Gender and Abstract Characters - Pink Think

I perked up when I saw Dariusz Jagielski's post, "Designing game character that appeals to both genders and why abstract one is the best way to do it", because I've got issues with abstract characters and gender in the game I'm finishing up.

But then I perked right back on down, because the advice in the article is - to put it mildly - bad. Jagielski's message can be summed up in two simple points:

Yeah. I don't even really understand why one would need to make an abstract character represent a gender if the advantage of abstract characters is that they don't need to have a gender. But whatever -- there is little sense to be found Jagielski's post. Instead I'd like to talk about the issues I'm facing and see what people think about the questions I have. Maybe it will be a more interesting discussion.

The game I'm working on is an updated version of a puzzle game I originally released in 1995 -- Reproduction Man. In the game, the player controls the main character to help some really dumb sperm find a path to the egg.

I'm sure you've noticed the "Man" in the title, and that's the first problem. Although the title of the game is Reproduction Man, the eponymous character is actually abstract. In the original game, it was a white cartwheeling blob. Maybe it's a Clomifene molecule? A Gonadotropin hormone? Who knows. The point is that there's no reason it has to be a "man".

So why the heck did I call the game "Reproduction Man"? Honestly, I don't know. I was not as socially aware back in 1995 as I am now, twenty years later. I was probably thinking vaguely about games like Pac Man and Ladder Man. I was definitely thinking about the movie Repo Man, envisioning my main character as a sort of low-res Harry Dean Stanton, who'd rather die on his non-existent feet than live on his missing knees.

But seriously. I think the reason I used "man" in the title is simply that "man" is the default gender in American culture (my wife, a linguist, calls this the "unmarked term"). This goes back tens of thousands of years, but it's not just ancient history. Women only gained the right to vote (vote -- in a democracy based on equality) in America less than a hundred years ago. Basically, I called my game Reproduction Man because I - along with pretty much every other dude on the planet - am sometimes purblind to a myriad of unconscious, sometimes subtle, culturally-transmitted biases.

Anyway, the question is, "What do I do about it"? I thought about renaming the game, but it just seemed wrong, somehow, since the entire point was to re-make this weird piece of Windows shareware history. Then I thought that maybe I should allow the player to choose a "female" version of the character. But if I did that, I would then need to add some sort of "markers" to the abstract character to distinguish male and female versions. And any markers I chose would probably be more wince-inducing than the use of "man" in the title. The world definitely doesn't need another "Ms. Pac Man".

My solution, if you can call it that, was to keep the title but ignore gender completely in the design of the character. I also don't refer to the character as a "he" in any text that's presented to the user. It doesn't feel like a great solution, so I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts.

My second problem is babies. When you win a level, you see a little animation of an embryo. At my wife's suggestion I randomly choose an embryo to show, in either blue or pink.

She doesn't see this as a problem - which just goes to show how opinions can differ about these things. I, however, feel a little uncomfortable about it, and I think the reason is that I am more immersed in the gaming "community" (pitchfork-wielding mob?) than she is. As I got back into game development, it was impossible not to see the sorts of upheavals in the gaming community that seem to revolve at least partially around gender issues. And if I'm honest with myself, a lot of my motivation for wanting to get people's opinions about this stuff is that I don't want to come down on the wrong side of it unintentionally. Plus I'm simply not an expert on what will make things better or worse for anybody in gaming. I do know that I'd like it to be better than it is now -- and that I don't want to create games that alienate anybody out of unconscious cultural bias. I want to alienate people out of anger at my frustrating puzzles.

The blue and pink thing seems kind of ironic to me in the present context. Colors became "traditional" markers for babies' genders specifically because the gender of any given baby isn't generally obvious at a glance. They are "abstract characters", so to speak. But why is it so important to be able know the gender of a baby at a glance? I don't know the answer, but I can say that every possibility I've entertained is pretty depressing.

But on the other hand, my wife has a point. Gender is actually a thing, and it doesn't seem helpful to try to be "gender-blind". Maybe markers will become a little less fraught when we have the kind of culture where the marker doesn't say anything about what a baby can or can't do. I say this as someone with two daughters -- one of whom wipes up the road with me regularly in Mario Kart, and the other of whom kindly showed me how to survive more than ten minutes in Don't Starve, while wearing both her beard and her flower garland with pride.

Anyway - I'm leaning strongly toward ditching embryo colors altogether. What do you all think? Grey babies? Rainbow babies? Molten red babies with little horns on their unformed skulls?

Let me know in the comments.

Also posted at dkilmer.com