Feminine Aesthetic in Game Design

I've been thinking about how gender influences design and narrative style in videogames.

In my graduate seminar on Western-American literature, we discussed the book Borderlands: La Frontera. The book is written by a woman who sees herself on the border in the ways she defines herself: in her ethnicity, her sexuality, and her culture. We talked about how a writing style can be masculine or feminine (of course using very stereotyped definitions of masculine/feminine). Academic writing is, according to this theory, very masculine: it's highly linear, hierarchical, orderly, and institutionalized (in its publication, who can write it, etc.). Feminine writing is more circuitous, expressive, and personal. Maybe feminine isn't a great word for it; maybe it should be called experimental or expressionist. But I wonder if gender plays into it.

If you've read Anthropy's Rise of Videogame Zinesters (I reviewed it), it's a good example of a "feminine" non-fiction narrative style. It includes personal experiences, videogame history from a non-AAA point-of-view, how-tos and inspiration for making your own games.

Recently I've been playing Magical Diary. It's a scheduling-type game where your decisions and stats determine how you pass your exams and who your romantic interest is. You need to play through the game more than once to see all the possible options; for this reason I'll label it "circuitous." This is different from a New Game + where your character is stronger or the bosses are harder on a 2nd playthrough. There are a few conversations where you get to decide what to say, so I'd say it's also kind of expressive.

Recently, many personal games have been coming out of the Twine scene, many written by women (not that a man couldn't write in a feminine style, just that he often chooses not to). They're experimental, personal, and/or branching. So I think if I were to apply this idea of feminine aesthetics to game design, it would look like this (and I don't think any one game is completely feminine or non-feminine; just some ideas):

• circuitous, non-linear, cyclic
• expressive: the emotions of the player or player character are central to the game's "message"
• personal: since many games by women are made by small teams or individuals, they can put others in their shoes in an eye-opening way. Think dys4ia or Mainichi or Actual Sunlight.

Aspects of masculine design could be the inverse... but they don't have to be. For instance, Oblivion is a very non-linear game, but its hierarchical quest and level structure are very masculine aspects of the design. So masculine design aspects would be:

• linearity or being "on rails" 
• empowering: the game makes players feel powerful or special
• hierarchical: tied to empowering; a linear structure enables a game to scaffold the player's learning (like in Portal), or familiarity with an arbitrary combat system (leveling, quests, etc.). 

This ties into videogame publishing and feminist aesthetics. This article, in describing the background of feminist aesthetics, describes the fear as "the systems of representation that are available in Western culture are so irredeemably male that a woman can only be heard if she adopts a male perspective, if she speaks as a man." Since self-publishing is easier, women's voices are out there, but are they being listened to?

Otome dating sims, where you're a girl looking for romance, are kind of hard to find. There are a few good publishers and they're small. There are a lot of visual novels out there too, and it's kind of hard to find excellently written ones. Is it because the feminine aesthetics that brought them into being are fundamentally opposed to an orderly distribution service like Steam? Or is it because Steam (or other large downloadable publishers) only listens to women's voices when the speak "as a man"? 

There are other games that include many feminine aspects but are still masculine in their design. Take Portal. You're making paths instead of killing people; your character is a mistress of the void, yet you are carefully led through a linear series of puzzles. I think Tomb Raider especially suffers from this conflict between masculine and feminine design aesthetics, but I haven't played it so I don't feel like I can write much more about it. 

I'm trying out ideas here; is it silly to designate some design aspects as "masculine" or "feminine"? Or do you think it's a distinction worth thinking about?

I consulted this feminist aesthetics article when writing this.

Inspiring Women Game Devs

I haven't participated in Critical Distance's monthly Blogs of the Round Table blog prompts for a while, but this month is about ladies in videogames we admire. And um... there are a lot of women in games I admire. I'll start with developers.

Christine Love: When I played Don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story back in 2011, I was first impressed with the mechanics/story of the game. Then I realized that Christine wrote all the code and story herself (it's also where I found out about Ren'py). Which is awesome. And after that I kept finding more women who were making games that I liked a lot more than the puzzle-platformers I keep seeing (they're fun sometimes, I just like a little variety in my indie games). 

Deirda Kiai's Life Flashes By was another game I played happily (remember when Brainy Gamer was like "you've probably never heard of it" thereby solidifying his position as indie game hipster?). I was impressed with how the story inspired reflection on my own life choices. And after I played it, I found out it was designed/written by a woman. The quality was a little amateurish at times, and I realized that at some point a game can still be really good, even if it doesn't always look/sound like a professionally-made game. I mean "amateurish" in the best way possible.

Lively Ivy is another woman who keeps making games, and has been making games for a while. After I played a little bit of Spooks I felt like maybe I could try to do some pixel art sometime. It's inspiring to see how these artists started out doing smaller projects which eventually get put on Steam and stuff.

I don't actually know Bentosmile's gender, but their small games have inspired me too. I love how cute the games are as well as how they say things about the world. Things like "the attitude you have affects how you see others." I really like Zoe Quinn's games too. Even the small ones.

Speaking of niche genres, I was so happy when I found Hanako Games. I felt like there were other people who liked simulation games and games with lots of story. I just found out that Georgina Bensley pretty much runs Hanako Games and... that's awesome. I loved Long Live the Queen and the demos of the other games. I'm so glad these genres aren't dying out.

Around the time I started going on Twitter last year, I read Anna Anthropy's book about how anyone can make a videogame. It inspired me to make a simple and stupid game in Stencyl, and then another game in Twine. It helped me feel like even if I couldn't make a really professional game, making a game is still worthwhile. It's kind of like how I cook all the time even though I'm not a professional chef. You don't need a food license to cook for yourself, and you don't need a degree in computer science to make a fun or stupid game. 

My older sister Andrea is also an inspiration to me. She made a math game on her graphing calculator for me when I was a kid, which was basically Data from Star Wars: TNG asking me math facts. She helps me feel like programming is something I can do if I sit down and think about it. You know, the logic of "well my sibling did it so I should be able to do it too." She also made a choose-your-own hypertext adventure game about a spaceship that I can't find anymore (maybe it was someone else?). She has written her own murder-mystery parties, and she and her husband made a mod for Neverwinter Nights. Oh, and she and I are making a videogame together about newlyweds colonizing a planet (I just help a little with writing). 

It's not just one woman making games who has inspired me. It's how multiple women have successfully made games that I really like, and how they keep doing it, even though their games have kind of a niche audience. So... thank you, women making games! You inspire me. 

Punching a Woman in Assassin's Creed

Critical Distance is doing a series for game bloggers called "The Blogs of the Round Table" (BoRT) where many people discuss the same topic (here's the post with some of the other posts). For their first one, the topic is how video games allow us to experience things virtually that we wouldn't normally experience physically. Yes, most gamers get to jump around and do backflips and kill hundreds, which they might not normally do in real life, but I'm more interested in two other ways video games introduce us to unfamiliar experiences: 1) the experience of being a different kind of person and 2) a transferable experience that enhances one's experience with the physical world. This post explores the first and I'll discuss the second next week.

For the first, I think my small experience playing Assassin's Creed is relevant. Short background: I'm female and I've never really beat up anyone before. In Assassin's Creed, beating up other guys was par for the course, but the moment I accidentally hit a woman who was also a bystander I felt a pang of real-life guilt. I think she cowered and said "I have done you no harm!" or one of the other set phrases, but in that moment I felt like I had abused the power the game had so readily given me. I thought about the incident for days afterwards, wondering how I could have confused "push" with "punch". I felt that I had done something wrong. 

no, I still don't know how to make screenshots on my PS3

Maybe with this experience I understood a little the desire to protect women, who while taking care of their families or getting water or whatever the women in this game do with the pots on their heads are often ill-equipped for battle. I think it also helped me see how some men see women as fundamentally weaker and easy to overpower, and maybe how that overpowering could be a power trip? It's hard to describe what it feels like to be a powerful man, but I think playing Assassin's Creed helped me see why it's a fantasy for some people.

Punching a woman in this game also helped me to understand how much the context of a violent act means to the perpetrator. If I'm killing a guy in the game who is making others' lives miserable, it feels justified (and I haven't finished the game yet, but I understand that knowing the whole story is going to be a big part of moral quandaries that make this game interesting). And if I randomly punch some bystander, that's not justified. Admittedly, the game's setup allows a lot of random violence, but my conscience does not. 

Women Gamers

Over at Your Critic Is In Another Castle, Kate complains that game developers don't believe that she, a female gamer who has always loved gaming, including first-person shooters (FPSs), exists. I'm interested in this problem, and I have a few ideas about why there seem to be few "serious" games aimed at women (which felt a little overkill for a comment).

• FPSs aren't the favorite genre of female gamers. In a study that looked at gamers' genre preferences split by gender, 87% of females played puzzle games, while only 17% played FPSs (compared to 74% of male gamers who play FPSs).¹ It makes sense that, seeing these stats, developers would aim FPSs they make at a male audience (but do females not prefer them because they are so male-centric?).
• The people who make games are mostly male. In the gaming industry in 2010, 5% of programmers, 8% of artists, 8% of game designers, 18% of producers, 12% of audio developers, and 11% of quality testers were female.² Still, females exist in the business, and with 18% of producers being female, it seems like they'd have a say in making games that aren't ignoring or being terrible to women (sounds like that should be my next research). Gaming industry professionals make up the audience of E3, and companies want to show off, so... it's mostly guys showing off to other guys, from what I can tell.
• There are games out there that are selling really well that are designed to be consumed by women. Last May, these were the top ten games in retail sales. Zumba Fitness: Join the Party comes in at number 7. What the heck? I've never even heard of this game. Here's the skinny: you do that dancing exercise thing called zumba while wearing a wii-belt that tracks how many calories you're burning. The female populace has spoken, and if they're not playing LA Noire or Portal 2, they are probably playing some dancing game that was designed with them in mind.

This is, as far as I can tell, the current state of games for women. The Portal games, being puzzle games and having mostly female characters, seem to be the best serious games that include a female audience. There are games out there that are aimed directly at women; they're not aimed at women who are "serious gamers" because those women will buy the games for guys. Case in point: "Girls who are frequent gamers tend to play the same games as do boys who are frequent gamers. Gender differences in genres played are found primarily in girls who game less frequently."¹

Sources:

1. Pew Internet and American Life Project as cited in Magerko's "Different Strokes For Different Folks: Tapping Into the Hidden Potential of Serious Games" found in Gaming and Cognition. Because I think everyone should know this, I'm replicating the chart below (authors, if you find this and object, please contact me). A "*" indicates that males played the genre significantly more than females; "+" indicates vice-versa. % of boy gamers is listed first, then % of girl gamers (sorry! too lazy to make a table). Remember, these are preferences of teens who are already gamers from 2008, so it's not representative of everyone who plays games:

*Action games 84 48

*Strategy games 83 55 

*Sports games 80 55 

Racing games 77 71 

*Adventure games 75 57 

*Fighting games 74 17 

*First-person shooter 67 29

Rhythm games 58 64

+Puzzle games 58 87 

Simulation games 46 52 

*Role-playing games 45 26 

*Survival-horror games 45 18 

*MMOs 30 11 

 Virtual worlds 11 10  

The original article looked at extrinsic and intrinsic rewards and found that "Two of the three more intrinsic oriented genres are played significantly more by girls than boys." I believe there is a typo in the article, as their chart indicated that out of puzzle games, simulation games, and virtual worlds, only puzzle games are played significantly more by females than males. Just sayin'.

2. Gamedeveloper's 9th annual salary survey, as found in their April 2010 issue (vol. 17.4). What can I say, my husband worked in the gaming industry.