Poll: If female characters were given an advantage....

[Yureina]

Unbalanced and a lame game. Honestly... I can't see why any sane person would want to make that sort of inequality in a game. I'd say the exact same thing if men had that sort of an advantage over women in a game as well.

 

[zeldagirl]

Would all of you want to play a game where, if given the choice between two genders, it was the male character that has an advantage? Or would you all say, as you are in this thread, that you would reject that game, because of the inequality? Or where playing as the woman makes the game harder?


Honest question.

Honest answer? I've played Resident Evil 2. Leon had better guns and was harder to kill. Resident Evil 1 was the reverse. Chris was handicapped and Jill had it a lot easier. Did it matter? No. Why? Because it was a single player game.

This isn't a question of gender, it's a question of multiplayer balance. So long as it's single player, I don't care about gender stuff. I roll with it, regardless of backstory and crap like that.

Thanks for your answer.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

Would all of you want to play a game where, if given the choice between two genders, it was the male character that has an advantage? Or would you all say, as you are in this thread, that you would reject that game, because of the inequality? Or where playing as the woman makes the game harder?


Honest question. This topic has given me a lot to think about...

Played Mount & Blade ... female characters have it harder when petitioning their leaders for more territory.

But that only makes you feel better when you go rogue, charge your former liege with an awl pike and armoured warhorse, and rearrange his face with it.

Except with the diplomacy mod where its 100x harder for men as well and anyone who wants to go rogue.

Seriously, The territories I got where too spread out to form an actual coup.

Yeah ... but there's something fun about playing the role of Boadicea ... doomed to failure, but as long as you beat that king's retinue of 150 soldiers with only 40 soldier (albeit tough as nails, cream of the crop troopers from three different countries across the lands in which you pillage and burn) as your city of Reyvadin is being sieged.

Haven't played this diplomacy mod .... but I think it would take away some of the fun of being a tragic heroine impaling men on a lance.

Of course all the fun and immersion of that gets tiresome once you get assaulted by 1000+ army sizes .... so I might check it out.

Ahhh ... Polearms and one handed blades on horseback ... thank you speed bonuses ^_^ nothing like one/two shotting a guy on horseback as you circle around a unit of archers.

 

[artanis_neravar]

That sounds a lot like affirmative action. Regardless of whether you think it works, its sounds like the goal is to achieve equity, not to give women special advantages.

Interestingly enough, in the USA it actually tends to go the other way - universities try to have a 50-50 gender ratio, but over 50% of applicants are women. So women tend to have more competition for any given college.

It is special treatment, because they are getting in due to their gender or race, where as if it were equality, gender and race would have no bearing what so ever, the college admissions board wouldn't know gender or race they would admit people due to qualification

 

[Caldarin]

Wait, do you mean Boudicca the Gallic queen? Or is it some reference I'm missing
I'm pretty sure that Morrowind adjusted stats based on gender
Or you could go the Wheel of Time approach (not that they've made a game out of that yet) and restrict magic (in that universe, men and women can both use magic, but it drives the men insane the more they use till they start dropping mountains on people in their sleep...)

 

[MasterV]

Thanks for your answer.

You're welcome.

 

[EternalFacepalm]

This might have been mentioned already, but Fallout 3 gave slight advantages to females, actually.

 

[captaincabbage]

I would say it is a game, and a game should strive for balance in all things, not attempt to remedy some injustice towards women, imagined or otherwise. If the male characters have nothing to balance out this advantage, they may as well not even exist from a gameplay standpoint. So I may get it for the singleplayer, but the multi I would avoid until balance changes were made.

You hit the nail on the head for me.

 

[Bassman_2]

Everyone would play as females.

 

[kickyourass]

For me the question is more on how the rest of the game is. Is the rest of the game any good? If it is then I can probably over look an overall minor balance issue (Unless it's tied into the narrative in a major way), if not, then I'm not going to play the game anyway so it won't really matter how the genders are balanced.

 

[Loop Stricken]

There is no poll, I don't know what the question was meant to be but if the females could be made to look appealing to me [sub]sexually[/sub] then I'd play as females. If they didn't look good enough, I'd end up defaulting to male most likely.

 

[Azex]

an OP female in the single player campaign is not a problem in the least but...multiplayer has to be balanced.

 

[dstryfe]

That it's an unbalanced game. What else is there to make of it?

...we could have wrapped the thread there.

If it has some story driven reason for that to be the case and there's some interesting social system built around this concept (like, for example, the Drow - crazy powerful chicks, kinda subjugated dudes - not that they lacked lethality when it came down to it). That would be fine.

Pretty sure that was touched on, and shot down by the OP. It's just female character > male character, while the drow aren't really like that; drow women are clerics, and sometimes wizards, with very few exceptions. Drow men are melee combattants (fighter, ranger, rogue, etc.) with a few wizards. The fact that women are on top in their society is because the church *is* the state, and Lolth herself refuses male clerics. Uh...lost my train of thought.

Point is, female drow aren't inherently better, they just get higher scores in anything magical, as opposed to the melee-based males. That's the balance everyone suggests the game would need (better in some things, worse in others), and that has been stated to be absent.

There is all male character games everywhere, developers can make you play marble cheese if they so wish.
If this game is any of the above (excluding cheese) then Brink, Team Fortress Two, and Call of Duty are obviously conspiracy level male superiority hate generators that only exist to send the message that women are inferior.
This is NOT true, I don't see the opposite is true either.

The difference is (and I believe you said it yourself, in fewer words) that the female isn't playable and inferior to the male. If a weaker female was playable in those games, I'd be tentatively agreeing with that rant-ish edit of yours.

Thus, to bring this tangent back to the topic, I'd criticize the people responsible for their lack of sense with that design choice, and play female characters, while trying to pretend the obviously inferior males weren't playable at all.

 

[bob-2000]

Totally unbalanced, feministic bullshit. That is all.

I'm pretty sure even feminists would find this idea stupid.

As a feminist I can affirm your belief by saying yes, thats a fucking stupid idea.

 

[Chelsea O'shea]

Totally unbalanced, feministic bullshit. That is all.

I was going to say this in a less harsh manner.

Not much discussion value, OP, it's quite an obvious answer. Even if you think all women are inherently better than men, then you've got to admit that the game would be unbalanced and not fun for anyone who prefers to play a male character.

again, I've watched a number of anime where the plot device described is applied that makes women superior in this manner (usually its just to justify an all female cast so the male viewers have more cheesecake to look at).

Anime is not the best reference point honestly,what works in cartoons does not work so well for games.

 

[Farseer Lolotea]

Sexist, unbalanced, borderline insulting. I wouldn't buy the game, and I'd wonder whose bright idea it was and what they were trying to prove.

Because this may be a cliché...but two wrongs do not make a right.

As a feminist I can affirm your belief by saying yes, thats a fucking stupid idea.

Indeed. Most feminists don't like being strawmanned any more than anyone else does.

 

[The Wooster]

A new game has come out - its the bees knees, reveiwers and players are loving it, both singleplayer and multiplayer. its the hot new game, thats selling in droves...

And the basis of the game is that women are inherently better at whatever form of combat its based around. Whether its a mystical force, or a unique and powerful control system that women inherently adapt to faster and better, women are the primary force in the singleplayer, and to map this across to multiplayer by saying that female characters gain skills/ranks/abilities at a notably faster rate. A character of either gender starts even, and the nominal 'caps' are even, but a female character will gain those ranks and reach that cap faster than a male character. What would you make of this?

Depends. Including two genders and making one vastly superior is making a fairly unsubtle attempt at making a social point but fiction doesn't prove or disprove anything, it's fiction.

However if the game didn't feature male characters then I'd have no problem whatsoever.

Side note.

How come comparing a philosophy/movement/political stance you don't like to National Socialism is considered inane and immature unless we're talking about feminism. Calling radical or extreme feminist Nazis or the not-quite-as-funny-as-you-think-it-is slogan "feminazis" doesn't help your argument at all. It just makes you look like a dipshit.

 

[Farseer Lolotea]

However if the game didn't feature male characters then I'd have no problem whatsoever.

If they were using customization as a selling point, I probably would. (See also: Brink.) If the characters were preset, not so much; I still wouldn't buy the game if it was preaching at me.

How come comparing a philosophy/movement/political stance you don't like to National Socialism is considered inane and immature unless we're talking about feminism. Calling radical or extreme feminist Nazis or the not-quite-as-funny-as-you-think-it-is slogan "feminazis" doesn't help your argument at all. It just makes you look like a dipshit.

Yeah, I find the existence of that exception pretty bizarre myself. As far as I'm concerned, it's just another Godwin/reductio ad Hitlerum, and should be viewed as such accordingly.

 

[Elf Defiler Korgan]

"The man" won't hold my character down!

Wait...