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.
I was talking about this exact thing to my brother not two days ago. He seemed skeptical that this is even a position some people take, no matter how obscure they are in literature / gaming / television / etc., and that Star Trek was enough to make up for it. I’d link this conversation to him, but for the guilt of inflicting this corner of the internet on loved ones.
Ninja’d by Hyena Girl – sorry about that!
KICK VOX DAY OUT OF THE SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA, WILL YOU
HE WILL SHOW YOU
HE WILL SHOW YOU ALL
I’m a guy, and my favorite D&D character was a female half-orc bureaucrat wizard/tank. Let me tell you, nothing makes your character memorable like playing a Lawful Neutral bureaucrat in a campaign made up of anarchists. (She turned out to be everyone’s favorite, probably because she was very low in the Random Number God’s favor and yet still didn’t quite manage to die.)
RE: Z
Using “species” apparently would sound too scientific for the “fantasy” flavor.
I always figured it was because elves, humans, and orcs could inter-breed, ergo they were unlikely to be separate species.
…wow, I just realized the really creepy racial connotations of that. I mean, I always knew there were creepy questionable racial things, but. Um. Yeeeaaahhhh…
RE: tedthefed
Those people include women in the stories, and then also include lots and lots and lots and lots of rape.
Uuuuugh, I HATE this. medievalpoc on tumblr had an excellent post on that kind of thing, but it’s tumblr, so good luck finding it again. I mean, I can enjoy books with rape — Sasha Miller’s Ladylord did a good job, I think, of depicting rape culture and misogyny without making my soul cry — but it’s a very delicate line, and it’s like, shit, I get enough of that in real life, why would I want it in my fiction?
Speaking of fantasy I’ve always taken great joy in messing with the minds of players by subverting expectations about evil humanoid races in D&D/Pathfinder by making Gnolls very matriarchal. They’re all ready for the magic/stealth oriented Femdomme elves (Drow) but the 7′ tall warrior hyena amazons come as a rude shock to a lot of them… especially players who think tough=male.
Wow, a fighting game with D&D races. How many brain cells did Vox burn coming up with that breathtakingly original idea?
I tend to picture Vox as a little boy bouncing on his bunk bed in his Star Wars boxer shorts making signs that say, “no gurls allowed.” I bet he’s got a GI Joe and some army men, too. No doubt he hates his mommy, she’s probably the one who sent him to his room.
Hyena Girl – At least as of 3.5, that’s canon. They’re humanoid hyenas, after all.
I love it how they act like making games with no female characters is a new thing…
Nah. Think Doylist, not Watsonian. As in, the writers either didn’t think of, or didn’t care about, the fact that interbreeding should be impossible. Take Spock: Vulcans have copper-based blood. There is no remotely believable way that humans and Vulcans are closely-related enough to produce even a sterile hybrid, but there he be. Elves in most fantasy settings live hundreds of years, and in Tolkien they’re truly immortal. Individual rulers can probably trace their lineage back before our species evolved (not that evolution exists in Tolkien’s books). And yet, there sit Tanis Half-Elven and Elrond – and, more importantly, Elrond’s children.
RE: seraph4377
Enh, that makes sense. Still creepy racist overtones to me, though.
Not to mention Elrond’s grand-grand-grand-mother, who was a Maia, i.e. a kind of angelic being. But I guess she was powerful enough to make that work…
P.S. The canonical name distortion is Pox Day. The “French pox”, probably…
”Putting women in the game would be an act of brutal sadism, an act of barbarism even by pagan Roman standards. ”
Such a quote implies that it’s a delicate, history-based artwork. As if one’d take Berlioz’s music and ruined it with some horrible rap in it or something. Dude, you’re introducing fucking ORCS! Since the dawn of mankind women have existed. It’s a greater historical mess-up to introduce women as opposed to orcs…? Omg.
Vox Day is a big fan of Tolkien. Tolkien did put a, uh, token woman into his seminal work. And that woman was, in fact, good with a sword. I call bullshit.
Vox Day is a big fan of Tolkien.
Gee, I sure couldn’t tell.
Seriously, am I the only fantasy fan who wishes that the genre as a whole would come up with some new ideas to base a world on? I’m not even that into Tolkien, so the constant deluge of knock-offs is just really dull.
No woman gladiators?!?
Z – Yeah, we’re getting into straight-up “A Wizard Did It” territory there.
LBT – Oh, no doubt. So much of Fantasy is built on the foundation of Tolkien and perpetuated by privileged white nerds that it would be surprising if there weren’t any. The Drow fiasco alone…
RE: seraph4377
I’ve heard a lot of complaints about YA fiction, but I tend to actually prefer it, because in my experience, it at least has some OTHER fantasy ideas that freakin’ Tolkien. Like, I want something BESIDES bland blond vaguely-medieval vaguely-Northwest European! I want worlds based off of Feudal Japan, or ancient Egypt, or 1920s India! I want paranoid Cold War fantasies, and surreal Lewis Carrol fantasies, and modern day boring-ass fantasies about customer service.
Short aside about Paizo official campaigns and adventure paths: It is, in a way, almost ridicolous how many not generally hetereonormative characters and situations you can find in those bits of writing. Not in a bad way, but in a quantity where I was kind of surprised at the sheer volume and pleasantly puzzled after years and years of modules for 3.5 where such a thing as, oh, say a former sex worker or a bisexual mage or anything of the kind was utterly unthinkable.
As for that bit specifically, I like the set up, and it does introduce a fair amount of interesting quandries and questions about perception and guilt, it’s a good way to have a bit of an aside that might not neccesarily be instantly fixable with rigid “Right, the madame is evil / good and the mercenaries are evil / good” (Surprise! Third party!).
However, reading it out like that, the sex work seems almost incidental to the entire thing. “Her past as a gangmember” covers just as much, or even “former run ins with the mercenaries who have hand in organized crime”: What I mean is that given that the link seems to be “claw marks from intimiate contact + former sex worker = red herring victim”, it could just as easily be “claw marks + seduced and killed for vengeance”.
Essentially, the sex work isn’t neccesary since you already have the barebones idea perfectly fitting. I’d keep it in, because hey, it’s a good detail and adds character, but it’d make it so the part where they incidentally discover is subtle, so that it’s not an out and out easy connection. That way, the DM (who, if you submit it somewhere, might not be you!) can play it as much up or down as they like, which preservers freedom, while still having that casual link. Small bits about former jobs, a few asides about having made sure the beds in the tavern are in tip top shape because the madame is very much aware of the boon of a good bed, wink wink, and stuff like that.
But perhaps that’s just me. I think if you need to add a tetiary layer of description to what is already a very good murder mystery, you add a complication that is only there to be a complication.
What you could consider is having significant hints about it, or unstated sort of “Yea, that was her former job, along with stealing”, and then, once someone is found dead, have the mercenaries go “Damn right that former prostiture killed our friend! She’s a sly and conniving cat of a creature! A feline fatale! And you can’t trust her, because whores!” – which twists the narrative a little bit in relation to having her be the obvious possible murderer, while also having decidedly unpleasant idiots clamoring for her tail (which should, at the very least, make any group of players feel just a bit defensive and liable to consider different viewpoints).
LBT – my gf’s first series (Griffin’s Daughter) has the elvish society based on Japan’s! Her human societies are a mixture of medieval and Roman/Byzantine.
What about lady orcs? Were we supposed to assume they weren’t included either, or that they reproduce in some way that isn’t tainted by woman cooties?
If Pox is such a Tolkien fan, he should know that Morgoth created Orcs from Elves, so surely their breeding is a similar process. Morgoth didn’t have actual creative power, he could only distort. I’d bet on there being female Orcs, but they’re hardly going to be flashing their girly bits at their enemies, are they?
RE: Kittehs
GOOD. While my primary fantasy series, Reverend Alpert, is post-apocalyptic and a kludge of US religions, secular mythos, and pop culture memes. (Eventually, I plan to write a story about a superhero created by his town to protect them.)
He’s so pissy about the SFFWA not bowing to his earlier tantrum that we’re going to have to sit through many more before he tires himself out enough to take a nap.
Griffin’s Daughter also features lots of women soldiers, and, iirc, women involved in training gladiators (I’ll have to check that bit).