Silly, yes, but it’s pretty much what the mainstream media do. (Also true if you substitute “gay” or “trans” or “non-white” or “disabled” or even just “old”…)
Ok. If you talk about risks then I can be following the thread. I mean: i don’t know anything about how a female would think and behave in any given situation. Although I hate the 2bit model we see i.e. In movies, that’s all I know about them. It’s either the amazon (so:male) Hellen Ripley or the all whiney usual candy of a girl. If that is all then I’m not venturing into trying and write about women.
Writing should be an inner dialogue, being fully true to oneself. I don’t think I would be able to be true while pretending to be a woman. I’m not nearly as good.
My point, though, was that it sometimes sounds like male PC are just “easy” or too mainstream and one has to play the girl to be somewhat “right”. Dunno. Guess I’m overreacting.
I see writing (and reading) as among other things, being an opportunity to try a second skin. I’m not really a shop assistant, a robot, a monkey or a noble woman, but it’s fun to try and imagine how things might feel if I were. As fascinating as I am, I don’t think author-insert should be the go-to model for writing protagonists.
Actually, all too often IF tries to have the protagonist be the player, leaving the player to fill in the gap left by the missing personality, and while this can be interesting it doesn’t always make for the most motivated of stories.
Well, yeah, it’s a lot harder if your main cultural consumption is mainstream movies and videogames, which really suck at this. (My totally unhelpful solution to this, as for many things, is to recommend that you read great big piles of books instead.)
(And I am, obviously, pretty heavily invested in IF doing better than mainstream movies and videogames. Which is already true, I think, but this is a tiny bit like saying that at least you’re more gay-tolerant than Uganda.)
But, hm. We spend lots of time writing IF where the protagonist is an orc or a post-apocalyptic cowboy or a dog. These are much, much less like me than women are. I haven’t ever hung out with any post-apocalyptic cowboys, or read anything written by an orc.
So I can see that argument working if basically all your PCs are a fairly uncomplicated version of yourself; there are writers who work like that, for sure.
Yeah, that’s not really it. I don’t think you can really blame an individual work for having a male protagonist, at all. (That’s why I think the Bechdel Test is really best-applied over populations: you can’t really blame a particular movie about, say, the trenches in WWI for having predominantly male characters. But if 95% of the movies being made are set in situations where male characters predominate, then you have a great big problem.)
I think, straightforwardly, there are risks to writing female protagonists as a male author; but I think they’re minor or non-issues in most games, and in the ones that remain… they’re fixable. And it’s something that we should be doing more to fix together. And fixing shit is something that, as a community, we are pretty good at when we put our minds to it.
Then make a comp. I’m not joking.
Nah, ok. There is more to it. We will discuss orcs tomorrow: it’s 2am here.
I just want to ask: Joey, if Aliss was a male PC, would the game have been different? If we use female characters just for the sale of statistics, then what for?
Truth? Aliss is female because I wanted her name to be a futuristic version of Alice, as a literary reference to someone stuck in a dream world: Alice in Wonderland. Despite what various films might have suggested, Alice in Wonderland isn’t about drugs or fighting Jabberwockys or anything sinister, it’s primarily about logic: propositional logic and dream logic. The name fitted, so she had to be called Aliss and to be a she. But yeah, the story would have proceeded just the same if it had been a guy- though I might have struggled to find a fitting name (Morpheus is too active and too obvious, Ikelos misses the mark as well).
This is a really interesting discussion about what can writing do and what should writers do.
Re: Joey. I agree, in fact I would say novels and writing in general are the best media for experiencing the inner life of others. To be totally in the head of someone who is not you and maybe not even like you. On the writing end it can be a way to find out about those other people.
What maga said about the Bechdel test is right; it is a statistic that can show something. But it definitely can’t be something to tell people what to write about. Any good writer will ultimately develop a decent assessment of what kind of things they feel they can write truthfully about, and this will vary tremendously. I don’t doubt Marco’s self-assessment of why he isn’t interested in writing female characters, and any change in that position would have to come from his own interest. Outside arm bending is likely to lead to false writing. When I read Deidra Kai’s blog post about Andromeda Apocalypse, she said ‘I think it would be neat if the idea of a single-sexed future society were actually explored in some detail, but my guess is that the author just didn’t really think much about including any characters who weren’t dudes. Sigh.’ … It’s clear about her subjectivity, but I felt it was kind of silly for this game. This is the author’s story about a man and a robot stuck in space, with explicit subject matter of cosmological mysteries. If a player can’t accept elemental level choices of the author about their creation, that has nothing to do with the author.
I personally have no doubt that some writers can write any kind of character with truth. That doesn’t mean that they always will succeed, but they can and often will. If you think through your own reading history and remember all the times men transparently wrote women, and women transparently wrote men - I couldn’t count it, for me, it’s too high. Viewed in that elemental light, I think it is not such a great divide a lot of people seem to think it is per se, though not necessarily so for individual writers who don’t feel they can do it. My favourite author is Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine, who has written huge casts of men and women of all ranks of English society with great truthfulness, usually set at the time in which each book was written, for 50 years+ and continues to do so. I think of her feat, and also of her answer to the question of whether one sex can really write the other, which I don’t remember verbatim but was along the lines of ‘We know by now this deception works.’
I prefer writing women, probably out of the sense that when I write men I grossly overestimate the dangers that I will write characters who are like myself. I also had this idea when I was a teenager that women were just more interesting than men. Of course that’s a broad and nonsensical idea, but at some level it’s bourne out in my behaviour so I’m still more interested in writing women.
Trying to work out when a thing in a story is a statement or advocation, and when it’s not, is one of my great ongoing fascinations in interpreting all kinds of fiction. When is a character in a story some symbol for all of that type character and when is s/he not? There are no concrete answers. The work itself and its context may seem to generate nods in one direction or the other, but they’ll change over time, or across people or whatever. A famous example of this that’s stuck in my head was with one of my favourite films, Blue Velvet. When Isabella Rossellini’s masochistic character asks Kyle Maclachlan to hit her, audiences were agog in general, but some said ‘How could an actress let herself portray such a self-abasing character? It’s sick.’ But the actress didn’t have a problem because she was just being true to character who could easily exist, and David Lynch said ‘She is not a symbol of all women, she is this character in this situation.’ That has to be true sometimes because otherwise how are we going to write truthful characters if we prohibit certain types from even appearing? At other times you’ll encounter a character in fiction who seems so false it feels like an insult to that type of character or even a whole sex. It is an endless pool of ideas and counter ideas.
- Wade
I think a pervasive cultural otherization of women plays heavily into this. Like maga hints at, some people are more willing to identify with green pig monster cannibals than with women.
The times that I’ve read a female character written by a male author and thought, “wow, this rings false!” it was usually because the woman was being written in a way that was still obviously in service of male fantasies even though she was supposedly the viewpoint character.
E.g., she spent a lot of time thinking about her own hotness in a weirdly externalized way. Or – this happens a lot with Neal Stephenson, and is one of the reasons I eventually gave up reading his new stuff – she just acts completely unmotivated, as though to say: Women! Who can guess what is in their heads?! Bonus negative points when the unmotivated action in question is to suddenly decide to have sex with the hero.
But in each case I felt like the problem wasn’t that the author was in principle incapable of writing about women or imagining a female perspective; it was that the author was sufficiently wrapped up in his own ideas about women that the exercise of imagination and empathy didn’t really happen in the first place.
Ok, I may have exaggerated when I said that one (read: me) could not be able to picture a woman without being one. Sorry for being imbecile.
That said, my two points:
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A male Orc is a male. He can possibily have the same thoughts as a human male, just rather more simple. Like “ugh, ruargh, female, yum!” instead of “oh, milady, your eyes remind me of the blue waves of the Caribbean.” Also, yes: it is easier to picture an Orc than a woman and to identify with one. An Orc can be WHATEVER. I can make a believable orc that loves daisies and heavymetal, that argues with anybody still says “sorry” at the end of every other rant. When I picture a woman I want it to be realistic. A woman that a woman reader could read and say “yes, this sounds right.” And this is far more hard to accomplish. Not impossible, though. I suppose it’s just a matter of sensibility. Yes, the heroine who is hot and shows the curves and gives head to the hero is NOT the girl i would like to read about, let alone write about.
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What I was trying to suggest is the feeling I get when reading posts about the Bechdel test. It doesn’t sound about the need we have of female characters but a rather annoying thought following which we should use female characters just for the sake of it. You use a male PC = you are a dork. But, as I’ve said, I was obviously overreacting. As an example, I dig Porpentine’s work about sexuality and genders (even if I didn’t reach to the lengths of your story and now you hate* me), while I simply puked on a very famous italian thriller in which the female protagonist had a hard time all the book because of her period. And it was all in that: the period. So, according to the author, 20 days a month a woman has no real problem and life is blossoming.
*I wrote “hate” which sounds funny, but I prefer it over the more ambitious “disrespects”.
Ok, so Let’s think about it: Deirdra Kiai writes about women. Does she write about skin color, too? I can’t seem to remember it. This means that skin color is not an issue, while gender is. Is this right in any way? If we should forget about races, why shouldn’t we forget about gender too?
I think this is going in a positive direction. I have definitely heard of the Bechdel Test being applied to race, and as we are seeing, the picture is often even worse. And I also agree that you can’t apply it meaningfully to a single work.
Writing a female (or non-white) PC would definitely be out of my comfort zone. I must confess that writing a zombie PC was totally self-serving: I wanted to say something about personal experiences of being unable to trust your own mind and body - they are greatly exaggerated in A Killer Headache, but they are completely based on my own experience.
As for what I would like to present to the world as a writer, I think there is a lot of room for exploring male roles in the “Free To Be You and Me” generation. I feel like I never really tried to understand men until I was in my 30s, and now it’s a fascinating subject for me. So I want to write stories about men.
But I want other people to write stories about women, and people who are not of European descent, young, “able-bodied,” cis-gendered, etc. And I want those stories to be recognized on their merits and included in the canon. That’s what the test is about. Maybe I’ll try some of that as a creative challenge sometime, but that’s not the main point. Most of the time I find plenty of challenge in writing what I know intimately.
You can’t really write authentically about someone from a culture, subculture, caste or class that you don’t know anything about, but it’s not that great a challenge to find out a bit about others. I really like Balzac because he tried to capture every kind of person there was in French society at the time, and he was able to attempt that because he made an effort to observe people.
Not having female or non-white protagonists or important NPC’s can’t be sexist or racist per se, I’d say. But most of the time, or at least very often, it can’t be very realistic either. If you’re writing a piece of IF (or some other narrative) whose setting is one that in real life is likely to contain people of diverse genders, ethnicities, social strata, etc., then realism (if that’s something you strive for) would dictate NPC’s of diverse genders, ethnicities, social strata, etc. And then, too, the gender, race and social status of the protagonist (and NPC’s) would presumably be choosen with an eye to what makes the story as interesting etc. as possible (rather than for the sake of filling the quota of this or that demographic group).
Joey and Felix, I think you both have an important point: Realistic writing, and I would broaden that a little more to say simply good writing, recognizes the wide variety of people in the world and represents a range of characters truthfully. Often stereotypical characters are the result of lazy writing.
Yeah, I think this discussion tends not to get very far when it’s framed as being about “is person/group/work X sexist or racist?” – that puts everyone on the defensive and involves a lot of arguing about evidence by omission. And even if we’re talking about a case where they said something that seemed racist/sexist, I like to take this guy’s advice as much as I can manage to.
Applying quota at an individual level also leads to people putting token minorities into their work as a kind of “hey I’m not whatever-ist” marker, which is also not useful or truthful.
I sometimes try to back off a character I’ve created and ask myself, “okay, what aspects of this character did I pick by default, and would it be better or worse for the story if I instead went against default on this?” And some of the time, the answer is something like, “well, you’re writing about 18th century French aristocracy, so, yeah, they’re going to be some white people unless you’re willing to make a big part of the story about how it is that non-white people wound up in this position.” And sometimes it’s “I don’t know that I could possibly get this type of character right, even if I did some research into the topic, because it’s pretty far from my own experience and I don’t want to get it wrong or appropriate someone else’s culture.”
So I think that exercise is worth doing, but I think the other side of the coin is to encourage the contributions of people who can write authentically about those things that I’m unaware of – as capmikee was saying.
That’s a fascinating little game. In my youth, I only ever managed to reach the “read a book instead” ending.
Hey cool, I hadn’t played that one before. I like the simplicity of it, and the way the interface makes itself a little clearer over time. Thanks, thread that was previously making me cringe a lot!
The artwork is super cute. Is there any middle ground in the story I missed (edit - I mean, a middle ground where the mob does something either than reject or deweirdify? Something positive?) I ask because the funny thing is, I realise that if it were a straight storybook, I would accept whatever its outcome was. ‘Such and such happened. This girl was ostracised, these other girls were mean or just unthinking. I feel bad for the girl. These girls couldn’t tolerate difference.’ When it’s interactive but there is no way for the mob of girls or part thereof to show any real empathy, then I feel they are badly done by - or rather that the world is badly done by. I experience it as a mini world model but with some views I can’t play with that I know are there. That’s the kind of difference interactivity or non interactivity makes to me in how I interpret a story like this.
- Wade