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[PATV] Tuesday, August 30, 2011 - Extra Credits Season 2, Ep. 7: True Female Characters
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
This week, we look at what it takes to write a great female game character.
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To treat female characters as fully realized persons within the narrative, and not just obligatory eye candy and/or accessories to the character growth of a more important (male) character.
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Also, creating a female character who likes pink, or wears leg-warmers, or something similarly 'girly', does not necessarily mean it's a trope or that the female character is somehow static because of it.
Bottom line, most games out right now don't do much by way of character development: male, female, or alien. This entire universe, across the board, needs to be better tended to if you want gaming to be higher narrative art.
I will also play a bit of Devil's Advocate here, everything that follows is for the sake of discussion, not a personally held belief. Some women enjoy being eye-candy, and not all characters in a narrative must be dynamic. What's more: characters who are sexual are far more complete/dynamic/mature a character than those who are chaste.
@Skellyton3 They were referring to Other M specifically.
There's too much in the way of stereotypes in games. I've seen my share of testosterone muscle bound males, and slender, inappropriately clothed/sexual inclined women.
They work for some games, but it's bad to see them in every game. And if you think hard about it, everything is stereotyped in games somewhere (and I talk of games that have characters not tetris and such).
I would actually argue that this is a good thing. I'm glad that - with the exception of Dom's search for his wife, the comedic flirtation between Baird and Sam, and I think a relationship between Hoffman and Bernie is mentioned or implied - character's genders are irrelevant. It reinforces the notion that, in this world, societal trivialities like gender issues have become a waste of time, as well as the militarized view of gender, where you are a soldier first and man/woman second. While this isn't appropriate for all games, I think the argument that "well she's just a man with boobs" is inappropriate, and that it's more like "she's just a person." Just a recent example.
Beyond Good and Evil! (!!) Jade is not _overtly_ motherly, and it's not her children per-se, but most of the game's latter half is underpinned by the slow loss of pretty much all the family Jade has, and her desperate quest to save them is, well, you COULD replace her with a male character and have superficially the same story, but her femininity adds an enormous amount of poignancy and urgency to the story. And it's all the better because the game doesn't state this outright, it's just an everpresent background facet of the character. (And of course, leads to one of the all-time saddest scenes in gaming)
No, there are absolutely very important feminine ways of dealing with the world, solving problems, and they aren't as simple as society wants this from me, and I'm this other thing. And you fellas are completely missing what would be different, and that's why you have all these women warriors who are just a different avatar, but they could just as easily have been drawn as a male. The best you've come up with is to give the female characters different kinds of powers, like making them healers, psychics, etc. But really, those things could be done by male avatars just as well.
Here is one example of a female style challenge -- keeping everyone in the family happy and balanced. Oh, that explains why the Sims and other management games attracts so many female players. What about a female character that arranges life for her loved ones behind the scenes? What about solving problems without pulling a trigger and escalating violence using methods of control? How about characters that take time to process their feelings and emotions and spend time with friends and family to recuperate from traumas? How about a character with a story about intimacy or lack thereof in a one-on-one romantic relationship? The experience of violence from family members in domestic situations are stories of real women. How about using intuition and compassion instead of logic to respond to a situation? How about instead of physical fighting with strange bad guys, you have to find ways to tread a fine line of not attracting the wrong kind of attention and souring a friendship?
Orihime was a great female character in the anime series, Bleach. Her motivations and her reactions to events are very different that those of the boys in the story. Rogue is a great female character in X-Men with unique psychological demons. They are fleshed out by movies and other media, rather than in games, but they would be nice models that maybe one day will get games with mechanics and storylines that explore their way of dealing with the world. They've made games for Spider-Man and lots of games where you can play female heros as part of a collection, like Marvel Avengers. Why not a game for a female hero already existing in literature or pop culture?