Interesting article on Kotaku today in which activist Anita Sarkeesian expresses what she’s looking for from game developers.
Ultimately, she is looking for games to keep 8 guidelines in mind when making games:
1. Avoid the Smurfette principle (don't have just one female character in an ensemble cast, let alone one whose personality is more or less "girl" or "woman.")
2. "Lingerie is not armor" (Dress female characters as something other than sex objects.)
3. Have female characters of various body types
4. Don't over-emphasize female characters' rear ends, not any more than you would the average male character's.
5. Include more female characters of color.
6. Animate female characters to move the way normal women, soldiers or athletes would move.
7. Record female character voiceover so that pain sounds painful, not orgasmic
8. Include female enemies, but don't sexualize those enemies
So how does Stardock do?
Let’s take a look at Stardock last released game, the popular, critically acclaimed PC strategy game Fallen Enchantress:
1. Avoid the Smurfette principle (don't have just one female character in an ensemble cast, let alone one whose personality is more or less "girl" or "woman.")
Our last game, Fallen Enchantress has female leads and allows players to design female units in total equality with males with equal resource allocation (i.e. we spent an equal amount in the form of hundreds of thousands in art costs) on separate clothing, armor.
Stardock spent hundreds of thousands of dollars creating unique character models and assets to ensure that both males and female units could be created by players.
2. "Lingerie is not armor" (Dress female characters as something other than sex objects.)
Same. Fallen Enchantress female armor was functional, practical. As you can see in the above screenshot, the armor is not only not “lingerie” but it lacks breast definition because real female armor wouldn’t have that.
3. Have female characters of various body types
We include multiple models for male and females in the game. As any game developer can tell you, this was a non-trivial cost, especially to a small studio because it meant we had to create different types of armor (our armor is not a texture being applied).
4. Don't over-emphasize female characters' rear ends, not any more than you would the average male character's.
We modeled our units proportions based on real world measurements.
In Fallen Enchantress, players can design their own units, leaders, etc. Multiple body sizes included.
5. Include more female characters of color.
Done.
Literally any color you’d like. Even blue.
6.Animate female characters to move the way normal women, soldiers or athletes would move.
Done.
7. Record female character voiceover so that pain sounds painful, not orgasmic
Done.
8. Include female enemies, but don't sexualize those enemies
The Villain, Ceresa was female
and
according to statistics the most popular HERO of Fallen Enchantress was…
Procipinee. Queen of the West, heir of Amarian. The world’s most powerful channeler of magic.
But wait…that’s not all…
>50% of the source code in Fallen Enchantress was written by women (plural) and much of the art in the game was created by women.
I look forward to Ms. Sarkeesian holding Stardock up as the model of what game studios should be doing. In fact, her and her allies are welcome to find any modern game or studio that has comparable representation of women both in terms of in-game characters as well as development.
I won’t hold my breath.