so what i get from this is that most of great art has come from "pandering" to the people and that as an artist you need to sometimes give up "artistic integrity" in order to make money. So if that's the case then did Demons Souls or Mount and Blade make enough money to spawn 3 squeals? I don't see those artists pandering to the audience yet the still make enough money to survive on.
That's because there's more than one audience you can choose to pitch your product to. Sometimes, as in these cases, cornering a niche market can be a smarter business move than just going for the broadest possible audience (I believe this is a point Jim Sterling makes frequently).
and if making money is important then why is it so wrong to make the over used while guy character?
Regardless of my personal preferences, I never actually said there was anything wrong with it. In fact, I was offering an explanation for why that sort of character gets used so much: it's marketing, not necessarily conscious racism/sexism on the part of the devs.
Tenmar said:
Please take the time to actually read the entire post. Instead of trying to be witty. Please spend more time on your reading comprehension and give the posts you read the benefit of the doubt. I at least take the time to read posts I respond to and more often than not go back and re-read it and take the time to respond properly.
But to help you out I'll just quote myself. From that very same post. I know you can be constructive instead of destructive when posting. Have a wonderful day.
Hey hey hey, no need to be belittling or to insult my intelligence. It's possible that I misread your post, I didn't launch a personal attack. And I wasn't trying to be "witty" and I fail to see how my post was in any way "destructive", I was trying to raise point that's relevant to this discussion - that people tend to overvalue "artistic integrity" and "creative freedom" and assume that external influences on these things are a new phenomenon, when they're just not.
All that said, I don't see how my response wasn't appropriate to your initial assertion. The fact that you later suggested market research doesn't change the fact that you also said that if you start writing what other people want you cease to be an artist and become a panderer.
People go on about self-censorship as if it's being enforced by feminists or "Social Justice Warriors," when in fact the opposite is true. In many, many cases it's the insistence of the publishers that everything revolve around a generic white dude that's stifling artists' own desire to include women and other minorities.
Feminists aren't a credible threat to artistic freedom. They just don't have that sort of power. It's the publishers you want to be looking at.
I think it's easier to ignore and just pretend that developers all just want to make `The Adventures of Captain Generic`.
(By the way, not dissing the game or anything cause it's not even out yet but holy fuck do I hope they do SOMETHING to make Watchdogs have a good story because I guessed the basic story by looking at the front of it and seeing it had an angry looking white dude).
Story in gaming is woefully underdeveloped in general, how many `man must avenge his family/love interest` stories have we seen?
Insisting that demanding something new will result in LESS creativity just seems like circular reasoning to me.
Literally just write what you want to write. If you have an all male cast that's fine SO LONG as it's all male for a reason (say it's a war game set far in the past) and not out of some sexist assumption that women don't sell games. If you have an all female cast because that's what you wanted to do, that's hardly 'self censoring'.
Like for real just write good characters yeah if you aren't a hack writer than you're probably going to have a good mix of gender/race/ability whatever. If you're sexist you're writing is going to be sexist so perhaps the question is less "how can I fool people into thinking my writing isn't sexist" and more "How can I update my personal views about sex/race/whatever to be less problematic so I don't have to think about this stuff so much so I can focus more on the actual character development."
Okay, see - and here I'm going to just turn away for a moment from the OP and his question and make a statement: this is the problem with the "video games as art" mentality.
Art is a very vague term. Sometimes it means all creative content ever and other times it means works of art (paintings, sculpture, installations, all the stuff that you might possibly put or think of putting into a museum).
Art is "whatever you want your statement to be to the world in whatever creative form that statement takes" It's the can of soup painting as much as the painting of a field on a summer day or the statue of David.
Video games are not Art in this same way. Video games have a structure - they have to have some element of gameplay, they have to have controls for the players to use to interact, they have to have some basic things that a LOT of forms of Art don't have - canvas? take it or leave it, I'll use old newspaper because I can! stone? no I prefer wood thanks, or bubbles or lego pieces for my sculpture's message!
Video games are closer to literature than they are Art. Now, literary works fall under the broadest Art category, but they are their own thing. All Literature can be called Art, but all Art is not Literature - that sort of thing.
Story, characters, beginning, middle, end, plot, antagonist, protagonist - these things are largely considered things we must have - unless you are making the most innovative indie games ever, you're working in a framework here, people.
So - with that said - NO, you don't get to do just whatever you want all the time, screw what the audience thinks BECAUSE - if you've ever had any writing class ever the first thing you're being drilled about is? what?
Consider. Your. Audience.
Yes, that's right - you need to think about the "reader" or the "player" when you make literature or a game because they are not just *viewing and interpreting* your work as Art - they are participating (via imagination or gameplay) in the thing you make and they will reject or accept the thing you make based on how well it suits them and the interaction they desire.
So, it is with this understanding of what Video Games are and how we interact with them more like we do books than a statue or a painting that I say that Video Games are not Art, they are more akin to Literature.
And so I say - yes, do consider your audience and do NOT "self sensor" (I can't believe that's even considered a thing honestly, we all "self sensor" all the time - every day, in every conversation, every day at work, every day at school - we do not just blurt out WHATEVER WE WANT because? it doesn't work), but consider for whom you are making the game (hint: it's not yourself) and what ways you want to connect to your audience, what you want to say to them - and more importantly what you think you can make them HEAR in that category - you might have the most amazing things to convey but if no one is listening you're talking to yourself.
It depends, do you want to tell a specific story? then don't let how people might react influence that.
...However, if you want to have the largest number of people experience you're work then you'd be best to leave out things that might deter some of your potential audience.
I like to write stories. One day, I hope to be able to write for a video game company, mainly in RPGs. But, the question of women's representation vs artistic freedom has always lingered on the back of my mind, and I'm not sure how I should approach it.
I like to write stories as well. And I believe a good story can be in any shape or form, with any kind of character cast. However, after writing several stories, I realized that I only get better when I push myself to explore new concepts and new possibilities. Certainly, you can be an amazing writer who only writes white males and has amazing casts of characters that are always the variations of the same type; I have nothing against that really. But I honestly think that never changing and going out of your comfort zone is something that severely impacts the writer's ability to present his or her audience with a fresh, new and imaginative story. In a way, the writer is censoring himself when he is only keen on writing the same characters over and over.
Including women characters just to have a woman character is not really a good way to go either. If you think you are not ready to create a good female character, you should not feel obligated to do so just fill some niche. You also don't have to fill it if you simply don't want a story with female characters; there are amazing stories with zero female characters (The Hobbit comes to mind). However, writing a good female character is in many ways exactly the same as writing any good character; male, female, alien, robot, whatever. People are too often focused on creating a good female character that they screw up badly because they have little experience with it themselves and very little material to learn from, so they end up scraping up a character who is made out of a few negative stereotypes about women. I find that sad, because I am sure that every single person in the world has the opportunity to meet and hang around with various women; observe them, ask questions, look at their personalities and hobbies, find a community online and ask them... There are many ways to learn about something that you know little about; the same type of research is recommended for anything that you want to include in your story. It's not shameful to not have an impeccable knowledge of how the opposite gender works, especially when the media is not very keen on representing us fairly.
My point is; don't think that including women (or any other minority) is obligatory, but also don't think it will somehow negatively impact your story. By writing about different characters, you will improve both as a writer and as a person. There'll be hits and misses, but in the end, you will learn from your mistakes (if you know how to acknowledge them). Everyone should write about what they want and they should not feel pressured into writing about stuff that they are not good at or that doesn't interest them or that makes them uncomfortable, but learning how to write various types of people is a good and extremely valuable skill.
Gender-swapping. I really can't say I'm against that, actually quite the opposite, depending on the character.
The character is the character, and this is separate from gender, race and other things assigned at birth. Gender only really becomes an issue when specific qualities of the character has different gender-dependant effects in the world they inhabit.
Robocop could easily have been a woman, because nothing about the character (in my opinion) necessitates a male. Only the name Batman makes it hard for the character to be anything else than a man.
If you are writing an all-male cast, then there's nothing wrong with that, but do the characters really necessitate an all-male cast? Switching genders or skin do not have to change anything about a character other than the bits they were born with.
As an artist, you want to write what you want to write, but you also want to challenge yourself. Overcoming the hurdle it can be to believe that a character with a different gender than yourself couldn't have the exact same thoughts may be one of those challenges.
A great example, in my opinion, of how gender-swapping can not only retain the original character but even elevate it is the american sherlock holmes tv series "Elementary". John Watson is now Joan Watson, played by Lucy Liu, and after watching the first season my view went from "gender-swap? nice gimmick" to "fuck me/shame on me for having to see this before I actually understood the strength of the character".
If I knew about an upcoming video game with an all-male cast, it would probably feel weird, depending on the amount of lead characters. It's not that I see a reason to "force women into lead roles", it's that I don't see a good reason to just have dudes. If the separation from women were made a subject, however, and not only in a "Damn, I miss my dear little Darlene" way but more of a "Stop it. Darlene would fuck you both up if she knew what numbskulls I was travelling with", -that would help me relate as an audience member.
Gears of War 3 is in my personal opinion a great example of what could have been a "bro-show" but developed to an equal-rights kickass tour de chainsawgun with explosions, and it became richer for it.
If I caused any confusion with my wording, I apologize. To clarify, sometimes, I feel morally obligated to add a woman to my first all male cast or whenever I think of racy material, I sometimes hesitate to write it, because I'm afraid of showing women as sex objects.
You gotta look at what motivates you, what drives you, if you feel you have a burden to rationalize it to your audience see that as a fun communication challenge instead of a line you're not allowed to cross. Think about the guy that had the bold audacity to make super columbine RPG, Then think about the backlash that he got. Feel better? When you realize the hate storm is coming and its inevitable it should feel easier to crack a smile and keep writing.
but remember to put the motivations, burdens and flaws, problems of the characters first, and see where people are naturally going to relate to each other or clash against based on their goals or desires. All these characters, even your ideals and darlings are puppets, cogs in your wheel. Subjects of the theme you're trying to communicate. You have to have creative distance against all of them regardless.
I learned this quote from the creator of the show Mad Men. The rule for the viewer should always be "you don't have to like this character, but you're not allowed to not UNDERSTAND them"
If you think about the shelves full of fiction authors at a barnes and noble or amazon etc.. Whether the writer is male or female....
Ask yourself how many of those writers have leads that are gender reflective avatars of their own sexual identity, thoughts, beliefs, curiosities and dreams (I'm borrowing a line from Movie Bob in his Jack Ryan review but its true.)
and on the opposite end think about how many authors just genuinely desire to escape the boundaries of their own mind to experience different sexualities, different struggles, religions to perhaps paint a picture of a more fully homogenous world.
I'd say its at least half if not more in the former. Consider screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (A few Good men, The West Wing, The Social Network, Newsroom) you can literally feel the deadpan quippiness of his writing in the way his characters express themselves, and it's been said more than a few he sucks at writing fully fleshed out female characters.
Stuck to what he's good at. It worked to some degree right?
Gender-swapping. I really can't say I'm against that, actually quite the opposite, depending on the character.
The character is the character, and this is separate from gender, race and other things assigned at birth. Gender only really becomes an issue when specific qualities of the character has different gender-dependant effects in the world they inhabit.
Robocop could easily have been a woman, because nothing about the character (in my opinion) necessitates a male. Only the name Batman makes it hard for the character to be anything else than a man.
If you are writing an all-male cast, then there's nothing wrong with that, but do the characters really necessitate an all-male cast? Switching genders or skin do not have to change anything about a character other than the bits they were born with.
As an artist, you want to write what you want to write, but you also want to challenge yourself. Overcoming the hurdle it can be to believe that a character with a different gender than yourself couldn't have the exact same thoughts may be one of those challenges.
A great example, in my opinion, of how gender-swapping can not only retain the original character but even elevate it is the american sherlock holmes tv series "Elementary". John Watson is now Joan Watson, played by Lucy Liu, and after watching the first season my view went from "gender-swap? nice gimmick" to "fuck me/shame on me for having to see this before I actually understood the strength of the character".
If I knew about an upcoming video game with an all-male cast, it would probably feel weird, depending on the amount of lead characters. It's not that I see a reason to "force women into lead roles", it's that I don't see a good reason to just have dudes. If the separation from women were made a subject, however, and not only in a "Damn, I miss my dear little Darlene" way but more of a "Stop it. Darlene would fuck you both up if she knew what numbskulls I was travelling with", -that would help me relate as an audience member.
Gears of War 3 is in my personal opinion a great example of what could have been a "bro-show" but developed to an equal-rights kickass tour de chainsawgun with explosions, and it became richer for it.
I hate to necro a thread, but I found this on a websearch, and I wanted to say much a similar thing about making good female characters through genderswapping. It's a really, really good strategy for writing female characters and making a-typical female characters, and I've used it quite a bit in my own writing. It's been done well in films too, like with Ripley from alien or McCoy from Streets of Fire, both of who were originally written as male.
Plus, I don't think it's "self-censorship" if you use this method, because you can keep your super-sexualized female characters, you're just adding more that aren't, the lack of which I think is the real problem (I.E. it's not about too many sexy characters, but about too few non-sexy/sexualized characters).
Also, I'd say that making strong female characters is more a matter of story structure than anything else. Don't make her a prop to serve the male lead's quest or another male character's quest, give her own goals, her own agenda, and actually let her do something . THat's why a lot of those superficially "GRRRRRRRRRL POWAR" characters fail, they ignore those last three bits and end up falling flat as a result.
If you think developers have freedom to do what they want you life in pipe dream. Currently the share holders and publishers rule what get's made and what doesn't, and they think that having the women or homosexuals as people in videogames magicaly effects the sales.
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