On Gender

On Gender? Why not? I seem to be knocking everything else down.

Most designers are an inoffensive and liberal lot. Consider most game designers are not trying to import 19th century stereotypes and bigotry into their games, but rather exercise them from the minds of their players, and rightly so! I would not stomach any player or group of players who wanted to devote their time to demeaning and bad mouthing either gender. So having them fairly even rather helps dissuade such childish antics.

To them, if an Enchantress is every bit as good as an Enchanter, then a Warrioress should be every bit as good as a Warrior. It's not because they are going out of their way to try to be ``PC'', but because they genuinely don't see any fundamental difference, or at least don't see any difference worth mentioning. So whatever differences there may be, such as textures or pronouns, are purely cosmetic. They all have the same bounding box and the same chance of to-hit, etc. This may be a very democratic and liberal message, but they often don't realize they are sending another message as well, and it's one they may not completely agree with. Had they bothered to stop and think on things they might have taken a different course.

See, they are also saying individuals across genders are also completely identical and functionally equivalent for all roles. The part of that first statement is patently false. Only women can have babies. Even if you wish really, really hard nothing can change that. Is that fair to women? Is that fair to men? In a world w/o children this point may be completely moot. OK, fair enough, but what about the second part?

Most men can beat me at arm wrestling. I can beat most women at arm wrestling. Most women are shorter than most men. I know a fellow who is taller than most men, but is shorter than his wife. In the every day course of events none of these differences matter one whit. I may have been 6" taller than my wife, but she was seldom inconvenienced by her stature. Certainly I could beat her at arm wrestling, but this didn't really come up all that often. On the face of it, it looks like this also isn't a trouble either. Except, also on the face of it, we're not making a Virtual World consisting of ``mundane, everyday common experience''. We're usually making a Virtual World filled with High Adventure and Thrilling Action. Would not some of these differences come into play?

If in your world even the shortest of gnomes can reach things from even the top of the tallest shelf, then none of this matters. Now you've really broke my immersion, and you have a lot of explaining to do regarding just why that 3'2" gnome could reach the soup tureen from the top of that 7' cupboard, but if it's your game then it's your game. In this case it may make perfect sense to have identical bounding boxes and such. But it doesn't make perfect sense to have Ol' Shorty there be able to dunk on top of Shaq. Men, on average, have greater upper-body strength than women. Wouldn't men have an advantage in swinging heavy, sharp pieces of metal?

In the original MUD, Females had a distinct advantage. There were three attributes which were rolled randomly. For men they were taken as-is, but for women 10 points were removed from Strength and 5 points were added to both Agility and Stamina. Now every time one gained a level, 10 points were added to each attribute up to a maximum of 100. Females would max their ``ability to hit you w/o missing'' and their HP before males. The fact that males tended to hit just a tad harder was statistically insignificant, whereas Females hit more often and could withstand more blows was significant. Was this fair to Females? Was this fair to Males?

If you believe the two genders are functionally equivalent, that is to say if we can replace any male with any female and vice versa, then why even bother with the inclusion of gender in the first place? Just make everyone a Eunuch.

If you believe there are differences, such as child-rearing is some sort of inheritance mechanism or the ``you don't really die and reroll another toon, you just respawn'' fiction, then these differences are rather important and need to be addressed.

Including gender makes a statement. Not including gender also makes a statement. Be aware that you are making a statement no matter if you like it or not.

On a closing note, the /funny command in WoW will cause your 'toon to make some sexual innuendo. These are unique to each gender-race combination. For the most part they are funny, and also quite mild; Disney could certainly get away with them. Have you noticed each /funny joke is entirely heteronormative? Well they are. This could mean our friends at Blizzard are an extremely homophobic lot, but I suspect the real reason behind it all is some designer simply added this w/o THINKING. Yes the designer said something alright with his joke, and I'm sure it was not what the designer intended. Now do you see the importance of thinking when designing instead of just checking off items from a list?