Gender in Avadon: The Black Fortress

I played the demo and then very nearly didn't buy this game. I changed my mind and bought it after I found the developer's blog, and rediscovered that he'd done the Avernum games as well, one or two of which I've played and enjoyed before. But it was really hard for me to be optimistic after the very start of the game: character selection.

The men are fighters, and the women are casters.

That's it. There's no choice, no customization, in that regard.

I will concede, at least it is a 50-50 split. The two blade-wielding characters are men, and they're matched by two female caster options. And I've yet to be in any way insulted by anyone's clothes in this game; everyone seems pretty reasonably dressed. (Within the bounds of tradition, you know, wizards going to do battle in robes.) These are good things. And I understand that it's easier, when you don't have a big development team, to limit the number of sprites you have to create.

But my first gut reaction of dismay and resignation was telling, and in fact, being halfway through the game, I feel my gameplay experience is negatively affected by the inability to choose a warrior chick for my main character. I picked the shaman, but it's just not the same.

See, I have the habit when I play an RPG, if I can choose a class for the main character I have on hand all the time, it will be something like a paladin if that's available. Something built for survival. Why? Because sooner or later, they tend to put you into one or two solo missions. If you're a glass cannon, and you're prone to dying on your own, it's going to be a problem. And in fact, there are solo missions in this game, and I did feel a little irritable about it, and I think I had to reload once, because it was hard. And as well, I'd absorbed enough of the in-game thematic encouragement to think of myself as totally badass and able to handle anything. Thankfully, I chose a shaman and not a wizard, so I could summon a pet to help hold off some of the groups of enemies. But if I had the blademaster, I could have just run in and attacked everything and I think it would have been more satisfying.

The other problem I have is that when you're exploring, it's just practical to have your melee characters go in front. That way they get most of the default enemy attention, and they have less distance to run to get into the fray. Now, the way the game interface is set up, you can put someone at the top of your roster to be the "lead" character, i.e. the one that walks around in front. But this also means that this is the character who steps forward when you go to take an action, like open a door, open a chest, or talk to someone. This is the default person who picks up inventory items, and the default person you shop for. So, I feel like this is the person in charge of my party. Not my "main" character. Doesn't help when I take the blademaster on a mission where I get to work with other soldiers and he starts going on about how "I'm so happy I have my own command, now!" Hey, man! This is MY command! I'm the one in charge! Jerk.

On a related note, but not so much to do with gender: I have yet to find any characters I really like in this game. All the companion characters are crazy and obsessed about something and usually really violent regarding their obsession. I feel like I'm playing through the Facebook movie, where everybody is shifty and bitter and I don't much identify with any of them. At least they're...interestingly flawed characters? I guess? But, man, when I take the wizard girl everywhere, and then she's like, "Hey! We need to talk. Look, I'm tired of waiting around here all the time. When are you going to take me out hunting?!?!" and I'm like, "Uh. I take you everywhere. Everywhere! We just got back from a 5-story dungeon crawl!" but all I can say to make her happy is "You're right. We should go hunting soon." Well, that's a little weird.

Note that I'm not through with the game, and I can already see a plot reason developing as to why all the people I can pick to go adventuring with are slightly psychotic.

In fact, the only person I really unreservedly like in the game is a duke. One duke. He's all young and idealistic and wanting to use his power for peace after years and years of war in his country.

Which brings me back to the gender discussion. It seems that most all of the people at the top of the power ladder here are male. You could say, hey, it's just a feudal society, so what do you expect? But -- there are lots of women with power. All the shaman women seem to have power, they're just isolated and people don't necessarily respect them anymore. (Aside from the one lord's shaman wife, who talks big, but she's just kind of isolated, and opinionated by herself in a little garden, I guess?) Redbeard's "wives" are the people with most of the day-to-day power in the ultra-powerful fortress of Avadon itself, but really, they are subservient to Redbeard, and maybe not that happy about it. They are powerful women, but there is a glass ceiling, maybe. And Redbeard is set up as the ultimate power that no one can defeat (unless, I suppose, you do it yourself -- again, I haven't gotten far enough to see how that option might play out.)

Ultimately, the power balance in Avadon is convoluted enough that I'm willing to let it lie. I have mixed feelings about the name "Redbeard's wives" for the three powerful, dangerous, competent women who answer directly to the man in charge, given that none of them like the name and it's evidently intended to be slightly derogatory, but okay, maybe we're dealing thematically with sexism here and it's making a point.

But there's no reason that the ultimate powerful rulers of the different countries should all be men. This isn't medieval Earth. No one in the game's world ever questions that a woman can be as powerful as a man. The idealistic duke could be a duchess. The shaman wife of the iron-fisted lord could be reversed to a shaman husband of an iron-fisted lady (if you had a sprite for a male shaman). That would be even more of a compelling character, I think: the violent woman trying to strengthen her leadership position at any cost for the long-term protection of her people.

I think I've seen two soldier leaders bugged to display a female warrior while the dialogue text refers to them as "he". Every time it happens, I get excited. Is this a lady in an active combat leadership position? ...Oh. (So then I kind of keep flipping their gender in my mind, and trying to assume they are women as they appear, until they open their mouths again.)

Anyway. It's a good game, overall. Worth playing if you like old-school RPGs with skinny sprite graphics, and lots of complex moral choices with no clear-cut "best" option. Possibly a tad violent (being that you're plotwise expected to kill anyone who defies your organization and won't submit for punishment). And most of my gender-related issues with it are subtle and complex rather than blatant and obvious. I am really happy about art that doesn't feature pointless cleavage, even to advertise the game. I'd just like to encourage things to keep moving in the right direction.

On play (and life?) mirroring story: the token girl

I was reading a ReelGirl article about how Disney has decided to make more animated shows for boys, because boys are more interested in animation than girls, but the author argues here that this is because there aren't as many shows about girls, aside from damsel-in-distress roles. And another about Smurfs -- how there are 15 of them that are boys, and only one is a girl.

I started thinking about my own childhood and what kinds of stories I absorbed...

First of all, I just wasn't very interested in movies with "real" actors until after 4th grade. I liked animated movies. I dunno why. Maybe my parents were just really good at convincing me I didn't want to see anything over PG. (Kind of like how they taught me to be excited when the "music truck" went by...it was years before I knew they even carried ice cream in it.)

Then, I grew up with video games, and boys for best friends in my childhood. Our go-to game, on which we based a lot of our make-believe play, was Final Fantasy 2 (or IV in the properly ordered re-releases). I always, always chose to be Rosa or Rydia when we were acting out turn-based combat or whatever other outdoor videogame-based play we did, except when we made up additional characters, and then I'd still play female characters there too. I think we made up families for all the game characters, and those may have had more balanced gender lists.

So, in FF2, there were two playable female characters to, I dunno, at least 6 or 8 male characters. But it was 2/5 of the really important characters you took to the end of the game. But, for me, this wasn't too weird -- because all of my favorite friends (that I played with outside of school) were boys, too. One girl in a group of boys? Well, sure! Nothing wrong with that. (Besides, while in retrospect, Rosa was pretty submissive, Rydia was sassy and opinionated and strong-willed and could put out a lot of firepower and on one occasion single-handedly rescues your entire party.)

Then I think of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I didn't watch it very often on my own, but I picked up on the excitement about it from my guy friends, so I liked the theme song and at some point memorized all the character names. One of my friends had a TMNT themed birthday party, where all the attendees got to dress up. I got to be April, the only girl in the story. My friend's little sister, the only other girl involved, made the generous choice to be a Turtle and let me have the only April costume. I was faintly ashamed that I hadn't been the one to step up and make the sacrifice of a same-gendered identity for her benefit, but also a little relieved, because I liked being a girl character. But it was a really cool party with friends I really liked and some kind of elaborate maze in the garage, so I definitely wanted to be there and participating.

And my own favorite saturday morning cartoon, the one based on Super Mario Bros. 3! I loved Princess Toadstool. I got to be Princess Toadstool for Halloween once. But I don't know if I would have liked her as much if it hadn't been for that show. She probably had to be rescued by Mario and Luigi sometimes, sure. But other times, she was an active participant. I remember a scene where she shows up with vital powerup items -- without her being on the team, Mario and Luigi totally would have lost the fight. And sometimes she gets headstrong and goes off and does her own thing (for some reason I have this picture of her in a swimsuit in my head, hanging out with surfer dudes, but somehow this is associated with her being a free-willed, independent woman. Maybe it's just that it shows she can have more aspects to her personality than only and always "princess".)

In any case, I had plenty of childhood exposure to a skewed gender ratio in my stories, and in my friend base. As an adult, I sometimes crave a more even balance, or even female-centric stories and groups. But at the same time, I'm able to enjoy myself in a group of men, doing a traditionally male-dominated geeky activity. Maybe I learned that this is possible thanks to those token females in the stories. Maybe I'm prepared to dive into these man-groups because I learned early on that it's okay to be the only woman in an otherwise man-group.

So if you're going to make a token female character, please make sure that she pulls her weight as an active part of the team, at least. And remember, I still want more women around me in my geeky groups and my stories, even if I can make do without them.

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.

Fate of the World

This weekend, I picked up Fate of the World, since it was sitting around on my Steam wishlist and fit my general price preference. It's a game about solving global disasters, centered around climate change. I think it is the coolest thing ever!

Ok, there are a couple potential flaws. First, the interface is complicated, and to figure out everything that's helpful to know, you have to poke around in it a lot. I had no idea it was possible to look at very specific statistics, like how well trained a country's agriculture workforce is, until I eventually visited the Steam forum about the game (about 3 tries into the second scenario).

Which brings us to the other "flaw" -- or, alternatively, feature I rather like. This game is hard. The downside, some less patient players may get frustrated and give up, I suppose. And I might not put up with this level of difficulty in just any game. But here the difficulty level is an excellent vehicle for the concept that the world is likely to develop a lot of problems as we ignore the environment and keep growing our world's population and commerce. It's not an easy job, even if you start working on it as soon as possible. It's challenging, but if you pay attention to everything, maybe do a little extra research, and you have a plan from the start, you can succeed in saving the world. It seemed like it's part of the point for the game to be hard. It wouldn't be a very effective piece of Eco-Awareness campaigning if it was easy.

The most important bit of non-obvious information: Biofuel can replace oil! But only if you ban oil worldwide from the global HQ (which you have to build beforehand.)

Even if you happen to disbelieve in global warming and feel environmentalism is nonsense, I'd say it's still a good turn-based strategy game. There's a lot of depth to it. And also a scenario where you get to be a villain.

What can we learn from an "easy" old WoW raid

This weekend, I went back into ICC, and it was the most fun I've had in months with WoW.

It wasn't a primary goal for any of us. The group I raid with has trouble fielding enough people anymore to reliably get a group going into the new raid content. Even when we do go to a new boss we've downed before, it's rough; there's none we can easily one-shot. Some more casual players have started to sign up, which would be nice for filling in the ranks, except that the regulars aren't overpowered enough to "carry" them and they don't have the gear or experience on these particular raids to hold their own, yet. I've been a little burnt out, just try to hang around and see if they need people. So, this weekend, I filled in for some no-shows, but we still ended up with only 9 people, so it was decreed: "Backup plan! Let's go to ICC on heroic. With achievements."

Now, I did a lot of ICC in the past. Enough to start to get tired of it, not enough to beat the Lich King. I'd not done more than a couple of fights on heroic ever. Most of the group, however, had been through most of it before on heroic, maybe once, and most had most of the achievements. I decided not to slow the group down by asking for thorough explanations of boss fights (unless I started getting us killed) and instead I just shadowed the other healer from 10 feet away (seemed like a good policy) and this led to one of the best experiences in a while.

I could play through a challenging boss fight, learning on the fly, and still win.

Do you know how long that's been? I mean, maybe it works on dungeon bosses, even some heroic ones. But it's our general policy in raids to look up the boss, run through the strategy in vent, and of course we still wipe at least a few times while everyone gets the hang of what to not stand in.

But here, we had fights which took several minutes. At times, we'd take a lot of damage. There are percentage-based mechanics in there, and on heroic mode, sometimes there's enough going on that someone eats one of the "one-shot" effects that would have killed them in the old days, but don't, since we're over-leveled. It was enough to wipe us on a couple of fights, but only once per each (except we didn't quite get the Lich King down -- it was deemed to be a better fight for the start of an outing than the end, when we were already past the usual stopping time.) There were fights when something went wrong, like the other healer died halfway through Putricide, and I thought we were all doomed (I surely couldn't track all the crazy effects going on at the start of the fight)...and then we still won.

So why was this so much fun?

• It still felt like a challenge, but we were succeeding more than losing. There was a sense that we would soon succeed, even if we messed up.
• We had the chance to recover from our mistakes and learn to do better, over the course of a single fight.
• It was new to me. ICC in the old days got to be rote. Go in, do things the way we always do them; the only variation was with weird group makeups or someone who knew a different strategy.
• It was about my skills, not my knowledge of the fight. I got to prove myself as a good healer, a good player, rather than a good researcher and memorizer. I felt more present in the moment, trying to figure out what was going on and what I should be doing.

This isn't to say that I find no value in raids as they are now. With a good-natured group, it can be fun to bash our heads on the wall, trying to figure out what different strategy will let us win this time. But when the first time you face a fight is when you are the weakest (due to gear and experience), there is no room to stand in the fire that kills you in two seconds, the parasites that spell certain eventual doom, the healer to fail to predict two big hits in a row. If you mess up, the attempt is doomed. That's okay in small doses for some of us who like a challenge. But if it's the only form of challenge we have, maybe it's worth looking at other kinds of experiences to design into a game like WoW.