If you’re writing something for public consumption, then it behooves you to consider the public perspective – or get crushed by it.
If there’s a bunch of people out there who think there’s a prescriptive list of essentialist things that make a female or male character ‘bad’ based on nothing beyond the pronouns, then there’s merit in trying to figure out what the pattern is. Or considering it enough that you realize there is no pattern and it’s entirely subjective, which is probably the case.
But, for example, based off a cursory glance of a few web articles, here are things people say make ‘bad’ female characters:
Talking about, describing, or focusing on breasts – on the other hand, I’ve had female friends tell me about their breasts in person.
Talking about, describing, or focusing on sex or sexual attraction – see above.
Female characters who aren’t social or conceal their emotions – can’t women be introverted or cold?
Don’t have any goals or ambitions – that’s any poorly considered character
Focusing on their position in society and wondering how men have it – I’m sure there are many women who think about those things.
Is there really any difference to the above points whether it’s written by a man or a woman? I’m sure male authors are more likely to approach women with excessive physical descriptions because of the unexamined thought/belief that the female character is ‘different’ and therefore must be described in exacting detail and oh my god she’s so hot, unf. I agree with @Fawkes on this.
When it comes to that idea that there’s just a difference between a man writing something and a woman writing the same thing, there’s a part of me that says yes you idiot and another part of me that says no of course not.
As another example, there’s a popular web serial author who everyone was sure was a woman because they ‘wrote their female characters so well’. Then it was revealed they were a man and that aspect of praise vanished.
@Urban – but what does that mean? Is there anything you can put your finger on or is it more of a general vibe?
Amazone qoutes are not public perception. They are at most a vocal minority - and if you write a female protagonist you are always going to get some push back. And accusation of being a mary sue. Always.
Most women don’t think about how their breast constantly. How they bounce, how clothes feels against them - That is what people mean when they say when they say too much focus on breast. Not what a woman might say to a friend.
As for the rest of it. I don’t know which writing advice you get, but I suggest either reading the context of which they are given. Because my guess is that it all depend on stereotype.
A woman sexuality is for example often used to show how ‘evil’ she is. So a sexual woman is evil, because she is sexual and people react with saying: “Don’t do that.”
Interesting conversation. As a man I remember as part of a creative writing group we once did an exercise where we had to try and write two different stories, first one with a pov of someone of the opposite gender and then another with a character of a different nationality. It can be tricky but I found it a good exercise at the time. And actually when I first thought of my WW2 Resistance game idea I focused on the concept you could have an engaging female POV there because French Resistance girls are bad ass.
Personally I would say if you can have both genders in a game too, but if you have a specific story which you feel can’t work with one gender, usually something seriously historical, then it’s up to you. I love Guen because it’s amazingly well written and plotted and you can have a hugely varied character, so the fact its an established female POV doesn’t bother me at all.
*Waves Perspective from some one writing both locked and unlocked stories. (BTW I’m female and my locked game is male.)
Ok, so I’m all for gender choice and I think in most cases it is a very good thing. Buuut in most of the COG’s around here, how much difference does choosing a gender actually make to the storyline? In most cases if you’re lucky you might get a little flavour text here and there but in reality, you could well make them gender undefined if not for the pronouns. (I almost made another story locked female, but decided with only minor tweaking (and leaving out a couple things) I could make it work for gender choice as an example.)
Which brings me to:
In most cases if you can write a decent female NPC, you can most definitely write a female PC (or vice versa) since the players reactions are doing a lot of the work for you anyway.
Although I definitely think the correct pronouns are great, I don’t feel like my gender actually affects the story much in many COGs which is both good and bad. It’s usually good because lets face it, I don’t want to be playing a medieval knight and have someone looking over my shoulder every step of the way yelling “But women aren’t knights!” and generally giving me a hard time, while if I switch to male all those comments disappear as the only difference. And if you’re playing something set in your own universe or in modern times, it really shouldn’t make a huge difference most of the time and be able to be made gender choice. But on the other hand, sometimes I think you can get a stronger story with a predefined character in particular cases. (Stay with me!)
So what do I mean? Lets say you want to write realistic historical fiction. Say based on a fighter pilot in WW2. There (to my knowledge) just weren’t female pilots doing that. To write an accurate female character would mean having to include a whole heap of stuff on how they were managing to conceal their identity something that someone wanting to tell a particular story about Joe average pilot may not want to get into. Sure you could gender flip the entire cast, but apart from not being historically correct, I personally don’t love that as unless you’re careful, it can end up with the NPC’s being less defined than they should be unless a lot of extra work is put into making it seem right.
And then we have character (not just gender) locking. I’d personally like to see more of there, where you have a particular character with a set background and go from there for a more “book” like game I guess. Guinivere and Gaslight (from what I’ve heard) I think would fit into that, as would one of my WIP’s. By writing from a very particular character viewpoint, you can do more story based telling, but it’s going to be something some will like and some will hate.
So yep, basically if there’s a good enough reason for it, I’m not adverse to gender or character locking myself. I haven’t read everything published but I haven’t seen anything that’s been really bad in terms of writing male locked simply to push unrealistic stereotypes and I still think male locking is in the minority of games on the site and only in the HG range.
FYI anywone who is interested in female WW2 pilots outside Russia and ones based in Britain, I didn’t even know the Air Transport Auxiliary existed until the audio group Big Finish said they were doing a release about it…
Your entire post basically said what I was going to, so thank you.
@DreamingGames - the views expressed in reviews may be the minority (or they may not) but either way, they are important in acting as perception influencers. The impact these have on the general public as a whole is proven and it often leads to such shenanigans as “spiking”, “tanking”, and “fluffing” … it is true that you will get pushback for writing a female protagonist but that doesn’t discount reviews “just because you’ll always get pushback.”
I you, my friend but there were female pilots in WW2, some combat but most non-combat or training.
That aside, I’m going to have to disagree with you on a couple of points. The first point is that while gender has very little (if any) real impact on most CS games, it still matters to some. By having a choice, you allow your game to connect closer to those who it does matter to, male or female.
The second area I’m going to disagree with you on is the amount of work it takes to write a detailed MC - the MC in a CS game is always the most detailed and focused character an author writes - no NPC will compare with the effort and time an author puts in constructing a viable MC. From stats to choices every aspect of CS focuses on the MC and not the NPC.
That is not to say gender-locked stories are always flawed - the Infinity series is one series I was able to connect even though I played as a guy. That is unusual for me, I can’t even play games like Batman because they don’t connect the way they should. A lot of people love the literary aspects of Gaslight but the disconnect I felt with the MC soured the game for me.
@Jacic’s character lock concept is a different subject that deserves its own thread.
There you go, bad example. I learn something every day, did not realise there were female fighter pilots on the front line in WW2
Oh no I agree. I’ve obviously worded it badly. Although a lot of work is put into making the MC, I would say that only a small proportion of it in most games is actually gender specific though and in many cases is very malleable to the player’s wants and/or decisions.
I guess I’m not saying that I’m encouraging genderlocking for the sake of writing them, only if there’s a specific reason for doing so, as you can sometimes get a disconnect. I did a little census a while back and realised that I actually haven’t bought a good number of games that are genderlocked male. Maybe it’s a subconcious disconnect, maybe it was just the subject matter, probably a little of both.
If you are a male MC in choice of romance then you will get a brother who will stay “we are drinking tea like two proper ladies”. Can’t you see how it was meant to be a conversation between a female MC and her sister instead?
There is the fact that the Queen will doubt she was pregnant from you and think you have a child with another person… Clearly this scene was wrote with a king and a female MC in mind.
And in midsummer you will spend Saturday crossdressed as a woman (and a very attractive one as the game describe) and no one will ever know you are a man. The facial hair will never grow, your voice will never slip up, etc.
@Rhodeworks and @DreamingGames: the few times I’ve seen a female character and gone ‘yep, this was written by a man’, it’s not so much that the characters are too masculine. It’s either that they’re too feminine, in a really stereotypical idea of What Women Are Like, or they’re ‘this is such a Strong Female Character because look, she can kick ass and she doesn’t like girly stuff like fashion’ (the second one I’ve seen from female authors too, to be fair, but male ones tend to be the worse culprits).
Edit to say: it’s not that you couldn’t write either of these types and have it work; it’s where the author didn’t pull it off well enough for the characters to come off as people rather than stereotypes that it’s jarring.
Something interesting I’ve noticed in the several threads where people have debated how much the gender choice (and sometimes sexuality choice, race choice etc.) should affect things is that they always seem to focus on the negatives. People will argue that to make things realistic a female (gay, etc) character should experience discrimination, but there’s never any mention of more positive differences like how other members of the in-group respond. I guess it might be nice to have some variation based on the choice, but ones that aren’t just negatives.
I find myself side-eyeing the ‘but historical realism!’ argument a bit, since often it seems based more on a pop-culture flavoured understanding of history that says that in Ye Olden Days all men fought and all women sat around knitting and having babies and no one ever deviated from those roles.
And this is what I mean about gender flipping entire worlds,. It takes a lot of work and attention to detail to get everything just right. This was written as a Henry/Anne Bolyn style game and gender flipped for male. (It doesn’t necessarily apply to properly written gender choice PC’s without world flipping.)
That reasoning I think would have been more valid like 20 years ago. I’m not sure about exact numbers and maybe there are still more male gamers, but I think now days females are more open about wanting to play video games… And maybe not just those dating sim kinda games of which I see a lot on the app store.
I think that might be bc women are used to the fact that most games are made for male audiences and they might think that either they have to put up with this or they just don’t play videogames.
Hasn’t this been mostly disproven? The male-female gamer ratio is something like 55:45, last I heard (could be wrong; don’t quote me). There are more female gamers than people think, and they tend to buy quite a bit of merchandise. It’s a profitable demographic that is ravenous for inclusive games. Saying there are more male gamers than female gamers simply isn’t a valid excuse anymore. (And it entirely leaves out nonbinary folk.)
Very true, but I think, in general, there’s more of what you’d call “hard core” male gamers, whereas women tend to play more casually. That said, in genres like interactive fiction, I imagine that female gamers would make up a much larger percentage than with things like first person shooters.
That’s possible, but I know that, as a female gamer, I don’t tend to get put off a game just because the MC is male. For instance, I wouldn’t look at games like Mario and Legend of Zelda and assume I won’t enjoy the game just because the MC is male. With games like that, I don’t feel that the gender of the character really impacts on the story a lot.
I guess the main problem is that games with male MCs are generally considered “gender neutral” whereas games with a female MC are often considered to be specifically “for girls.”
You’d have to ask those who genderlock their games to males. I feel like this is the reason: if you’re allowing the player to choose between a gender, it slightly limits how the story will expand. If you’re genderlocked to male (or female), other characters and the whole game overall will have a clearer way to interact, because the game is written solely for a male/female. Honestly, there are games where if you choose a gender, the game doesn’t really care besides changing the way how it addresses you. Wouldn’t it have been better if a game was locked to one gender and thus the play wouldn’t have been so awkward? But the question here was why there are so many HGs genderlocked to male, so you’ll have to read the first sentence of this reply.
A first person shooter I think falls into the same category as Super Mario for example. All I see is a gun? And there is almost no interaction with other characters beside them giving me a mission and stuff. I don’t think it matters that much in that kinda game. But when it comes to an rpg it’s a different matter again. Sure games like Skyrim, Fallout, Dragon Age etc allows the player to pick the gender and more and more games do this that’s a good thing. But the majority of the games are still made with a male protagonist.
And I think that matters even more when is comes to CYOA where the players are supposed to be able to relate to the MC.
Are the current gender locked male stories written by guys? Could be your simple answer.
In terms of “character locked” (as apposed to gender locked) that would just fall on what the story is that is being told. (The only published one I can think of so far is gaslight.)
In terms of how many games there are though. I think there’s only one that’s character locked (male). (If you don’t include ones like divided we fall that have both male and female characters).
Gender locked male:
Great tournament series and swamp castle (all by same author)
Sabers series.
Lords of Aswick
It’s actually only 3 authors writing genderlocked male unless I’m missing some? (Taking character locked out of this, but that’s only 1 more anyway).
I personally don’t remember any other. My point is, I’m a male and would rather be forced play a female with the game receiving well that I am a female, rather than choose male and the game flow be “neutralish” and awkward.
you, my friend but there were female pilots in WW2, some combat but most non-combat or training.
