UPDATE: Video of Females on Female Characters Panel

[Therumancer]

Given that we spent about half the panel saying that sexy is a good thing (and that I personally defended Lara Croft for being a fantastic female character with many admirable traits, attractiveness simply being one), I'd say your assumption about our discussion is pretty off. I may not be a supermodel, but I'm not a narrow-minded dumbass, either, and neither were the ladies on the panel.

You're not wrong that many women who self-identify as feminists seem to think that "feminism" means "rejecting any female attribute that men find favorable," which includes physical beauty. That's not my particular definition, however.

Point taken, I'll concede your point, as I wrote that based on the summary rather than having seen the video as I explained.

My own fault entirely. I'm actually involved in a number of online discussions simultaneously right now, and responded based on how I read the text.

 

[beefpelican]

I disagree completely with the idea of the option to pursue romance with all characters in an RPG (comes up during the question half hour). In fact, I think it's important that there are some characters you can't do this with.

In the real world, sexuality is rarely all-embracing. People have different tastes, orientations, or occasionally no orientation at all and these attributes hugely affect a person's life. While you as the player should be able to shape that aspect of your character, when it comes to NPCs, which themselves all have pre-written backstories, giving the player the ability to command such an important aspect of their character, in my eyes, devalues them as a whole.

Not to mention real world romance can be a very long and rocky process. I'm honestly tired of romance in games that seem to have short time spans. Even if you do form a relationship from being together for work or travel those relationships don't tend to last long. Having true relationships just spring up so easily seems to cheapen the real thing. Maybe short term love blooms are common for a some but they're way too overrepresented. For most it's not that easy. It never was.

Just like my comment on writing different types of women the real problem with real vs fake is that there is barely variety between types of anything. From character traits, natural attraction, and relationships it's way too samey.

On the whole, whether romantic or plationic, RPG relationships come down to the same things: Keep the person in your party for a while, agree with them in the chat trees, and do a side quest. This is understandable, as game thus far are nowhere close to replicating real friendships let alone romances. Overall, the inclusion of romance options in a game seems to be used as a vehicle to give the NPCs some back story and let you hear their opinions on things. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. I like doing side quests. It just doesn't make me any more immersed in a game to have one of the characters say they love me.
I'm using the KOTOR, Dragon Age, and Neverwinter Nights games as my basis here, which are all Bioware, so if some other company has done things differently, I'd be happy to hear about it.

 

[Desavouret]

I just want to say this was a fantastic panel and I'm glad I got to see it. It seems these kinds of topics always hold a lot of interest and I hope that people take this and other discussions with them. It goes to the larger point of bad writing in games for any gender as well as race but hopefully we will keep getting better.

 

[Crimson_Dragoon]

I too don't get the hate on Lightning. I think people who hate her tragically misunderstand the character (maybe because of the length of game in which it develops ) People think she's meant to be a strong female character because she's always lashing out at people and we're meant to like that.

But it couldn't be clearer that that's just her personal flaw. Not a flaw of women, but a woman who can't trust people. Over the course of the game she softens up, loses her war wounds, becomes quite maternal (and in a lovely softly softly manner) with hope and in the end realises that her violence is hurting other people, instead of other people hurting her and comes to terms with it.

So yeah.

Thank you. This is true of most of the characters from that game. But no one seems to be able to get over the characters' flaws to see that overcoming those flaws is what drives character development and growth in the game.

 

[TheAbominableDan]

I loved this panel. I agreed with everything said with the possible exception of Bayonetta. I say possible because I haven't actually played it so these are just my (probably wrong impressions of it) while I've heard that Bayonetta is a great female character and I have no reason to dispute that. My issue with the game is that they had to resort to hyper sexualization in order to get their game with a great female character.

The game sold well and got lots of attention and they're may be a great character within it, but that was still a game with a character who got naked constantly. And I wonder if the game would have had as much success without that. Which I find a little troubling if I'm right.

Also, Enslaved was one of my favorite games of last year. I'm a man and I thought Trip was fantastic and had no issue with her putting the slave collar on Monkey.

 

[Formica Archonis]

Awesome, video!
Also:
Awesome video!

 

[Manji187]

"All characters are hard to write" indeed...so how about genuinely trying ay, gaming industry?

In the case of female characters: if Bayonetta is lauded for advancing female character development (she accepts her sexuality...but doesn't need your approval)...then the road ahead is going to be a long one.

 

[Macgyvercas]

You know I though this was going to be something else. Oh well.

I did too man. I dd too.

 

[brazuca]

You know I though this was going to be something else. Oh well.

I did too man. I dd too.

Count me in too! Now give me back 30 min of my life!

 

[Geo Da Sponge]

When I first started watching these videos, my mind was immediately drawn towards what the panel would have to say about Jack from Mass Effect 2. They didn't really cover her much apart from a brief "Good for you Jack, now go put on a shirt". But this got me thinking about how her character would work if she was male. From there I started wondering how the players perception would change when viewing a character who was half scared-little-boy, half psychopath instead of half scared-little-girl, half psychopath. Would the player be less likely to question the characters background if they were a young male mass murderer rather than a female one?

I then went to think about how, if you had a male Jack, he would interact with a female Shepard in the paragon romance option. The scene where Jack runs to Shepard in tears (up until it becomes sex):

Now that scene, if the genders were reversed would create an instant idea of female Shepard as a surrogate mother figure to the male Jack, especially if it remained a platonic relationship. That seems like a really interesting idea to me, and what's strange is that it comes about by carrying out male and female set roles to their logical conclusions, the female is the mother and the male is the destructive aggressor. Not that I'm complaining about the storyline as it is, it's my favourite romance subplot of any Bioware game.

I was just wondering what Susan (or anyone else) thought of this.

 

[vxicepickxv]

Wait a second here. Women don't like poorly written or developed characters either.

I'm not really shocked at hearing that.

 

[Camaranth]

this brought up some interesting points about characters and perceptions in general.

I think story development and characters are going to become more important and with the ability now to show subtle hints of emotion instead of having the characters just state how they feel. to quote the greatest robot of all "that makes me feel angry!" This was mentioned not to long ago in an article here on the escapist, focusing on the motion capture that was used for Enslaved and how most of Trips' emotions are shown rather than stated.

The name thing was interesting and I think it also a reflection of our society and the snap judgments people make . I have a gender neutral name (well it's certainly common for men) and I've found that by not indicating my gender is actually an advantage.

As for having every member of an RPG party be a possible love interest independent of the player characters gender choice....
I think it's a good idea but what would be better is if there was the flirtatious option and to have your character be Totally Shot Down if the other character just wasn't interested.
My first thought was of a female shepard trying to seduce ashley williams....can't really see Ash being ok with that....

 

[Jakale]

I disagree completely with the idea of the option to pursue romance with all characters in an RPG (comes up during the question half hour). In fact, I think it's important that there are some characters you can't do this with.

In the real world, sexuality is rarely all-embracing. People have different tastes, orientations, or occasionally no orientation at all and these attributes hugely affect a person's life. While you as the player should be able to shape that aspect of your character, when it comes to NPCs, which themselves all have pre-written backstories, giving the player the ability to command such an important aspect of their character, in my eyes, devalues them as a whole.

Not to mention real world romance can be a very long and rocky process. I'm honestly tired of romance in games that seem to have short time spans. Even if you do form a relationship from being together for work or travel those relationships don't tend to last long. Having true relationships just spring up so easily seems to cheapen the real thing. Maybe short term love blooms are common for a some but they're way too overrepresented. For most it's not that easy. It never was.

Just like my comment on writing different types of women the real problem with real vs fake is that there is barely variety between types of anything. From character traits, natural attraction, and relationships it's way too samey.

I don't have a huge issue with the "quick relationship" stuff because in almost all the games I've played that have an optional pursued relationship (counting things like Harvest Moon as not as optional) allow or force the option of not letting that relationship continue past the final boss (Dragon Age, Mass Effect, etc.) You can even argue some cases that the relationship isn't that fast. RPGs with mostly walking have you going all over the place, and anyone who's played Oregon Trail knows that much travel, without pausing to explore castles and caves, takes a while. Stuff like Mass Effect with starship travel still probably doesn't happen in a week and real life (not to mention movie) relationships have started in less than a month of knowing one another.

Sure you could argue cases where you can do the full range of conversations needed in one sitting by leaving rooms briefly and whatnot, but most games seem to wait til just before the final battle to see the effect, basically making the assumption of progressive wooing.

I agree that it's less real if games made absolutely everyone in your party an option to romance, though I'd argue that it would be more interesting to allow you to try and then, after building up your relationship to the point where you can try to take it down a "more than friends" path, let the NPC refute your advances because they're straight, gay, made of molten rock, etc. It let's you roleplay, while giving the NPC more character depth, and maybe one or two of those characters could have their minds changed by a suitably persistent and charming PC.

 

[vxicepickxv]

After watching the videos, my only question is how did I miss all the Enslaved hate?

If you're going outside of gaming to webcomics, I find Luna from Dominic Deegan to be a well written female character.

Good writing is hard. Good writing for someone of the opposite gender is even harder. I'm going to go back to an old pen & paper RPG called 7th Sea. I find it interesting that the best written book, both in general and for female characters, was written by the creator's wife.

Even with Kat's scars, she's not an overly ugly character.

Why limit the FFXIII hate to characters? I'm pretty sure that FFXIII can go to hell.

I'm glad that they didn't mention Lineage 2 and how bad that is. The female dwarves look like children.

About the study, adult games are for adults, and comic books aren't really mainstream enough for body image? I'm not really sure I know how to address that area.

 

[Susan Arendt]

I disagree completely with the idea of the option to pursue romance with all characters in an RPG (comes up during the question half hour). In fact, I think it's important that there are some characters you can't do this with.

In the real world, sexuality is rarely all-embracing. People have different tastes, orientations, or occasionally no orientation at all and these attributes hugely affect a person's life. While you as the player should be able to shape that aspect of your character, when it comes to NPCs, which themselves all have pre-written backstories, giving the player the ability to command such an important aspect of their character, in my eyes, devalues them as a whole.

For example, ME2 is mentioned as a specific example for where free romance should be used. Mordin however, is a Salarian. Salarians are an asexually orientated species, it actually says this in the codex entry. It would have made no sense at all for him to be a romance option.

In the end, my favourite characters from ME2 were Mordin, Samara and Legion. All 3 of which are non-romance (Slight question mark over Samara, but ultimatly all attempts are rebuffed by her, thank god). Somehow I doubt this is a coincidence (I am asexual myself, by the way). I think that, as a character, it makes little sense for Samara to find Shepard attractive. She's amongst the oldest Asari in the galaxy, long past her Maiden stage quite literally a matriarch, a mother.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that romance options are fine, but not if they don't make sense as part of that character. The game should be able to turn around and say, "Ok, you want to pursue the romance option with this same-gender NPC, but this NPC is heterosexual. So you can't. Tough luck." Forcing the NPC into a position that makes little sense based on their character backstory is even worse than them not having one at all.

You're absolutely right - it wouldn't be at all realistic. I do like having multiple options from a role-playing point of view, but not everyone is going to be ok hopping into bed with someone of the same gender, or a different species. I need to think on this more, to see if perhaps there's some middle ground to be had. I mean, on the one hand, it is a fantasy role playing situation, so you should be able to pursue it as you like. On the other hand, if we genuinely want fully realized characters, then they can't just be robots ready to hop in the sack so long as you tick the right check boxes. You raise excellent points for discussion.

 

[GloatingSwine]

I agree that it's less real if games made absolutely everyone in your party an option to romance, though I'd argue that it would be more interesting to allow you to try and then, after building up your relationship to the point where you can try to take it down a "more than friends" path, let the NPC refute your advances because they're straight, gay, made of molten rock, etc. It let's you roleplay, while giving the NPC more character depth, and maybe one or two of those characters could have their minds changed by a suitably persistent and charming PC.

It's not just that it makes it less "real", it makes the characters less varied if they're all gagging for some Shep (homoshep or heteroshep).

In Mass Effect 2, for instance, Samara was interesting because of the reason she wasn't a romance option (and she will shoot you down pretty fast).

I think there should be an option for a homosexual relationship for either gender, but every hole's a goal just means there are less points of difference between the characters.

 

[Cropsy91]

Honestly, in regards to some of the opinions on Bayonetta, I was neither put off by the level of sexualization nor attracted to it. I actually found it fun just because it was just so absurdly over-the-top that it came off as intentionally humorous, perhaps even a spoof on sexuality in modern games in general.