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.
Buttercup Q. Skullpants:
So THAT’s what that noise is. I always thought the jaw harp was some ultra twangy guitar.
My favorite part is how you get near the top of the list and suddenly it’s all Immortal. They are the most black metal band that ever black metalled.
I got to number 3. Are all bad black metal bands German? Is bad, when applied to black metal, a redundancy?
I raise you: Warriors of Genghis Khan:
Well, sounding like your album was produced by a drunk squirrel that’s never seen a mixing desk before is considered something of a point of honor in the black metal scene. Immortal wins a special prize for having a drummer who appears to have no sense of rhythm of all. If you gave a monkey some drumsticks and sat it behind a drumkit, its random banging would be more rhythmical.
This may be one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard.
AIT – yeah, it’s a weird sound. Roger Daltrey played it at the beginning of “Join Together”. I think it’s safe to say that’s the greatest jaw harp solo in all of rock ‘n’ roll.
Fuck yeah Overgrowth!
They’ve been releasing alpha versions since 2008, making it the most alpha game of all time.
Would that be this squirrel, perchance?
That bit about the drummer reminds me of the joke that you know when the stage is level ‘cos the drummer’s drooling from both sides of his mouth.
Nah, that squirrel has encountered a musical instrument before. If you get someone like that to produce your album you’re obviously a sell-out.
Well, I guess this is proof MRAs live in another world. I just wish their world didn’t get the cool fantasy stuff 🙁
This guy has obviously never played or even learned of a single Japanese all-female fighting game.
For the same reason movie studios are not targeting black people, who buy almost half the movie tickets in the US despite being 17% of the population.
I *LOVE* the Most Unwanted Song. I mean it. I could listen to it every day.
Oh yeah jayemgriffin, it was “codified”.
*distant howls of pain and rage from Medieval Historians everywhere echo plaintively across the tundra*
Also to return to overusing Tolkein, I LOVE Tolkein and my god am I sick of his ideas being trotted out time after time.
It’s a big part of the reason why I barely read any Fantasy any more and infinity prefer most Science Fiction.
And as LBT says, when I do read Fantasy it tends to be YA, as there are many more interesting worlds being created there.
Tales of the Otori for example, Fantasy set in Pre-Modern Japan with Magic Ninjas? Yes please.Brilliant female characters? Political machinations? Even more yes please.
I think what Vox meant to say is “Women having any kind of agency or being anything other than passive objects for men is very threatening to me and makes my boner sad. Therefore, I will expend large amounts of mental energy denying that women can do anything, especially physical stuff and extra-especially fighting, and pretend that this somehow reflects historical or biological reality rather than my own hangups.”
Buttercup, Amorr is the name of Mr. Beale’s Rome clone in his fantasy world of Selenoth. He has written several novels and stories set there – the series is called “Arts of Dark and Light” or something like that. So his claim of historical verisimilitude is even shakier than it looks – the game isn’t really set in Rome at all – but in a fictionalized version of Rome.
I tried to read a couple of his short stories in the series – he offers them for free on Amazon periodically – and found it grim and depressing. Will not be reading him again.
Fun fact: Women were quite frequent in Roman gladiatorial fights. As proper fighters. Archaeological evidence suggests that the Romans considered “barbarian” women (Celtic and Scythian women both had quite a track record of participating in warfare) fighting to be quite exotic and that these female warriors fetched both a good price and drew huge crowds.
Then again, historical accuracy and misogynists rarely go together.
^ Something that George R R Martin, a much better writer Pox Bray I assume, obviously knew about. There are women gladiators in A Dance With Dragons. Fantasy based on history is so much better when the author bothers to actually the study the history. What a concept!
This reminds me – I ran an all-gay D&D campaign that lasted about eight years. The cultures of the game world varied from bog-standard in a number of ways. Dwarves and elves got along, for one thing, and the party encountered an orcish society in which commerce had replaced warfare as the means to social distinction. Now that I think about it, commerce and economics played a highly visible role across the entire game. Don’t know just why, it’s not part of my life (never even worked a private sector job). I also introduced an island nation settled by escaped slaves that had developed into a functional libertarian utopia, locked in a cold war with the slaver society from which their ancestors had escaped.
Oh, and one in which women were four fifths of the population and all of the warriors, who practiced polyandry. Wouldn’t Pox Day have gotten a kick out of that!
Late back to the party, but thank you freemage and fibinachi for your input.
Economic injustice is a major theme/plot driver of this campaign, which is why I went there in the first place. The major city in this kingdom was getting flooded by refugees over the past 90+ years due to political and supernatural disasters in the surrounding areas; more than could be absorbed by the kingdom’s economy. This resulted in a large permanent slum outside the city walls, and the rise of increasingly powerful gangs.
It’s also made the mine in this boom-town incredibly important, both as a magnet for those in the slums, and for the machinations of the trade guild/mafia.
Sexism in the game is virtually non-existant. I try and keep a gender balance here in the NPCs, although I admit It’s not fully 50/50. I tried to keep racism as a very minor element in this campaign, partly because my friends and I love to play really non-human characters (our last campaign featured a centaur, kitsune, tengu, kobold, and cursed human) and I wanted this setting to allow for a wide range of possible characters. The only real exception is against orcs and goblin-kind, since the nation experiences constant raids from them. It’s still human-dominated, so you’re absolutely right about this character’s relative desirability in the campaign.
In the case of this character, the arc is that she and her sister both ran with a small-time gang as teens before the gang was squeezed out by the more powerful organizations. Her sister the thief decided to “go straight” and become a scullery maid at a ramshackle tavern, while she went into prostitution as the “least bad choice”, with her species putting her at a competitive disadvantage to the humans and half-elves in the field. She snuck into the city to get access to wealthier clients, but was confronted and assaulted by one of the mob’s mercenary enforcers. She clawed the shit out of his face and escaped. The boss then sent a couple of thugs into the slum to get rid of her, which the two sisters killed before escaping to join the caravan to the boom town with the players at the start of the adventure. When the town was found to be completely abandoned, the catfolk sisters laid claim to the inn, allowing her to step into the Madam role.
That way when the captain of the mercenaries enters town with a wicked set of scars across his face, and is later found murdered…
Yes, this is exactly my thinking right now. I’m planning to write a content note in the GM guide about this, and noting how to modify the campaign to eliminate prostitution references if any of the players feel uncomfortable with this addressed in their game.
Side note: In this campaign, the healer of the party became smitten by her at the introduction, and the two have had an adorably awkward romance happening throughout the campaign.
LBT: The bureaucratic orc sounds awesome!
Skanky Tits: Ugh, my deepest sympathies that your friend went through that.
Robert: Sounds like an awesome campaign. 🙂 I understand where you’re coming from with economics though. I have this crazy affinity for holy characters (especially paladins), despite my dislike of organized religions in the real world.
Beloved wrote a fantasy Egypt short story once, which I thought was pretty good. The hero was a young girl who was kind of a Cinderella because she had red hair, which was taken as An Omen. A traveling priest/troubleshooter takes her under his wing and they confront and defeat a powerful mummy sorcerer together. Beloved was worried that the relationship between the preteen girl and the grown man would be taken as perverse.
Thing is, Egyptian fantasy is bound to have undead sorcerers in it because, like, Egypt is the Ur of life after death.
I am currently working up a 1930s pulp Savage Worlds game involving an ancient Egyptian priest-mummy who is seeking the lost secrets of Atlantis in order to restore the glory of Egypt because he woke up in the 1920s and the popular image of Egypt all around him was that crippled pup of an apostate Pharaoh, Tutankhamen. Yeah, he has rage issues.
@Fibinachi: Re Pathfinder — I haven’t bought into Pathfinder because my 3.5 is perfectly serviceable, and anyway I have plenty of other RPGs that need love, like True20 and the aforementioned Savage Worlds. I have shelves of GURPS books; the system’s just not for us but the sourcebooks are invaluable.
Anyway, I remember one adventure published in Dungeon waaaay back before 3.5 was even published, where this unfortunate NPC was seduced into a private garden by a courtesan, where they were both killed by a plant monster so someone else could get his hands on a valuable contract for vanilla beans.
And there should be sex workers all over Waterdeep, but I don’t recall seeing any in any game resource. There’s probably some in one or more of the novels, which were more daring (I remember being somewhat shocked when one of the Drizzt books broke the Passionately Sexless wall with an explicit mention of a woman’s nipples; but I was like 15).
@Skanky Tits: Unfortunately, there are POC in Lord of the Rings. They work for Sauron.
@thread: Oh sweet Christ rolling on a random table, FATAL. “To suggest burning this book would be an insult to fire.” (para.)
@thebobgoblin, I have heard of The Blue Rose but I haven’t played it at all. I do have a good opinion of True20, except that keeping track of injuries gets confusing for me as a GM so I tend to use a lot of glass-jawed mooks and one or two full NPCs in my fights.
@Robert,
Your all-gay campaign sounds awesome. Unfortunately, every. single. one. of my gaming group is an evangelical Christian so I find that it’s better to avoid the topic of sex in general.
Lord, I don’t know where this meme comes from, but I wish it would go away, along with the whole Violent Glaswegian characterization of dwarves.
I do like Pratchett’s little gags like his dwarves carrying tiny axes where a human might carry a pocket knife. There’s a dwarf businessman in a boarding house in The Truth who cuts open his boiled egg in a pointed manner with a tiny axe after his fellow boarders start airing embarrassing opinions at the breakfast table.
… Oh god now I have Pratchett feels.
I mean the whole elves and dwarves fighting like cats and dogs meme.
Falconer: One of the great things about Pathfinder is that it can be free:
http://paizo.com/prd/
Having all the rulebooks in a searchable, freely available website is SO helpful, especially in the era of iPads and net gaming. (We’re currently playing the game with D20 Pro and Google hangouts, since I moved away from the gang in the middle of a campaign.)