Accidental femsploitation?

I like to spend some of my time creating game ideas and writing them up. One involved a pair of girls, who were Best Friends Forever since childhood, and one of them must rescue the other from the evil villain, using the power of science.

I shared the (slightly more fleshed out) early design with a friend, and his reaction was, "femsploitation, nice, i can dig it."

I was taken aback. Exploiting stereotypes of femaleness for the sake of humor? That sounds bad! I didn't mean to do that! Except, I kind of did. I was giggling a little inside as I wrote up the storyline.

And then I begin to question the validity of the work and my goals in how I set it up. Am I going to include something that trivializes the experience of women or any other group represented in the story? Am I going to offend feminists by letting the women in the story have "trivial" interests like crushes and BFF? Will I trivialize the experiences of black women pursuing advanced science degrees if I make the main character into a black woman scientist who makes no big deal of being what she is? After all, I haven't thus far consulted any black woman scientists in the real world to try to find out what they feel about life, the universe, and everything.

I've also spent a lot of time in the past couple of weeks reading about feminism and concepts like privilege, wherein a person doesn't realize the benefits they have or the ways in which another group is disadvantaged. So I feel an urge to do mental backflips to try to see what I might be overlooking in terms of messages I accidentally convey that could somehow hurt people.

But I think I am on target. I wanted to make a story that pushes the boundaries in storytelling a bit, something that takes the default superhero "man saves woman hooray!" story and turns it on its side, to "woman saves BFF hooray!" and see what happens. I want to reach the "normal female" audience, or the audience who has a certain narrow idea of what a "normal female" is, and tell them it's okay and possible to become a strong woman without giving up everything familiar and girlish if they don't want to. I want to say, you can have a major, dramatic life experience without it being all about falling in love and living happily ever after with your SO, even if you are a woman. I want to celebrate values of friendship and community; whether you think of that as stereotypically feminine or not, I believe those are good things!

Yes, I have it in mind to play off of some stereotypical female behaviors, partly for the sake of humor. But I don't mean to pin down and weaken the female character with these behaviors, nor to define her with them. I mean to allow her to have them, without reducing her overall strength and capability.

And I realize it's impossible to predict everything that could possibly offend anyone. Maybe it's overly feminine to worry about it in the first place, or maybe it's just the same kind of quandary that many standard-white-men face when someone first accuses them of ignoring their privilege, but it's taken conscious effort for me to move past it. My solution is this:

1. Don't deliberately include content I know to be really offensive to some groups of people.
2. Acknowledge any feedback from offended parties and try to consider them next time.
3. Acknowledge that no story will ring true to every audience member.

I can't write something that illuminates all aspects of an ideal world at once, and also resonates with all possible readers. My work will be incomplete in that sense, and it will be flawed in some ways. Then, 100 years from now, it may seem offensively old-fashioned and stereotypical. But it will still have value now, and it will put something new into the mix of culture out there. I think that is a good goal: create something that is different from most of the other video game and superhero stories out there, and see if anyone follows that path.

That would be my favorite possible outcome: as a result of something I make, more people create major characters and concerns that are minorities amongst the current collection of characters and concerns in the medium, and eventually we get to have stories that make me think and feel more new things, and help me become a broader-minded person, able to believe in new possibilities.

Arrogance in a casual game design (about butterflies)

In checking out the Chrome web store, I've found various Mahjong games. One I picked up a few months ago, Mahjong Butterfly, I found to be fairly enjoyable for a mindless, relaxing variety of game. You can pick up three different tiles at once and match any of them, so it's rare to be seriously stuck. And there is a "butterfly collection" component on the side, which allows for an excuse to keep playing the game longer than a handful of rounds, where you still feel like you're achieving progress toward a longer-term goal. I eventually filled out the butterfly catalogue, and wandered off from the game for a while.

The other day, I was looking to fill that mindless puzzle game urge again, and thought, why not a couple rounds of this game again? I never uninstalled it (mind, it was a bookmark app anyway -- another issue entirely) so it's an easy thing to find.

Turns out, they've updated the game.

My butterfly catalogue is empty. I don't really care. It's almost nice to have that secondary goal available again.

It loads with a 30-second video ad. This is irritating, but would be tolerable, except that from time to time, the game will bug out and freeze up. I can't click on anything. 10 seconds of no input is about my threshold before I refresh -- and then I have to wait for the ad again.

But the thing that bothers me the most is the "Would you like to share this achievement?" questions. When I first picked it back up, it started spamming me with four of these popup messages per butterfly, and some of them seemed to be exactly the same. I have to tell it, "No! No! No. No!!" before I can get back to my game. It doesn't even say where it would share anything if I told it yes; I assume either Facebook or they have something on their own company game site. And I absolutely don't care enough about this game to want to tell everyone on facebook that I play it, much less that I have found a dozen different butterflies. (Obviously, this is an issue with many Facebook apps, that aggressively try to trick/persuade users into spamming their friends with messages from the app, rather than respectfully allowing a default setting of "Nah, I don't want to say much about this to anyone.")

Annoyance with this primes me to be annoyed at the hint button. Sometimes I look away from the screen while I'm playing this low-priority game. But take 15 seconds of inactivity, and it starts blinking. Hint, hint, hint, hint! When I finally come back to the game, I either push the button, or I click on a random tile I didn't really want to mess with yet, because of the irritation of the blinking. It's a little thing, but in the context of the way I play the game, it suggests to me a huge arrogance. "This game is important! You are definitely focusing only on it! If you can't figure out what to do in our time limit, it is certainly because you are too stupid to see the solution, and you could not be either strategizing several moves ahead or attending to something off the computer!"

Ultimately, the take-away message for game design that I have built up for myself here is this: Don't be arrogant. Accept that your players may not consider your work, no matter how lovely or brilliant, to be the center of their world. Make sure there is an options menu, wherein they can turn off all the repetitive demands for attention that you might think are a good idea to include for some users. Be respectful in your requests for players to do the work of free advertising (i.e."sharing") for you, and back off if they're not interested.

Gender-neutral language and storytelling

Today, I saw this blog post about dogs and smurfs. It discusses how stories about women are often viewed as stories for women, rather than stories for people to read, and it suggests this has to do with our language, in which we usually assume that unknown people or creatures are male, as well as a kind of tokenism, where in most children's stories, the main group of protagonists contains only one girl, and her main character trait is that she is a girl.

I've believed for some time that our language shapes our thinking. We hear "he" often enough and we come to assume "he" ourselves. We don't have a gender-neutral pronoun in "proper" English.

Now, for some time, I've assumed that it must be a worse problem in languages like Spanish and French. The very nouns are masculine and feminine. How does it affect you to hear that this object is masculine, and that one is feminine? If the language sticks objects into a male/female category, wouldn't that make it harder on some subconscious level to break yourself out of male/female stereotypical behavior?

But then I read some of the comments following that blog post, and saw people from France and Iceland saying that in their native languages, they have stories about different kinds of creatures, and the different creatures have different default-gender implications. So they get a broader spread of female and male protagonists in their children's stories, where the turtle is generally a girl, in keeping with the femininity of the noun for "turtle", or the gorilla is a boy.

Here in the English-speaking land, we don't assume a gender via our nouns, and then the result is that we just assume everything defaults to male, and our stories come out weighted with a male population. Which I believe feeds into hesitancy and underconfidence in many women whose favorite childhood female role models always follow the lead of the (male) hero/prince/leader in the end.

Serves me right for assuming things about other cultures without talking to natives about it.

I'm still jealous of Japanese and its ability to comfortably refer to someone as "that person" instead of "he" or "she", though.