The funny thing about this defense is that it’s often true. Technical difficulties such as money, time, or toolset limitations get in the way of gender diversity, at least in the case of video games, and surely with some of the other examples above. Fortunately, we don’t have to take point with the truth of the matter to reject the claim as a valid or appropriate policy for addressing gender exclusivity. The point is precisely that it is difficult because for so long (i.e. most of recorded history) it was not necessary to consider the rights, interests, or unique concerns of women themselves, because women were for men. Things are more convenient when you ignore half the species… but this is not a good reason to do so.

You can see this echoed in an admittedly select example from gaming history. Industry Gamers reported yesterday that Peach wasn’t included as a playable character in New Super Mario Bros. Wii because it would take extra effort (time/money/etc) to make her skirt move appropriately. Dynamic, fluid things in general are difficult to capture in video games because of the way toolsets work. When you’re plastering a skin on a collection of polygons, movement is limited to the programming of the polygons. It does indeed take special programming to have things like long flowing hair, draperies, or otherwise non-rigid textures, since the technology has evolved without these features being seen as central. Although soft hairstyles and draped fabrics are often associated with femininity, and heteromen like femininity, other physical manifestations more directly related to masculine interest in the sexual use of women have taken priority.

Welcome to the world of breast physics. Moving, bouncing, jiggling breasts that show the effects of gravity insofar as they wobble more or less appropriately as the character moves have long been developed as key aspects of game graphics. It has been done without a wink of shame, too. Since these games were designed primarily for and by men, serving men’s interest in having women’s bodies displayed for men (read: as sex objects rather than the vehicles by which sentient beings live their lives) is only reasonable.

The ethics aside, what is interesting to me is that a console developer who has admitted to working so hard and so successfully to market their product to women would not even bother to work out the clothing details required to let women play female avatars. Meanwhile when designing games for men, tailoring breast physics for their aesthetic appreciation is common place.

Do they even begin to think about these things?

Of course, Cassaria is my character in WoW, one of two who I am currently working on. On the other side of Azshara, while Cassaria was parked happily at a table in Dalaran waiting for the dailies to refresh the next day, Cassis was undergoing a moral dilemma. Cassis, you see, does not condone the senseless murder of critters. Even when eating them gives her 40 attack bonus and 20 stamina for an hour. As a wee Gnome Warrior, Cassis really isn’t the adventuring type. As much as she loves the journey, all that fighting is just too stressful. There’s nothing she’d like more than to pick herbs and combine them using her alchemy skill to help out fellow adventurers, and to travel the world, learning new recipes and meeting new people.

Cassis was my very first WoW character, and although I didn’t play her for too long, maybe half a year, she holds a special place in my heart. She is such a sweet, happy, friendly little gnome, very generous of spirit. It’s hard not to feel good playing her. Cassaria, on the other hand, was levelled earlier this year using a refer-a-friend experience bonus, and was built specifically for raiding. She would raid 5, 10 and 25 player dungeons in a raiding guild several times a week. Cassaria doesn’t have much character. She just gets things done, and she’s fairly decent at it.

Although I have role played with Cassis, she’s not a role play character as such… I’m not very committed to keeping her ‘in character’ when I play, I don’t often seek out role play situations, but she definitely has a distinct character, and I am almost incapable of going contrary to it even when the game demands it of me. This might be because Cassis is closer to my own identity, or is maybe an instance of it, or a part of it. Thus going against her inclinations would be going against my own (my self) in a real way.

So when Cassis was asked to hunt down and slow roast twenty wild turkeys in honey and autumnal herbs, she was sincerely torn. Cass loves cooking, and she loves Thanksgiving, and she especially loves big celebratory dinners where you get to feed all your friends. The turkeys are necessary to complete the feasts in the game, which you can then feed to your whole party (normally each dish only feeds one), thereby granting them significant bonuses in game for a short duration. To be clear, Cassis regularly hunts and kills animals for food, quests, and in self defense. But there is a significant difference between critters and regular beasts. Critters do not fight back, and they are completely defenseless. Even an accidental blow will kill them. There are achievements in game for killing critters, and others for /love -ing them. In general, casually killing critters as you come across them is  a normal and pleasurable part of game behaviour (perhaps there’s some sort of repressed morbidity happening here). But it makes Cass /cry every time she sees it.

I think this highlights something important about the way players relate to characters, something to bear in mind when doing empirical research. No one player necessarily relates to her characters in the same way. Even within the same game, there is variation in the identity relationship between the player and character- so much so that sometimes it’s not even sufficient to refer to it as an identity relationship. Characters are sometimes little more than tools with tendencies. So if we wanted to know, for example, how MMO players identify with characters, as compared to FPS players, we’d need to account for these variables. Similarly, there might be different kinds of ethical implications in identifying closely with a character- one might be more susceptible to learning from that character’s interactions, and from the story. It would also be interesting to know what kinds of qualities encourage or discourage closer identity relationships between players and characters.

In my own experience, part of the reason why I stopped playing Cassis and moved on to other characters is that Cassis was lacking in areas of my identity that I wanted to play out in this fantasy setting. Since Gnomes are child-like in attitude and appearance, playing one inhibited me from exploring more mature relationships and interactions in game. Although Cassis definitely has some of the personal qualities I want to play out, she doesn’t have all of them. It might be that I inhibit myself, so if I feel that two personal qualities are incongruent, I separate them into separate characters. In some ways, this might ease some of the incongruence that I feel (and, I’m sure, many others feel) between different aspect of my own identity. However, it could be that the way characters are designed in WoW they are pegged into somewhat restrictive roles. Aspects of personality are played out through the /silly, /flirt, and even the /laugh commands, and these are immutable, though one can certainly choose not to use them. If game designers decided that Blood Elves will be daft, shallow, and sexy, and all the Blood Elves you interact with emote in this sort of way, then your Blood Elf will carry those connotations into the world, and your character must develop in response to them.  This in turn affects how you relate to your character.

In the case of video games and in this case MMO’s, the abilities of avatars are predetermined and unaffected by categories such as race, gender, and so on. For at least some stereotypes, then, there is  a break between the positive and negative attributes. Take the stereotype that women are smaller and weaker than men. The first attribute is not necessarily bad, but it carries the second, which can be harmful in the ways expressed above. In MMOs, even if one has this stereotype, there is no way to modify one’s behaviour accordingly. So although women in games are smaller than men, they are not weaker, since their strength is not modified by their size or gender. Expectations that women would be weaker might hold on, but continuing to expect this to be the case would likely interfere with your success in the game. So over time, it might be the case that the negative attribute of weakness is dissociated from the neutral attribute of smallness, at least in game. Perhaps some empirical data could help explain if the break carries over to an out of game context. If this is the case, the outcome would be huge. Not only would game developers have an increased responsibility in their design of games and inclusion of stereotypes, but also ‘stereotype modification therapy’ games might be a realistic possibility. I intend to look around at current research on stereotypes to see if I can predict what the out comes might be, but I will table that for now.

The second way that stereotypes might work differently in games is that video games, like fables or stories, model behaviour and sometimes model moral behaviour. Modelling can be seen as an endorsement in a fictional context when the behaviour being modelled is glorified, when possible negative outcomes are not included in the representation, when excessive benefits are bestowed on the participant engaging in the behaviour, and so on. This might take the form of “winning”, so in the story of David and Goliath, the good guy wins the match, wins morally, and his morally bad opponent loses. Winning a game or competition (or the favour of others, or status, or goods) is often used in storytelling to convey the sense that a moral victory has occurred, and to the victor goes the spoils. 

In thinking about this sense in which winning a game is used metaphorically to represent a moral victory, I wonder about cases where no moral behaviours are intended to be endorsed. Does the fact that a behaviour happens to correspond with winning entail a moral endorsement of that behaviour? This doesn’t seem to be the case in a straightforward way. A story can have a sad ending, the bad guy might win, the innocent townspeople might all die, what have you. This might even serve to bolster our sense that what happened was unjust, thereby solidifying rather than countering positive moral commitments. But we might wonder if one is playing a game where one is invited to identify with a bad guy, to act out morally bad behaviours in order to win, might be differently problematic.

One way to think about it is to consider that the more you can empathize with a character, the more mitigating circumstances you have access to to justify what would otherwise be morally bad behaviour. A complex story that shows the tragedy behind villans, their own internal psychological conflicts and histories, for example, might be analogous to the game described above, where you identify with the bad guy.  There is a sense in which this would not be an endorsement, but rather a more realistic model of a morally bad person. Fleshing out a character and a story to show the reals costs next to the benefits of a life of crime, for example, involves a degree of depth, carefulness, and outright skill that we might not expect of some media, such as comic books, cartoons, or video games. But there is nothing intrinsic to these media that would preclude such richly developed characters and stories. Some, however, have argued that such things are not necessary or relevant to the aesthetic quality of video games in particular (thinking of certain ludologists here). But what if there is a sense in which it would be morally preferable to avoid two-dimensional portrayals of characters and morality?

Our gray tabby kitten, Zoe, hiding in a Tofurky box. From Jackie, Thanksgiving in September, 2009.

Delicious things so often come in small packages. A shame, really, since then you have to go through multiple packages to get your fill. That is how it was with the kittens. No kittens turned into three kittens over the course of a month, with little to no forethought.

The Edmonton Humane Society was rife with them early this summer, and I was drawn to their website every day, browsing through the photos of tiny kittens without homes. It was heartbreaking and adorable at the same time, and I was left itching every day for more. Covertly, I started researching kitten care at the office. Between spreadsheets I would be reading animal behaviourist guides to introducing new kittens into a home with an established cat. We had two at the time, sweet old cats who hated senior food, loved snuggles, and wanted to nap more than anything. At first I was just curious- would it be possible for them to adapt at this old age? Would being around a kitten unlock deeply buried maternal tendencies? Would they kill it? I had been reading a blog by a foster mom for kittens, and her stories about her own harem’s indifference to the fosters gave me hope. Hope turned into a field trip to the Humane Society, and then another, and then there was Malcolm.

Baby Mal, being cozy

Mal was a bitey little kitten, just six weeks old and in a cage all by himself. He had been found on the streets alone, and had been fostered alone, and played too rough to be around other kittens. As soon as Ivan took him out of his cage and held him in his arms, Mal tried to eat his beard. And then his necklace. And then his nose. We were smitten. Is there anything cuter that a ferocious baby kitten? I think not.

Two weeks, a bottle of antiseptic, and several facial bites later, we were thinking differently. Malcolm was a terror. Our raiding schedule was immediately interrupted, as Mal was intent on keeping our attention all to himself, and was more than willing to use force (read: tiny kitten teeth of doom) if necessary. We were desperate, trying to find techniques to train him out of his bad behaviour, contacting several behaviourists and vets for advice. We tried everything, from aversion to positive reinforcement. We tried seeing if the old ladies would be willing to show him how to behave, but they wanted NOTHING to do with him. AT ALL.

Then there was Zoe. We took Mal up to the Humane Society again to see if we could find another kitten who was tough enough to put him in his place, but who would model good behaviour for him, and show him how to play like a good little kitten. She was a scraggly little thing. One of a littler of three, she was the only girl, and she was tiny. But what she lacked in size she more than made up for in tenacity. It was busy that day, and there were many potential adopters in the kitten room, but Zoe got almost no attention. Her fur was rough, it felt like wet wool under my fingers, and I could feel her tiny skeleton right under her skin. Her file said she had been treated for anorexia, but was now eating well. She didn’t seem to be quite as attentive as her brothers, and was far more interested in playing with other kittens than with people. But when we took her out and held her she stayed perfectly still and looked at us mildly. She endured our pats and tickles without trying to squirm away or getting bored. I was a bit worried about this, taking her passivity to be a sign that she might not be able or willing to bear an aggressive brother. But when we introduced the two of them, she really shone.

Mal’s first thought was to nibble her neck to see if she’d wrestle, but rather than falling for it she went after a tissue on the ground. She was diverting his aggression to a toy instead of herself- something Ivan and I had been more or less hopeless at. Once we got her home, it was less than three weeks before there was a significant improvement in Mal’s behaviour, and Zoe continued to teach her big brother all kinds of tricks- how to hunt strings and catch toys out of the air, and how to make sure they were well and truly dead. Around the same time they started to bond, and we would catch them snuggling together and cleaning each other’s faces in heart-melting moments of Kodak cute. It was exactly how we had hoped.

What came next was… inexplicable. Call it kitten fever. Ivan had always wanted a Siamese cat, but had never had the chance. And there she was, on the Humane Society website one weekday morning. I messaged him at work to tell him, and he left early to pick her up. Good thing he didn’t wait, cause there were several families hoping to be able to take her home in the time he was there. Ivan neglected to tell me he was actually going to get her… I didn’t think he would, at least not without telling me. But I came home and there she was.

And then there were three. Three tasty morsels of sensory and emotional satisfaction, three depositories of love and snuggles and happiness. They are some of the tastiest things I’ve never eaten. If only the interwebs would let you touch them, you’d fall in love too, I’m sure. Now, my raiding time is mostly spent with them. It has been a fair trade, for everyone involved… except maybe my guildies… but, they probably aren’t too surprised. Games get abandoned for new additions to the family all the time. Usually we come back when the novelty wears off. I suppose we shall see. In the meantime, the Very Bad Kittens reign supreme as the main way I like to spend my time.

The VBKs, at Jackie's, being good for a change.