Stolen Pixels #258: Where the Boys Are

[Lucane]

There'd be no difference between playing male or female other than cosmetic (which you won't see that much of anyway).

There are two good reasons(not including laws, rules and politics.) for buying cosmetics and clothes in real life are protection from the elements and/or deciding how you let the rest of the world see you (flashy, retro, formal, functional, etc.).Since Brink doesn't have stats on its gear it only follows the latter.

 

[Novaova]

Global Agenda has male and female models for every class, and stats-wise the two genders play identically. So it can be done. It's not rocket science, developers. Put women and men in your games.

Also, the argument that "women don't play shooters (or are a small segment of the playerbase) so it is wasted dev time" is bunk. Lots of men enjoy playing female characters, for whatever reason. They are customers too.

 

[Keshie]

STALKER had that problem too. Throughout the entire region there wasn't a single woman, picture of a woman, sound of a woman nor mention of a woman. The only logical explanation must have been that alternate-universe Ukraine is inhabited solely by armed gay misogynists.

 

[CrystalShadow]

As far as the whole "only women can have babies" argument it's as silly now as it was before. We can't do it without a guy.

Lol, no. But taken from the point of view of a soulless bureaucrat whose only concern is the survival of the species, it's a lot more valid than it sounds.

A woman needs to devote about 9 months at the minimum to creating a baby, (A lot longer in practice, but for now we'll ignore actually raising a child).

A man... Needs to devote about 5 minutes to it.

That means, if you don't care about the feelings of anyone involved, you need maybe one man to every 100 women or so.
That's where the idea that men are disposable comes from; For every woman that dies, the loss to the species as a whole is greater (in theory) than it is if a man dies.

But that's all still rather silly in anything more than an abstract sense.

OT: I've tended to consider the technical argument a little silly somehow. If all the character models have to be created explicitly, then yes, creating a female character doubles the work.

But if you've spent much time with programs that have extensive character customisation (Cryptic studios MMOS), it becomes apparent that there's no way every character variant is designed explicitly.
And since each variation of character traits can be blended together, the first technical question that arises is why male and female are explicit categories, rather than just being extremes of some set of traits that can be blended together just like all the others.

Who cares if this leads to the ability to create 'male' characters that look ambiguous, or have a walking animation more suited to a female character?
Or, if it results in a 'female' character that struts around like a man?

The point is, if most of the customisation revolves around blending together various traits to create something which is a unique blend, why does 'male' and 'female' suddenly have to be a completely separate set with nothing in common.

One look at human beings shows that's not even true biologically. People's physical traits blend into one another to a large extent anyway, and what's considered 'male' and 'female', while having some definite things that don't tend to overlap, is otherwise mostly a statistical norm.

I don't get why people approach a character generator from that perspective unless every possible option has to be created explicitly. (Which I concede still appears to be the case for animation sequences. - and perhaps the skeletal systems those animations are keyed to.)

It seems like a waste of an opportunity because people can't spot a mental bias that doesn't have an underlying technical reason to be implemented that way.

 

[duchaked]

Valid point.
To me it also seems silly that there are ten billion character "possibilities" in Brink, yet somehow they all look exactly the same: like neanderthals with cockney accents.
You have skinny neanderthal guy, giant neanderthal guy, and black neanderthal guy. But they all look like they are related or clones or inbred or something.

this
seriously...
(at least with the gurls we canz dress them up in pwetty dresses lol )

 

[Mr.Pandah]

Yeah, because every other online FPS has female characters.

...

Oh wait.

*shrug*

I kind of get why people are annoyed, but I fail to see why they are picking on Brink specifically.

My sentiments as well. Also, people still give a fuck? Get over it. I don't see the big deal at all.

 

[Kahunaburger]

There'd be no difference between playing male or female other than cosmetic (which you won't see that much of anyway).

Cosmetic differences are basically the point of the appearance side of character customization.

 

[Aptspire]

Congratulations, Brink. I shall not pick up a sausage festival

 

[-Samurai-]

Congratulations, Brink. I shall not pick up a sausage festival

According to your profile, you play Halo and CoD. You've already picked up a few "sausage fests".

OT: Where were all these equality nuts during the 80s and 90s when nearly every game had a male protagonist, and most had a female playing the damsel in distress? Oh, right. Gaming is mainstream now.

Everyone will forget the whole "Brink has no females" thing within the next year anyway.

 

[Biodeamon]

ha ha ha ha! pretty short but extremely funny

 

[RelexCryo]

While it may be an interesting option, it often isn't a realistic one, either.

This^. How often do you see women on the frontline of a war?

 

[Novaova]

How often do you see women on the frontline of a war?

Slightly more often than "never," which is the problem with the game in question. Also, since there's no requirement for videogame women to hump a hundred pounds of gear and ammo across the countryside for days on end or drag two-hundred-pound casualties to safety, this is a bit of a non-sequitur.

 

[bluepotatosack]

You have skinny neanderthal guy, giant neanderthal guy, and black neanderthal guy.

Did you mean skinny, giant, and medium? Any body type can be black. And not all of the heads have the neanderthal like sloping brow.

 

[tehroc]

Why does everyone in Brink have to look like Dee Snyder?

 

[michaelknives52]

2 words jiggle physics.... very expensive to produce

 

[Soylent Dave]

While it may be an interesting option, it often isn't a realistic one, either.

This^. How often do you see women on the frontline of a war?

This argument would have more merit if Brink was a documentary. About frontline warfare. And even then - off the top of my head, women serve on the front in Russian and British armed forces*. There are almost certainly other examples if you Google.

But we're talking about a game, and making a game that deliberately alienates half of your potential audience (in fact, half of the people on the planet) is really stupid.

Especially when (I'll say it again) one of the main ways that game sells itself is how customisable your character is.

I don't think anyone is claiming that Brink is uniquely misogynistic (and hey, at least you can make black characters, because that's still not a given nowadays); it's just a particularly egregious example, given the vast amount of customisation that is available within the game.

It's pretty dumb when any game developer does it though - there's very little reason for virtually all game protagonists to be white men. There's also very little reason for virtually all game characters to be grotesque caricatures (the white ones too).


It's laziness. Putting female characters into your game might mean taking some of the male assets out (but in Brink would we have noticed? It's doubtful...), and it might well mean the game takes a bit longer to produce.

But that's just because it's something we don't normally do - if we normally had male and female characters in a game, along with more general variety in character design (including things like 'ethnicity' and 'personality'), then we wouldn't think of this as being extra effort. It would just be 'what you do when you make a game'; standard practice, not extra work.

You know, like putting multiplayer in - that wasn't always standard issue; it pretty much is nowadays.


-
*This is because of the asymmetrical nature of the wars we're fighting at the moment, but the net result is British women are fighting & dying in uniform, as soldiers of the British Army.

 

[Agayek]

So the idea of making a game with all FEMALE characters is completely incomprehensible?

From a business perspective, yea it is. The vast majority of FPS fans are males in the 18-30 demographic. Thus, they will attempt to appeal to that market, and a significant portion of that market is insecure in themselves enough to refuse to play as women.

 

[Baneat]

To be fair, I'd use the character with the smallest hitboxes regardless of gender.

 

[RUINER ACTUAL]

I almost think they didn't include female body types to avoid another type of persecution. Its a lot easier to just say it was a resource decision than deal with the attacks from feminists groups saying the "light" body type is bad imagery for girls. Dumb shit like that.

 

[The Random One]

Good point, Shamus, though the comic is essentially a sprite comic. On top of all the things you mentioned, you also have to make the hit boxes to be genderless from the ground up (one guy mentioning just 'copying the hit box', but if the hit box doesn't match the character model your game is fucked up) as well as the general character design, since you have to figure out whether the enemy rushing towards you is the big guy with the big gun or the small guy with the leaping powers with more ease than what kind of genitals it has.

So the idea of making a game with all FEMALE characters is completely incomprehensible?

From a business perspective, yea it is. The vast majority of FPS fans are males in the 18-30 demographic. Thus, they will attempt to appeal to that market, and a significant portion of that market is insecure in themselves enough to refuse to play as women.

That doesn't stop them from playing single player games in which you play as a woman, though. They might play as women if there was no other choice, since that's an excuse to do so. (Please insert a joke generalising mainstream FPS players as closeted homosexuals here.)

So my idea for a game is this: IN A WORLD in the far future, all the men have gone to war generations ago, and the women were left behind. The only men remaining are those who were children when the war began, and after being raised under the protection of a cabal of scientists originally intending to protect them and now using their limited number to control the people through control of its reproduction. Now certain parts of the population are rebelling against the scientists and have taken to arms. Gameplay is like Shadowrun only good and there are say five different factions with different powers and different objectives on each map, there being two pro-scientist ones (maybe one that's like a PMC force and one that's a zealot-like guard of honor), two anti-scientist ones (one that's a regular rebel force who wants to end population control and one that is a bunch of crazy feminazis who want to kill the remaining men and take the scientists' place through controlling cloning rather than reproduction) and one wildcard shits and giggles one that's just taking advantadge of the chaos. There would be few maps but the objective on them would change depending on the two factions who were fighting, which could be any two of the five.

Hey, remember that article way back that suggested a world in which women aren't expected to wear pink and like dolls but wear black and like guns? When the men left, women were supposed to wear black for the many who had already died during the war, and train to defend the homeworld should the last men fail. Since then it went from being a tradition thing to the general way of thinking. ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED