very specific image (and very specific hair!) of a certain guy.
Though that also makes it the ideal place to subvert those ideals a little, to subtly insert a new default. Hmm…
That reminds me of another part of the interview with Fares I linked to earlier. On the subject of change, he mentioned having moved his paper towels at home as an experiment. Six months later, he still went to the old place first. “When such an unimportant habit is difficult to change, one understands how hard it is to think new when it comes to things that matter.” “As an example, I have realised that I have had a strange view on what’s male and female. Feminism used to be a loaded subject to me. I used to think it was tedious when someone brought it up. I couldn’t see that men and women were treated differently. But now that I’ve realised that’s the case, it’s very obvious how much we’re formed by our stereotypical gender norms.”
(My quick translation, but hopefully, you’ll get the point.)
Exactly so.
In my (authorial) experience, side characters are particularly prone to problematic tropes, because you’re not giving them the love and attention you might give to a main character. So instead of carefully working out this character’s story bible, you came up with him between two sips of coffee in order to fill the needs of a particular scene, and the lack of mental effort results in a cliche.
I’ve been trying an exercise lately, when I come up with a default NPC, of flipping one of the salient features of that stereotype. Automatically imagine a wild-haired young man in this type of role? Try making him older, or a woman, or someone with impeccable grooming. Sometimes the results truly do not fit or are tricky to narrate*, but often it gives a more interesting substrate to work with.
- A specific case of the “problems narrating” category: I find it’s easy to casually flip genders on minor NPCs in written IF, and relatively easy to communicate that someone is non-straight, by giving them a same-gendered partner or interest in same.
I find it a lot harder to casually flip ethnicity, because then I have to say (somehow) “this character is black” or “this character is Asian”. Fine: but then I have another problem, because I don’t want to have a story in which minority races are called out as Other while white characters pass by without remark; I also don’t want a story where I’m communicating race through secondary stereotypes, e.g. by having characters speak in exaggerated dialect or wear strongly stereotyped clothing; and, on the other hand, most of my stories aren’t so much about race that it makes sense to have every character’s race be explicitly narrated all the time. Sometimes it’s possible to clue this kind of thing with a character’s name, and it’s usually pretty solvable with significant characters, but if it’s a minor NPC whose name is never presented?
I haven’t resolved this to my satisfaction. There’s a character in Counterfeit Monkey I decided should be black. I tried various ways to indicate this in the text without making it seem as though Alex (the narrator) thinks in terms of “people” vs “black people”. I experimented with some different descriptions and bits of dialogue that might clue it in more gently, but they all felt super ham-handed. So I took the references out again, but I am sad about it and I feel like I need to give this problem more thought so I can do better next time.
What I want is to communicate “contrary to expectations you might have about game worlds, this game world contains people of color, for example this character here” without communicating “contrary to expectations you might reasonably have about human beings, this character is not white”.
However, if you play Monkey, please do mentally fill in that some of the characters are people of color. That will be closer to my concept than if you default them all to white.
Emily, perhaps you could simply include graphical feelies that depict certain characters as non-white? Doesn’t really help for minor NPCs, of course, but I can’t imagine any way to resolve your problem with text alone. Good luck, though, if it can be done I’m sure you’ll figure it out.
Sorry if I missed you saying this, but did you consider just stating absolutely everyone’s ethnicity/race/colour in every case? You said it would make sense to narrate everyone’s race, and tried various subtle ways, but that they weren’t graceful. It’s easy to imagine they wouldn’t be. Conventionally in the ideology and aesthetics of writing which reflects lived reality today, stating the race at every introduction would seem bizarre, and is non-subtle – except that you’re working in sci-fi/fantasy. It’s possible there to show that the character sees the race of each person equally by having them state it in the narration in 100% of introductions, and it’s a genre where people will quickly accept such a tic, I think. Obviously you wouldn’t always do it at the exact first moment of contact, but, you know, you’re a writer of great skill, I don’t need to spell it all out : ) Maybe it wouldn’t work. I certainly haven’t tried it myself.
The funny thing about giving in (which sounds judgmental, but is not intended that way - bear with me) in a situation like this is that you didn’t get to make the character you wanted to be black, black. Not because of any qualities of the character, but just because of language, and a progressiveness which actually tripped you on this small thing. Or maybe it’s less small if you wanted to indicate characters of more races are in the game than you feel you did. It’s hard to make some points about race and the ideology and structure of language without actually just making the points. I’m just raising these ideas for speculation. I’m speculating on an alternate take on your game, not the game you did make, which is obviously thoroughly considered.
-Wade
At least in CM, I think it’s not SF/fantasy enough for that not to seem still pretty weird – many aspects of the culture are very very close to ours now, and others are like the more authoritarian extremes of ours. So I think overtly pointing out everyone’s race would have given the impression that Atlantis is a highly race-conscious place, which given how dystopian it otherwise is, would probably have come across just as straight-up racist; when what I actually wanted was to say “although this place has many very creepy policies, they are centered on use of language, and skin color is very much a secondary concern”.
I dunno.