There are possible conversation snippets (well, possible speech) between Helen and Sophie if you reach a “Caroline dies / Sophie lives” ending. Also, I think Helen’s memories include conversation with Alana. I’d say Spiral passes, depending on whether you judge these to be significant conversation.
The dragon in The Sealed Room is female. I think the PC is genderless, so if you consider a female PC, that game passes as well. (There ought to be a separate category for non-gendered PCs. The half-Bechdel, perhaps.)
Ah; I didn’t reach the ending there. (You don’t remember what those conversations were about, do you?)
Oops, so she is. But genderless is pretty clearly not female (‘you can think of them as female’ is not the same thing as ‘depicted as female’; and if anything, IF ‘genderless’ often tends towards male-default). But yeah, this is another big reason why IF Bechdel rates are going to have a disadvantage relative to books/movies/TV.
I think I should probably replay Spiral to be sure, but if memory serves me right:
[spoiler]1) Alana invites Helen to a party after Helen is turned down for Oxford. The conversation is reported in retrospect rather than explicitly played out, though.
In Helen’s memory of her miscarriage, she repeats a number of things that Alana said to her over the course of the pregnancy and in the aftermath. Three snippets, I think, starting with a recommendation to abort and ending with “perhaps it was just as well”.
How could I forget … Helen’s memory of being a schoolyard bully. The conversation is about how many bricks are in a wall, and whether the other girl is smart enough to count that high.
Helen’s memory of a meeting at the Nex: although in fact other people are speaking, there’s a silent exchange between Helen and Alana that speaks volumes.
If Helen and Sophie live … at the scene in the Tube, I think Sophie talks about being frightened or uncomfortable (I must replay to refresh my memory) at a commotion taking place further down the train, just before the bomb goes off.[/spoiler]
Most are pretty weak contenders, I guess, but (3) should do it.
Sounds like at least one of those should qualify, yes.
That takes us to somewhere between 6 and 4 games out of 19 (or somewhere between 21% and 32%). Ignoring the AFGNCAAP issue for a second, that’d be about what you’d expect if there was gender-parity and each significant-conversation game featured only one significant conversation. (Which is obviously not the case.)
I think J’dal passes too, if you count an offhand remark as a conversation – which I would, in IF.
From the “no significant conversation” files, Transit has some conversations described but all the NPCs are male and I think the protagonist is too (since you can barge into the toilets looking for your male friend). Shuffling Around also has a fair amount of dialogue IIRC – Woeful Pat and the peasant (?), the exposition machine at the beginning, the final boss, and the nerds at least, but all the NPCs I can remember are male. Murphy’s Law has dialogue with the bank clerk but the PC is male.
Anyway, if you want to look at questions of gender parity, you can see how many games pass the gender-reversed Bechdel test. More than six, I’d guess. Let’s see:
Shuffling Around (the PC is male, if only so early on someone can say “INSTRUCTIONS, son. I trust I c…”)
Sunday Afternoon
Andromeda Apocalypse
Kicker
Guilded Youth
Last Minute (in some paths, I think)
The Test is Now READY
Lunar Base 1
I’m not sure if the PC of Eurydice talks to any male characters about anything but the dead woman, and I think the male NPCs in J’dal talk to each other about something that’s not J’dal, but I’m not positive that the conversations exclude her. (Well, when she joins the group at the beginning Roderick is finishing some kind of joke.)
There’s probably some others I missed because I was bad at IFComp this year and didn’t finish playing the games.
a) most of your speech in the conversation is prompted by imperatives from men, or mediated through men,
b) every time the conversation turns to conflict (which it does extremely quickly) the men speak on your behalf,
c) sausages (not an actual reason).
Going back through it, I suppose it’s technically possible to have an exchange of about three utterances without male characters getting involved; but, mrmf, calling this a separate conversation is pushing it. Might push it into the marginal category, but it’s not a straightforward pass.
Maga beat me to it - in A Killer Headache, extended conversations with Peter about eschatology are not hard to achieve, and the male severed head has brief responses about several subjects. The PC is pretty clearly male.
Not that I’m proud…
Also, I would consider Living Will to be all conversation, which lowers the score even more, I realize.
Oh, and I forgot these, from my blog. I’ll discount the two games I didn’t review, and count games as matches if I scored them equally.
Three right (Shuffling Around, Body Bargain, In a Manor of Speaking), one wrong (Fish Bowl). Four equal (Guilded Youth, Castle Adventure, Last Minute, Escape from Summerland).
Three right (howling dogs, Living Will, The Test is Now READY), one equal (Eurydice).
Kinda but mostly not. howling dogs earned the Banana; Living Will was fourth banana.
Perhaps it’s more something that’d make it feel as though I’m not just making the protagonist female to be female. I mean, I suppose I could write something gender-neutral that could probably be a woman, but it feels like cheating.
It’s not high on the priority list but it’d be neat if an idea for a female protagonist who clearly had to be female came up.
Okay, so you’re locked in a room, and the key is in the keyhole, but on the other side of the door… and the keyhole is a circle, about two inches in diameter… and also you’re wearing boxing gloves?
Or a game where you wake up, and you have amnesia, but in a SHOCKING TWIST it turns out that you’re the Pope.
Or a game where the command “GROW BEARD” is fully, some might say “lovingly”, implemented?
This seems pretty odd to me; if you follow this principle, you only get female protagonists in stories that are centrally about being female. Which seems silly.
Perhaps not clearly had to be, but more, I don’t want to feel like I’m drawing a triangle on a men’s bathroom icon.
So, I meant, a more compelling reason than just-because. Although sometimes you also just have to put something on a back burner or admit a little too soon that idea X won’t work right now–in order to focus on what you have. And by you I mean me.
What if I wouldn’t give a fuck about writing a story with a female protagonist at all costs? Are we discussing human rights, here?
Sometimes I’m just out of focus. But, then again, I’m too dumb to be true.
Just looking at short things I’ve written, these are the ones where switching genders would be… maybe not impossible, but certainly a pretty big transformation of what the game is about:
Manna: this is about the history of a patriarchal religion, and all the characters are members in its hierarchy. Dead By Morning, The Cavity of Time: these are AIF parodies. (If Stiffy Makane became female, that’d be another story entirely. Has to happen sometime, though.) Yellow Dog Running: reliant on assumptions of the slay-the-monster, win-the-princess trope. The War on New Year’s: the PC is Stalin. A female Stalin would be another game entirely. Even if all she does is dance. Ugly Chapter: this is about a specifically male variety of resentment. Olivia’s Orphanorium: this is a rip on a genre of games that invariably have a female protagonist. Moondarkling: Elfboon: a rip on a genre of novels, ditto. Dulle Griet and the Antenorian Icebox: the PC is a folklore character and heavily-gendered Bruegel painting.
Well, the key thing is, it’s not really ‘at all costs’. The costs of writing a female protagonist, as a male author, are just not very high – particularly if you’re not writing the kind of IF that delves deeply into the protagonist’s inner life.
I had a think about this. I’ve had 10 games published online, of them two have female protagonists, six have neutral protagonists (though neutral doesn’t necessarily mean asexual) and the other two each have three or more protagonists with a mix of male, female and neutral genders. Most of the time gender isn’t really all that significant to a story, or at least, not the kinds of story I’ve tended to write.
I find it interesting, for instance, that the Choice of Games design philosophy is to have the player choose a gender at the start. The idea is so that the player can better envision they’re character- it’s a very CRPG kind of feature.
Well, for me it’s more just looking at stuff I said I’d never write and hopefully proving myself wrong or wondering if it was worthwhile not to bother with trying setting/protagonist/detail X or Y.
Which seems to fit into the whole theme of this odds thread–which is trying to prognosticate what sort of odd risks or unusual things people will do or are prone to do, and wondering aloud how we can take risks/why we didn’t before.