So our old friend Vox Day is working on a video game. And he’s decided to make a bold and unprecedented choice in his design of the game: he’s not going to have any ladies in it.
But it turns out this choice has nothing to do with anything so pedestrian as misogyny. In fact, it was the only rational choice he could make. Let’s let him explain. He has such a way with words. (He’s apparently some sort of writer.)
I am a game designer. I am designing and producing a game that does not, and will not, have a single female character in it. This is not because I am misogynistic. This is not because I do not women to play the game. This is because putting women in the game makes no sense, violates the principle of the suspension of disbelief, and will not make the game any better as a game.
Well, that makes sense. I mean, the game is probably some game that has to have only male characters to be believable. You know, like Dance Party with the American Presidents or the U.S. Poultry & Egg Association Board of Directors Simulator 3000 or something like that.
I am the lead designer of First Sword, a combat management game. The game has orcs and men, elves and dwarves. It has goblins and trolls. But it has no women.
Uh, wait. It’s a combat game filled with orcs, goblins and trolls, but putting women in it would “violate … the principle of the suspension of disbelief.”
Because the game is a gladiator game. Women cannot credibly fight as gladiators. We don’t put women in the game for the same reason we don’t put bunny rabbits or children in the game.
Well, why not? You put fucking orcs in it. Why not make a combat game with bunny rabbits?
Actually, someone already did that. It’s called Overgrowth. And it’s supposed to be pretty good.
Putting women in the game would be an act of brutal sadism, an act of barbarism even by pagan Roman standards. While the Romans did occasionally put female gladiators in the arena, they were there as a comedic act.
Really? This is a VIDEO GAME. You can do whatever you want with it. It is really harder to imagine a woman being able to fight a man than it is to imagine entire races of imaginary humanoid creatures?
We could, of course, throw out historical verisimilitude. But we’re not going to. Because we value that verisimilitude far more than we value the opinion of a few whiny women who don’t play the sort of games we make anyhow.
Historical verisimilitude? Historical verisimilitude?!
YOU’RE MAKING A GAME ABOUT ORCS AND TROLLS.
ORCS AND TROLLS DO NOT EXIST.
THEY HAVE NEVER EXISTED.
THERE IS NO HISTORY THAT INCLUDES ORCS AND TROLLS.
Bleh, embed fail!
Interestingly the only overt feminist computer game is a rather brilliant stealth-based FPS called “No One Lives Forever”.
It is old by today’s standards but imagine a 70ies themed spy thriller with Cate Archer as heroine, henchmen discussing the sociology of crime while on their guard shift, women NPCs explaining to villains why cat-calling is inappropriate and tons of funny dialogue.
I play it once a year – it’s my all-time favourite computer game.
NB: Don’t try the Playstation version. It’s rather lacking.
So is he going to slap a “No Gurls Allowed” banner on the game’s package? Eh, he probably scorns consoles so it’ll be a PC game. That still leaves him the problem of how to keep his game away from the feeeemales.
I’d really love to see a group of female gamers record themselves playing his game and laughing at his ridiculousness. Well, maybe not. We all know that MRAs get highly offended when women don’t do what they’re told, so they’d probably dox them or something.
I love Skyrim. My female Dark Elf married another female Dark Elf and they adopted two daughters and built a pretty awesome Manor. They have a house steward but he seems to only wander aimlessly around, eating and swimming in the fish hatchery. He didn’t even do anything about the giant that bounded onto the property and killed the cow. Men. Always sitting on their asses, eating sweet rolls. Pfft.
If he’s just ripping off Lord of the Rings like every other fantasy hack, he actually could claim that there would be no female orcs in combat due to “historical accuracy”. Tolkien’s quote about them was:
Besides that, I don’t think it’s simply not including female characters that’s Vox Day’s mistake here. I think any artist should have the right to choose what kind of characters they want to include in their work without having to shoehorn in every possible social group and topic. Tokenism can be just as (if not more) harmful as exclusion. I do think most creators could really benefit from thinking outside the white male heterosexual cisgender first world middle class mold, but the solution to that is way more complex than to throw boobs on some random character, give a brown pixel shader to another, and call it a day.
The mistake here is first calling attention to deliberately leaving female characters out and writing a really flimsy justification for it that amounts to “women, get out!” If he just made the game and released it, nobody would give a crap and the game would just be more quickly forgotten white noise in an overcrowded industry. Every uproar I’ve seen about excluding female characters has always been because of a creator calling attention to it. You’d think they’d just stop that by now, but nope.
My female woodelf’s Skyrim husband is apparently a badass. I got the “Oh noes! Your spouse has been kidnapped by bandits!” quest. I was about to go find him when suddenly… Quest completed. I was really confused until he wandered back home the next day. Apparently he killed all the bandits and rescued himself!
Grr, that kidnapping quest. There’s a glitch or something that can mess up the NPC’s movement once you rescue them. When my Dark Elf’s wife got captured and I got her back, she started walking into walls and getting stuck. I imagined my character going “My god, darling, what did they do to you?!” and then swore an oath that she would kill any bandit she came across. Which works out well since bandits always attack you anyway.
Every time an MRA talks about history like they know what the hell they are on about I want to bang my head against a wall and somewhere a kindly and harmless history professor has a heart attack in the study filled wall to wall with books.
Please stop massacring my subject, go and pick up a book.
This was like the time I argued with an MRA on tumblr who seemed to be under the impression that there had never been any universal military conscription before WWI and thus the suffragettes were to blame for all the men dying in the trenches.
When I pointed out that mass conscription had existed long before and you could probably blame Napoleon with more credibility than you could blame the suffragettes he conveniently ignored that.
Oh and he claimed that Chivalry had been codified. As a medieval historian I laugh heartily at this and throw the millions of medieval texts at him on chivalry all of which pose a different definition of chivalry. I also gift to him the vats of historians tears shed as they try and come up with a workable universal definition of history.
I will also drop Christine de Pizan on him, just because.
Historical facts are misandry.
This is completely accurate? Are they also going to fight a giant enemy crab? Attack its weak point for massive damage? Is it going to be on sale for five hundred ninety-nine US dollars?
Whoops, I tried to put a fake HTML tag at the end of that. It was supposed to say /datedreference.
Oh right, the Romans never had women as the victims of horrific cruelty in their entertainments. Nosirree, never happened. They were only there to be funny pretend gladiators.
Fuckwit.
I think both Vox Day and Heartiste are pretty racist, as horrible people often have such things in common.
“I’m going to create a game with trolls and elves, but no women, because that wouldn’t be historically accurate.”
Um, no. You’re making a fantasy game. If there are elves and trolls in he game, historical accuracy has gone out the window. You’re not including women in the game because you don’t want to, not because of “historical accuracy.”
And what the hell, why won’t this idea that women don’t like video games just die already?
I’m so glad we have MRAs to make historically accurate games, the ones where dwarves and orcs are characters but there are no women because women never fought. I wish I was half the historian Vox Day is /sarcasm.
Women can’t fight, right… I must have gotten my ass kicked in martial arts by short, extremely effeminate men then. What a load of hogwash. Just because women, on the whole, are shorter and have more difficultly than men building loads of muscle mass doesn’t mean they can’t fight. Most women can fight just fine when they put their mind to it, just like most men.
Vox is a joke and his game will never get made. Unfortunately there’s also a real game coming out where you can’t play a woman for the exact same reasons.
There is a long history in the high-fantasy-RPG community of using “historical verisimilitude” to refer to “my weird hang-ups that make the game less fun.” For example, saying, “You can’t use that kind of sword because we are playing a classical high-fantasy setting based on medieval England and that fantasy sword is based on one from the pre-Islamic Middle East.” It is transparently bullshit because Orcs.
I have also heard a lot of anecdotes about women who tried to play female characters in D&D (&c) only to have their characters captured and raped by bandits/Orcs/whatever because verisimilitude. It made them not want to play the game anymore, thus preserving the boys’ club.
The flipside of this is fun, where you say, “OK, if you want to do that, go for it, and if you are serious about the game, then come up with a reason why it makes sense for your character to do that.” This style makes it a lot more fun & creative to play, which is why my current game is 3 women and 2 men (and awesome).
@historiophilia Chivalry… was… codified…? Somehow I (and all of my professors) missed that.
And actually, the other guy plays a female character, so the party is 4 females and 1 male, and my male character probably goes down (dying) more often than any of the others.
leftwingfox:
One key thing to keep in mind with Pathfinder (and other flavors of D&D): Magic is technology. That is, it fills much the same role as technology does in the real world–it’s reliable, stable and produces repeatable results. And it doesn’t care about gender identity one whit.
Technology in the real world has had a huge effect on the rights of women and PoCs (less the latter, due to the economic factors that come into play). Magic would likewise have a similar effect on most D&D settings–with the added factor that high-powered magic has been around since nearly the dawn of time. Thus, gender-role thinking should be massively reduced (that it often isn’t in many published and home games says more about this world than the fantasy ones). (Side-note: This is an also why Voxie is so full of shit.)
Now, economic injustice DOES still exist in the setting. Thus, yes, there will likely be sex-work (high-end courtesan roles may have a reasonable number of people who ‘prefer’ that particular line of work, but streetwalkers and even brothel workers will likely still be drawn from those forced into the role as a matter of economic survival, if not literally just forced into the job by traffickers). But it shouldn’t be anywhere near as gender-imbalanced as it is in ours; instead, at all tiers of society, sex workers should be as likely to be as male as female. Non-human sex workers outside their own communities are likely viewed as “exotic”–and thus, probably disproportionate at both ends of the economic spectrum. (A cat-folk prostitute might appeal to jaded wealthy types, but will have a hard time finding customers in a human-dominant community’s ‘middle class’–so will often end up working more in the slums and shantytowns.)
So, your catfolk madam’s inn is likely staffed by a mostly human crew, with the number who identify as men or women in equal numbers (note that a low-level sorcerer could adjust their gender presentation, which should not be confused with their identity, something which would net them more customers).
So it’s not an intrinsically bad idea to include sex-work; you should just make certain you’re remembering that this world is not one that abides so readily by our own fucked up kyriarchal imbalances. It may have all new biases, but it should at least have ours be impacted by the presence of magic. (Racism, of the “I dislike people of my species with slightly different skin-tones” is another thing that should be virtually nil in a fantasy setting, IMNSHO. The idea that someone cares about skin color when there’s people running around with tusks and pointed ears and mechanically different body-types is going to seem strange in most environments.)
My understanding is that First Sword isn’t so much a game as it is a glorified spreadsheet. Oh, it’s going to crash and burn, of course, but it’s not that hard to make something like that.
I do have to admit that it’s a better strategy than the ones lots of other fantasy writers take to make their works more believable representations of times long past. Those people include women in the stories, and then also include lots and lots and lots and lots of rape.
In 19 Common Era the Roman Senate prohibiting men and women of the highest classes from appearing on the stage or in the arena. The decree specifically mentions an earlier decree from 11 Common Era prohibiting freeborn women under the age of twenty from appearing in the arena. in 200 Common Era Septimus Severus expanded the ban to include women of every station.
Archaeological evidence of female gladiators has been found from Turkey to London.
Pox Day might know this if he ever took his head out of his ass.
*The Roman Senate issued a decree prohibiting*
I would totally like to see Dance Party with the American Presidents come out. I bet Martin van Buren could get down.
I have the feeling William Howard Taft would just tear up the dance floor. Just put on “Maniac” by Michael Sembello and watch him go to work.