It seems that everywhere I go, I read about this issue of gender in Bethesda’s newest Elder Scrolls RPG, Oblivion. To give some explanation to those who aren’t clued in, Oblivion is getting rave reviews. It’s being heralded as the best role-playing game, ever. That’s some high praise.
It’s a huge, open-ended game where you can pick from one of many races to play, and of course, you can pick your gender. What is not made clear during the character creation process is that your choice of gender effects your character stats - several races have the men stronger than the women, while the women have higher mind-based stats. Therein lies the issue.
Brinstar has a good post tracking the history of this conversation (and her opinions on it), from a Guilded Lilies post to an interview with one of the game’s developers (this is where I came into the argument), through the ridiculing of the discussion by Kotaku.
I’m gonna start by making this point clear: the women in the game are actually garbed in suitable clothing and aren’t disproportionately top heavy. They don’t have overly sexual bodies and they wear clothing that is actually appropriate for fighting and adventuring in. But that’s not what everyone is talking about.
I’m on a listserv for women in game development, and I’ve been in the midst of the flurry of conversation on this topic. It’s amazing how varied people’s opinions are. Everyone has a completely different opinion and everyone feels just as strongly that they are totally right. Ok, that’s true for most hot-topic debates. But I didn’t have a clear opinion on this when I entered into the fray on the listserv, so I was surprised.
Note that my comments are mostly in response to the listserv discussion, not the Guilded Lily post which is really not all that incendiary, but somehow helped set off this firestorm. Going and pointing something out in a casual way doesn’t have quite the effect you’d expect on the wild and crazy (and frequently anonymous) internet.
My opinion? I like it. I think the need to make everything exactly equal everywhere for fear of controversy is breeding blandness. People are not all equal. Men and women do not have identical strengths. The strongest women are never as strong as the strongest men. That’s biology. That’s where evolution has brought us. And I think it’s a valid thing to model in a video game. Why? Because it’s interesting. The mistake in Oblivion is that these differences are not made obvious. Some simple text describing the genders and listing the differences would have gone a long ways towards preventing this discussion we’re all having. The fact that it was hidden makes it seem like something we’re just supposed to know, “Oh, everyone knows men are stronger so we don’t need to say that this is so in the game!”
On the listserv, someone who is very much against the gender differences went so far as to say we pick our characters purely based on aesthetics, and that even race selection should also have no impact on gameplay, since we should just be able to choose our appearance. Oh no! This is what I’m afraid of.
Let’s look at a favorite game of mine, a little game you might have heard of called World of Warcraft. Both genders are equal, and except for a small limitation on which classes each race can play, all races play each class pretty much identically (with the exception of the Priests who get just two spells that are racially different). How ridiculous is it in PvP when my 7 foot Tauren druid gets taken down by a 2 foot tall Gnome warrior? Is there anything more silly than a Gnome warrior? I think it should be clear that size matters and a 7 foot tall creature is going to be stronger than something that’s the size of her shoe. I want to see more class differentiation!
In some single player games, they can have the luxury of just making it harder if you choose such an unlikely combination. If you choose to be a midget warrior, the game is going to be tough. You aren’t gonna be as strong as a huge-o behemoth-type race, and you know that going in. But some players like to choose this option because they want the extra challenge. In a massively multiplayer online game with a huge mainstream audience, this is certainly not going to fly. Everything has to be exactly equal because there’s very little that actually has to do with player skill in WoW (well, there are a few key skills - holding aggro as a tank and especially being a good healer are things that can be done right or wrong) - the game is a great equalizer. Everyone can reach 60, all it takes is patience.
To me, this whole conversation feels like the remains of the Politically Correct movement. Everyone has to remain very sensitive and never say anything that can be construed as negative. Come on! I want to see an un-PC game where woman start out with higher cooking skills! That would be darn funny. Let’s accept and acknowledge our differences (that said, cooking is not an inherent feminine trait since I really can’t cook at all and one of my closest guy friends is a fantastic cook), let’s mock the stereotypes of our differences and get them all out in the open. There’s a kernel of truth in them, and I think they’re worth examining.
Ok, that rant aside, people have made valid points that this is a fantasy game and it doesn’t need to be real at all. Why should the people of this fantasy realm have been driven by the same evolutionary imperatives that led our men to be the big strong ones? It doesn’t need to be. But I think it’s valid that there be gender differences, just as it is valid that there be race based differences. Oblivion has different gender differences for the different races - not all races have weaker females - and this is the kind of thing I like to see. If I choose a tall thick-necked figure, I expect to have a lot of strength. If I’m thin and weak, then not so much.
Today I was talking to my Kung Fu teacher about this whole conversation. I’ve been taking Kung Fu for over three years now and one thing that I have learned is that I am weak compared to the men. Every woman in the class is weaker than just about every man. They can do more pushups, they hit the pads harder, and they are generally stronger. So what do I have going for me? Well, I’m faster than a lot of them, that’s good. And there are particularly techniques, like Chin Na that are what I spend my time on. Chin Na involve using pressure points to get someone into a joint lock. They don’t take strength, they take precision and fine motor control. I have those things. I can take down a man twice my size by pressing his fingers the right way. The lesson here is that I have learned to fight the best way for me given my lack of physical strength. This is the kind of thing I’d love to see in a game, knowing that your physical form has strengths as well as limitations and seeking out the best way to play to the strengths.
All that said, in any game that implemented this I’d like to see this differences made clear and be part of the player’s choice. I played a little bit of the White Wolf pen and paper RPG Vampire in college for a bit. One of the cool elements of the character creation system was that you could take merits - these were cool boosts to your character in a number of categories. But every merit has a point cost associated with it and you have to take an equal set of flaws, which are detrimental to you in some way. This could be a cool game mechanic.
At this point I’m just rambling. Suffice it to say that I think there are a lot of cool game mechanics out there that could be brought to the role playing realm. I am not satisfied with a world where every one is completely equal. That is not real, that is not even a fantasy I can buy into. Any world whose inhabitants were all the same would not be a place I’d care to stay.
