This year’s Gencon was record-breaking, bringing in almost
37,000 people. From my not very scientific observations, however, the percentage of attendees that were women was... not very high. As a woman concentrating on the professional side of Gencon, I definitely felt like a bit of an outsider at the con. (And I’m
not the only one. That said, I did meet some amazing women in the industry
1 who deserve to be acknowledged.)
This, combined with some conversations I had both during and after the con, made me think about how my feminist identity
2 informs my work. I
am a feminist. I’m also a gamer. I grew up with board games and video games as a ubiquitous part of my social life. I came to RPGs through LARP and eventually found my way to tabletop games. I love games, I love being a gamer, and I want to make games better so more women will want to be gamers.
Therefore, one of the things I try to do as part of my editing work is to look at any characters or situations with real-world corollaries as objectively as possible, and try to suggest changes that could make the text more appealing (and, often, less offensive). At the top of my hit list are female characters.
So what does this mean? What am I looking for?
I’m looking for female characters that aren’t clichés, aren’t there just to serve as cues for sexah art pieces, and aren’t
Manic Pixie Dream Girls or borderline
Mary Sues either. (Hermione Granger, I’m looking at you.
3) I’m looking for depictions of female characters that don’t assume that sex = gender = heteronormativity.
To get a sense of what I mean, look at the Bechdel Test. Comic creator Alison Bechdel depicted a
test that gauges the richness of the female characters in a given film. To pass, a movie must:
1) have at least two named female characters, who
2) talk to each other about
3) something other than a man.
Most action movies that we draw from in gaming fail miserably. Saturday night at Gencon I spent some quality time watching “Predators.” It was a highly enjoyable giggle. It was also a crap film for women (a crap film in general, really). Some of my absolutely favorite movies fail this test. Many “chick flicks” even fail this test. As the original comic points out, the original “Alien” passes it -- and it’s no coincidence that Ripley is one of the canonical “awesome” female characters in sci-fi. Pretty much every Joss Whedon production passes with flying colors. Many episodes/serials of my beloved Doctor Who do not.
Obviously in a game setting, you’re going to have minimal dialogue, and the characters are going to be focused on the goals of the game, but that doesn’t mean this test can’t serve a purpose for your work. For me, that means that female characters need to be more nuanced and more creatively designed. You should imagine, that if, say, your two female vampires were to meet, they might have some common ground other than vampirism and female genitalia.
If you have three female character writeups in your game, and one of them is a virginal princess type, one of them is an evil (and possibly lascivious) queen, and one of them is a sexless, mysterious, and wise crone-type, we have a problem. Not because any of those are
bad, but because you can do better. We can all do better. What if the crone were actually a bit of a lech? What if the evil queen were also a doting mother? You can bring out their femininity
4 without smooshing them into societal archetypes that are constructed to appeal to heterosexual males. Which is why I don’t suggest that the virginal princess be transformed into someone who’s secretly a hormonal lust monster ... OR a closet lesbian.
Gender is more than sex, and more than sexual orientation. I once played a female cleric of Kord in a D&D campaign. She was, I like to think, very feminine -- but she was also a bruiser with blacksmith’s muscles and a double-axe who wasn’t particularly interested in flirting or sex, because she had better things to do with her time. She wasn’t asexual, she just had other priorities
-- but she was unquestionably female.
When you reduce female characters to broad stereotypes, it makes me think you don’t know -- or care to know -- much about people unlike yourself. (I say “unlike yourself” because the vast majority of writers I’ve edited in the industry are male.
5)
Clearly, I’m also not one to insist that all characters could just as easily be male or female. I think a female character is stronger
6 -- meaning more compelling -- if her gender identity is an important and acknowledged part of who she
7 is. I’ve always found the gender-restricted character classes of Diablo way cooler than the “we’re totally all equal, check out my tiny, boobular Gnome tank” equity of World of Warcraft.
Gender and the portrayal of women in pop culture is a huge issue (there’s even an
entire magazine about it!) and no one post can hope to cover the entire issue. But I’m a woman, I’m a gamer, and I’m in the industry, so I’m going to continue to work in a way that I feel is right and try to make the products I work on better in every way I can. This is one of them.
1) They’re out there! They’re doing great work! They’re writing, and editing, and creating art, and talking about games, and other cool stuff! Particular love goes to the even-better-named-than-I Filamena and fellow librarian Carol from All Games Considered, for being so nice to me at the con.
2) Yes, I am a dyed-in-the-wool liberal. Yes, I am a vocal feminist. No, I don’t think this makes me a stick-in-the-mud political-correctness-obsessed pinhead. (You may think so. Feel free to start an argument with me.)
3) I love Hermione, but she should be bad at more stuff. So should Harry, for that matter - never forget that HP is a fantasy series about the popular kids.
4) I have my own, fairly traditional, occasionally problematic understanding of what “femininity” can mean. This does not mean I am a VICTIM OF THE PHALLOCRACY OMG. But I thought I’d own up to it.
5) That said, one of the most sexist bullshit manuscripts I ever worked on was written by a woman. I was just as vicious to her text as I would be to anyone else’s; just because she’s a woman doesn’t make it not sexist.
6) The rather awesome Chuck Wendig asked the question of “what makes a strong female character” on Google+ while I was brainstorming this post. I think it was quite rude of him not to read my mind and realize I was going to talk about this, but whatever. Go read the answers his followers posted - they’re thought-provoking and worth your time: https://plus.google.com/102598717561259337811/posts/aEqoxjkZ9bw
7) Fascinating stuff going on in Guild Wars 2 development of the androgynous Sylvari. Ree Soesbee's posted some wonderful things on her blog about lore and gender, and the community's doing a lot of talking about gender and sex. Go read up.
8) I realize there's no footnote 8. But I also wanted to give you this link on sexism in Magic the Gathering tournaments, because it's really interesting stuff: http://www.gatheringmagic.com/women-and-magic-the-games-lost-tribe/
