Poll: Would you play a game with feminist overtones?
- Thread starter James Joseph Emerald
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oh look, the poll proves nobody cares
how beautifully ironic when all these topics keep being pressed in our faces.
( at time of post, 'i dont care' and others are ahead, and total vastly more than anything else )
pre-emptive anti-flame-shield ^
anyhow, go for it, if it bombs it'll still get publicity for trying something edgy and that's what you want at the end of the day so there's no real downside i guess?
how beautifully ironic when all these topics keep being pressed in our faces.
( at time of post, 'i dont care' and others are ahead, and total vastly more than anything else )
pre-emptive anti-flame-shield ^
anyhow, go for it, if it bombs it'll still get publicity for trying something edgy and that's what you want at the end of the day so there's no real downside i guess?
I would play -a- game with feminist overtones, but this one sounds like it's a lot less overtones and a lot more shoving it in your face. Plus, it's not really feminist to reverse the gender roles. You're just exchanging a patriarchy for a matriarchy, not really the goal of the feminist movement.
I'd rather watch female polygons running around than male...always thought it was gay that the camera in third person games is always focusing on some guys ass!
indeed, hell-boy proved fairy's are not to be messed with as-well.. they'll suck the calcium right out of you and leave a pile of gore splattered all over the room.Dags90 said:Whether or not it's "too girly" will depend on the art design, and I wouldn't expect My Little Pony to really help much. Unless you get Tara Strong as a voice actor, then maybe. Also, I think you'll get more "LOL FAIRY, THAT MEANS FAGS LOLOL!" than anything.
^ now THAT is irony.CannibalCorpses said:
'i'd play a feminist game if there was a female cast because there are women to oogle as sex idols'
and you know what? its true, people / guys would! i probably would, if not just for the irony factor.
Basically, the idea is just to do the opposite of the norm in terms of gender. All the characters are deep and multi-faceted and have their strengths and their flaws. It's just that most of the scientists, soldiers and corporate executives are women and most of the healers, support staff, and femme fatales are men (they wouldn't technically be femme fatales, but you know what I mean). And since the majority of the characters are soldiers and scientists, the majority of the cast are female. The roles are reversed, but that doesn't really have a big impact on the characters.jesskit said:
It's how it's done that's different. I'm not just going to include a "token tough action girl". And the male characters aren't actually gentle and emotionally unstable. That's just a vague stereotype that exists in the cultural context of the game's world. In fact, most of the female characters are progressive enough not to discriminate against men.AngryMongoose said:
Well, I'm no artist, so I'll eventually get an art director involved who can handle that end. But it's meant to be kind of ironic. Like, the base concept for the game came from finding a middle-ground between two ideas I had: "Wouldn't it be funny if Kingdom Hearts had a world based on Gears of War, where Sora gets a chainsaw Keyblade and eviscerates the heartless into kid-friendly hearts-and-stars-strewn paste" and "a story about the horrors of war, except with cute little pixies firing Rainbow Propelled Grenades and Glitter Guns at each other." It's evolved a lot from that, but the aesthetic is intended to be something along the lines of Conker [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conker:_Live_%26_Reloaded] or Robot Unicorn Attack.Dags90 said:
It depends what you mean.
Feminist overtones, as in "Men and women are equal"
Or Fem-nazi overtones, as in "Alle Hagel die überlegene Geschlecht!"
I'll accept the feminist overtones, but I never will except the fem-nazi ones.
Feminist overtones, as in "Men and women are equal"
Or Fem-nazi overtones, as in "Alle Hagel die überlegene Geschlecht!"
I'll accept the feminist overtones, but I never will except the fem-nazi ones.
I generally seek out feminist games whenever I can find them. That is not an impediment to me at all.
However.
1)
2) Having a 75% female cast is also not necessarily feminist. I mean, Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball is really, really heavy on the female representation...but that is one of the last games I'd call feminist.
However.
1)
PrinceOfShapeir just said something really important. Keeping oppression and power imbalances based on gender is not feminist, even if you just reverse who is on top and who is on bottom. So the society you described isn't feminist.PrinceOfShapeir said:
2) Having a 75% female cast is also not necessarily feminist. I mean, Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball is really, really heavy on the female representation...but that is one of the last games I'd call feminist.
This is a good thread to showcase my own game development in which I'm doing something similar (which I'll get to, below), but yeah, this is something we need to do more often in games, in which we reverse gender roles and take a look at how strange reversals appear. Good luck with your project.James Joseph Emerald said:
My own game (currently called Trek! and desperately in need of a new title) is a card game designed to use roleplaying elements, and get the players to collectively solve puzzles and survive each episode without getting the ship destroyed. It started out as a simple affectionate parody of Star Trek[footnote]Trek! borrows more from the raygun gothic of The Original Series than The Next Generation, but incorporating elements of both. For example, the crew positions include a ships counselor and chief of operations as well as traditional science and communications officers.[/footnote] but with time, the diegesis took a life of its own, so that my genericized expies of Klingons and Romulans (Pirates and Romans, respectively) each became very much their own thing, significantly removed from their sources.
One of the new regular rival civilizations in the expansion (Strange New Words) is the Sapphic Hegemony, essentially space-Greeks in which the gender roles are reversed. Men are regarded as simple-minded warriors, laborers and scenery, and are disregarded as scientists, philosophers or artists.[footnote]The Federation society, incidentally, is actually closer to Roddenberry's vision than was portrayed in any of the Star Trek series, in that it is both genderless and sexually open. According to Roddenberry's vision, all of human society was as promiscuous as Captain Kirk (remember that in the 60's kissing was TV shorthand for sex, so yes, Kirk was boffing girls of the week across the galaxy), however writers from then to now, including the recent reboot movie, were too uncomfortable with this vision of the future.[/footnote]
Anyhow, cards featuring the Sapphic Hegemony from my Nanowrimo efforts last year:
The Game Is Afoot! [http://www.flickr.com/photos/uriel-238/5250973386/in/photostream][footnote]As per TOS, missions are named like episodes, usually a snippet of Shakespeare or some other famous saying. Occasionally, you'll get something that sounds like 20th century sci-fi. Only one mission is in this set.[/footnote]
Hegemony Impressment [http://www.flickr.com/photos/uriel-238/5243297334/in/photostream]
Hegemony Courtesy Fleet [http://www.flickr.com/photos/uriel-238/5243297276/in/photostream]
Prince In Waiting [http://www.flickr.com/photos/uriel-238/5213015297/in/photostream]
Hegemony Jurisdiction [http://www.flickr.com/photos/uriel-238/5186402810/in/photostream]
Sapphic Slavers [http://www.flickr.com/photos/uriel-238/5157109170/in/photostream]
Sapphic Slavers [http://www.flickr.com/photos/uriel-238/5157109170/in/photostream]
Honorary Gender Reassignment [http://www.flickr.com/photos/uriel-238/5155654631/in/photostream]
Enjoy!
238U.
It's really hard to say without seeing anything from the actual game, but it just sounds like you're just replacing males with females and vice versa. Sorry, but that doesn't really sound interesting to me. If you want that in your game, I got no problem, but it doesn't sound like a good enough idea to hold a game up on its own.
Remember: the gameplay should come first. Yes, the story is important but if your game is relying completely on it to be interesting, something has gone terribly wrong.
Remember: the gameplay should come first. Yes, the story is important but if your game is relying completely on it to be interesting, something has gone terribly wrong.
Aside from the Metroid games, no. And I'm not sure you can say Other M was very feminist in how they turned Samus into an insecure terrified little girl with daddy issues. So pre Other M, sure, though it was all first person and with no dialog it was easy to forget you were playing as a girl. Hmm, so it's only femisticish if you stop and think about it. Are than ANY games with solid feminist overtones?
You're both misunderstanding. The game is not supposed to be realising some sort of feminist paradise. It's just supposed to subtly explore themes of feminism by reversing the genders of those involved and keeping almost everything else true to our current social climate.trooper6 said:
if you want to challenge the rules of the 'fairy princess gentle incapable' role, just have your fairy's idle animation bring out a nail-file and grind her teeth sharp and then practice biting in mid air for the next kill
sorted.
i want to eat people with a fairy now.
/sigh
sorted.
i want to eat people with a fairy now.
/sigh
Pretty much this. I don't mind Amazonian stylings, gender role reversals, or even struggling against chauvinism. In fact, I think that it could make a pretty solid experience within a game. But straight feminism, that Kate Chopin stuff that does not actually strive for equality but freedom from consequence, I despise. It sounds like you are designing more on the former than the latter, which I wouldn't even associate with feminism. So in response to the poll, I wouldn't touch a game that was described as anything more than touching on the subject of feminism. In the same way, I will not play Duke Nukem because of it being a lewd example of male superego.canadamus_prime said:
I certainly would. Whether done well or badly, I'd like to play it through just to see if it'd be any good. It's something different and I'd probably buy it out of curriosity and for a change in experiance.
Which themes of feminism, exactly, are you exploring?James Joseph Emerald said:
What PrinceOfShapeir and I are saying is that just reversing gender roles of current society by itself isn't necessarily feminist.
What is your experience with feminism? What is your theoretical background on this? Which wave are you thinking of exploring?
There's a difference between Betty Friedan and bell hooks, between Gloria Steinem and Julia Serano, between Gloria Anzaldua and Mary Daly.