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Original post by Kest On the issue of stereotyping, that's a given. Females do interact with each other and males differently than males interact with each other and females. It gives our species flavor.

And it is a product of culture, not an inherent property of gender. It is a fantasy game, so you can do whatever you like - but I don't think you should necessarily pigeon-hole all women in a role assigned to them by our male-dominated culture.

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Original post by swiftcoder Quote: Original post by Kest On the issue of stereotyping, that's a given. Females do interact with each other and males differently than males interact with each other and females. It gives our species flavor. And it is a product of culture, not an inherent property of gender.

As far as the topic goes, what makes the difference? It's something shared by almost all humans, as well as many animals.

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It is a fantasy game, so you can do whatever you like - but I don't think you should necessarily pigeon-hole all women in a role assigned to them by our male-dominated culture.

By avoiding female-specific behavior and reactions, you've stereotyped all women as being exactly like men, or vice versa. The only way to get around assigning personality to every individual is to not give them any at all. If you're so afraid of alienating someone that you can't bring yourself to add any depth to your characters, the result is going to be obvious.

You're crunching on this as though all women are going to be thrown into a box with a label. Having characters of all genders (of which you design the personality of) react to the player's female character differently because she is female isn't throwing all females into a category. It also isn't throwing the player character into a category. It's allowing your game world characters to make interaction decisions, or to choose words differently, based on gender.

Pop in an episode of any character-behavior-heavy TV show or movie, and try switching the genders of important characters in your mind. It won't take long for things to look strange. Watch Smallville? Try watching some of the non-romantic close scenes between Chloe and Clark, while imagining Chloe as male. Watch Supernatural? Try watching non romantic situations while imagining Dean's character played by a female. It's good for a laugh.

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Original post by Kest By avoiding female-specific behavior and reactions, you've stereotyped all women as being exactly like men, or vice versa. The only way to get around assigning personality to every individual is to not give them any at all. If you're so afraid of alienating someone that you can't bring yourself to add any depth to your characters, the result is going to be obvious.

I think I am arguing exactly the opposite. My intention is to increase depth, by assigning personality to characters based on who they are, not what gender they happen to have been born as.

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It's allowing your game world characters to make interaction decisions, or to choose words differently, based on gender.

Do you, in everyday conversation, treat women differently than men? I can understand that you might for example punch the shoulder of a male friend, and not a female friend, but by these actions you are implicitly alienating effeminate men, or women who are tomboys. In short, I think you are basing your argument on an antiquated (and sexist) set of social mores, which are no longer universally held in our culture.

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Pop in an episode of any character-behavior-heavy TV show or movie, and try switching the genders of important characters in your mind. It won't take long for things to look strange. Watch Smallville? Try watching some of the non-romantic close scenes between Chloe and Clark, while imagining Chloe as male. Watch Supernatural? Try watching non romantic situations while imagining Dean's character played by a female. It's good for a laugh.

Try substituting 'gay male' and 'lesbian female', and see if it seems any easier...

@OP: my apologies for thoroughly derailing your thread [smile]
From the standpoint of content production time and effort, I think you are perfectly justified in producing a game with only a single gender/race of player character - and many others have done so successfully.

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Original post by Kest Who says allowing a female player is going to increase the female audience? I don't know about you, but I've never passed up a game just because the player character was strictly female.

I didn't say allowing a female player will increase the female audience. I said having female players that follow typical stereotypes probably isn't going to gain you any female players, and in fact will probably make you lose some.

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On the issue of stereotyping, that's a given. Females do interact with each other and males differently than males interact with each other and females. It gives our species flavor. If you ignore that, your characters will be robots. But then again, that's pretty common.

Uh, no. People interact differently with other people. When you start drawing lines in the sand based on gender, you're stereotyping.

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Nothing I mentioned about male or female interaction was meant to be bad for a game. The point was that those things won't work well with the opposite gender.

Again you're stereotyping. I think you have a lot to learn about life if you think you can't have a male play a female role or vice versa. I'm assuming if you were to add a female protagonist to your game she would talk about fashion and shopping and get emotional all the time right? I know plenty of girls who don't fit the stereotypical female persona. I think maybe you don't know many people, or you're getting all of your information from these teen dramas you mentioned.

Yes, in silly teen TV shows they have a lot of stereotypes. In the media in general there are a lot of stereotypes. There are even actors that make a living off of their stereotypes. Does that mean you need to add that to your game? I don't think it does.

Kest isn't stateing anything that hasn't already been covered ad nauseum in Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.

But that book was intended to provide insignt into male/female communication in marriage. Even in that light, much of the 15+ year old book is a joke.

However it doesn't apply to women ordering at Starbucks. It doesn't apply to some unknown guy tossing insults at you on the street corner (yes, please insist he just wants to bond with you).

In fact it doesn't apply to the vast majority of NPC relationships in RPGs. And thus has near zero merit to this thread.

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Original post by swiftcoder Quote: Original post by Kest By avoiding female-specific behavior and reactions, you've stereotyped all women as being exactly like men, or vice versa. The only way to get around assigning personality to every individual is to not give them any at all. If you're so afraid of alienating someone that you can't bring yourself to add any depth to your characters, the result is going to be obvious. I think I am arguing exactly the opposite. My intention is to increase depth, by assigning personality to characters based on who they are, not what gender they happen to have been born as.

You're increasing depth by making the perceptions by (and of) males and females exactly the same.

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Do you, in everyday conversation, treat women differently than men?

I feel comfortable around females I don't know, but only comfortable around males that I do know. So my behavior most likely changes. It may be connected to some useless primitive caveman territorial instincts, but that doesn't change the fact that it's there. I usually need to understand a male's intentions and disposition before I relax around them, where I don't care nearly as much about those things in females.

Beyond that, there are obvious lines drawn between heterosexual males that are rarely crossed, which we frequently cross with females. Not for flirting, just for friendliness.

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I can understand that you might for example punch the shoulder of a male friend, and not a female friend, but by these actions you are implicitly alienating effeminate men, or women who are tomboys.

Guys who are more relaxed while dealing with women are still going to be relaxed with a tomboy female. The stereotype of the female has nothing to do with it. It's the stereotype of the male, someone who feels more comfortable around women, who changes things. And the male is a specific individual, with a unique personality, who is allowed to alienate people.

Is it that you're afraid your NPC characters are going to irk the player? Most NPCs irk me. Not because they alienate me, or because their opinions conflict with my own, but because they waste my time with boring conversation that doesn't spark any emotion from me at all. As far as I'm concerned, being upset by an NPCs conflicting view would be revolutionary.

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In short, I think you are basing your argument on an antiquated (and sexist) set of social mores, which are no longer universally held in our culture.

What culture is that? The Cylon homeworld? From what I can discern of the human race, people of different genders still interact differently with each other.

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Quote: Pop in an episode of any character-behavior-heavy TV show or movie, and try switching the genders of important characters in your mind. It won't take long for things to look strange. Watch Smallville? Try watching some of the non-romantic close scenes between Chloe and Clark, while imagining Chloe as male. Watch Supernatural? Try watching non romantic situations while imagining Dean's character played by a female. It's good for a laugh. Try substituting 'gay male' and 'lesbian female', and see if it seems any easier...

There's a reason each of the characters in these shows has a sexual preference, and interacts with each gender accordingly. If a specific gay male is more friendly or less defensive around males than females, how are you going to represent that when you don't treat the player differently because of gender? With the system I would use, I can have characters who behave all sorts of ways because of gender dispositions. With your system, you would have robots.

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Original post by Konidias Again you're stereotyping. I think you have a lot to learn about life if you think you can't have a male play a female role or vice versa. I'm assuming if you were to add a female protagonist to your game she would talk about fashion and shopping and get emotional all the time right?

You're the only person in this thread who has brought up "fashion", "shopping", and "emotional" when describing female behavior. The only thing I brought up was that females are more open toward each other about personal or romantic issues than guys are. If you think that's generally false, then we can just stop communicating here.

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I know plenty of girls who don't fit the stereotypical female persona.

I never implied that women should be put into a stereotypical persona. I implied that many women interact with men differently than they interact with other women. Whatever it is that you think you're arguing against doesn't exist here.

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Yes, in silly teen TV shows they have a lot of stereotypes. In the media in general there are a lot of stereotypes. There are even actors that make a living off of their stereotypes. Does that mean you need to add that to your game? I don't think it does.

I can let you name the TV show. Name a show with strong personal character interaction, and if I've seen it, I'll show you where specific genders of a specific sexual preference would not behave the same way as certain characters, even though the scene is not romantic or sexual at all.

For one easy example, close male+female friends usually hug to greet each other, and close female+female friends do the same, but close male+male friends usually shake hands, push each other, or smack each other on the arm/back.

It might sound funny and insignificant, but it sure as hell looks strange to see two very close female friends walk up to each other and shake hands, or push each other.

Most gender related behavior follows the same pattern. If the game isn't going to have much friendly character interaction, no one is going to notice. But if the scenes are drawn out as detailed as a movie or TV show, the characters are going to look robotic, or just strange.

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Original post by Kest For one easy example, close male+female friends usually hug to greet each other, and close female+female friends do the same, but close male+male friends usually shake hands, push each other, or smack each other on the arm/back.

While you are correct for at least a large part of the US, in much of Europe men routinely hug each other in greeting.

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It might sound funny and insignificant, but it sure as hell looks strange to see two very close female friends walk up to each other and shake hands, or push each other.

Even in the US, young women in the business world are apt to shake hands instead of hug, and women who play soccer, hockey, etc. will slap each other on the back in greeting or congratulation, much like their male counterparts.

I fear you are extrapolating generalities based on a limited sample - just because this culture has the historical leftovers of gender-discrimination doesn't imply that the differences are endemic in the gender.

Re: Unisex Texturing

Hi, I just want to point out that in some designs, the gender of the player character is purely cosmetic. Therefore the difference between a game with the choices of both female and male characters lies only on the existence of the model and of skeletal animation.

The difference between he/she is trivial, if your script already accepts variables or markups within a passage (e.g. instead of writing "he" in the script, the writing would write "$he" and the engine would know to replace those with the correct pronoun accordingly). The pronoun issue may not exist if the character is always address in second-person. The game uses only "You", and only the name of the player character when address it in third-person.

Example: Dungeon Siege

The two genders uses the same set of equipment, weapons, and same clothing textures. A "dress" is worn by both male and female characters. The armor of a male and a female uses the same skin. They look different because the geometry of the models are different. Weapons are identical, and are scaled by the height of the character. In the code, there is no distinction in the gender of the equipment. A male character could take off his manly armor, and a female character could wear it and look womanly. The body figures of the models are different.

I thought many games follow this unisex texture method for equipment, although I don't know for sure. I also know some games that have drastically different models for male and female player characters (male armors covers full body, female armors are bikini-ish). I know that the textures in Dungeon Siege are shared by both gender because I saw its files.


I didn't consider the issue of the context of the quests. But if the player can choose whether to accept a quest, it is not the designer's problem to provide an option for the player character to flirt with a guard, regardless of the actual gender of the player character. It is up to the player to select a quest. In Dungeon Siege, the gender of the player character is unrelated to the conflict, and it was not relevant anywhere.

Some of you would not consider Dungeon Siege a true RPG. I am just saying that you could probably design the game such that the gender of the player character is not crucial for the game.


I agree that a game does not need to provide both sexes of a races, and I have seen games (MMO) where warriors are exclusively male and archers exclusively female. For me that was kind of offensive, because I know that for some cases the reason was not a lack of resources that prevented. So I suggested to code the game allowing both choices. If someone sees your game and wondered why all the races only have male characters, you could tell them the truth and invite them to mod for you. This is only assuming that the story of your game could fundamentally be not sex-specific (and perhaps also not race-specific, so that your quests and equipment resources are still applicable to different races).

[Edited by - Wai on March 25, 2009 4:58:27 PM]

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Original post by swiftcoder Even in the US, young women in the business world are apt to shake hands instead of hug, and women who play soccer, hockey, etc. will slap each other on the back in greeting or congratulation, much like their male counterparts.

What does that have to do with anything? My only intent was to show that gender can influence typical character interaction. Not that it can only influence it a certain way, or that there are no exceptions.

If my player character is strictly female, I can have female friend A gossip to her and compliment her hair, while female friend B chews tobacco and punches her in the arm. Male friend A might be distant to her for being way out of his league, while male friend B treats her like any normal female friend might treat her. I can do whatever I want, because I know what I'm working with. If I blindly swap her for a male, all of my characters change into something else, rather than just her.

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I fear you are extrapolating generalities based on a limited sample - just because this culture has the historical leftovers of gender-discrimination doesn't imply that the differences are endemic in the gender.

Most games take place in a limited sample of culture. Any generalities I mentioned were meant only as an example of global human tendencies.