[UbuntuWomen] What makes a video game "female friendly"?

[Jacinta Richardson]

Thierry wrote:

> So I was hoping to find some answers here. What do you think would make a game 
> interesting for both male and female players? Or rather, what would make sure 
> that nothing stands out as only interesting for one group? And what has 
> bothered you in games so far?

Let's consider Zelda; Twilight Princess.  I've never played (or even seen) the
other Zelda games, but I realise that Zelda has a history and the hero (Link) is
always male and left-handed (except on the wii, where he's right handed and the
whole map is mirrored to make that work).  The annoying thing is that Link
didn't have to be specifically male in this version.  He's actually pretty
androgynous in appearance and that was awesome.  Unfortunately pretty much all
of the young human(?) females get all weak-kneed and useless whenever Link turns
up - particularly at the start of the game.  Which of course throws any gender
neutrality out of the window.

I loved the game, it has an awesome variety of puzzle solving, but it was
frustrating that Link's gender kept being thrown in my face.  I didn't mind that
I was rescuing females, but couldn't it have been because they were my
friends/from my village than because of romantic interests?  Couldn't we have
had a boys and girls who needed rescuing rather than all girls?  Although there
was the androgynous Prince of another species too, I suppose.  The worst thing
was most of the weak-kneed stuff was just scenery, and not even relevant to the
game play.  It really wouldn't be that hard to make minor changes to the
relevant scenes in Zelda to compensate for Link being of either gender.

For another game, think of Final Fantasy VII.  Here again, the protagonist is
male.  Apparently, if you play it right, in the one scene where it really
matters, you can end up on a data with Barret rather than one of the girls.
Again it has puzzles and a good story line (although while everything's urgent,
time doesn't seem to pass very quickly if you've gone off exploring).  Still
Cloud is definitely male, and there's no alternative to replace him with someone
female.  Like Zelda, this sends the message that girls can't be heroes.

In a different style, Diablo II required that genders were class based.  You
couldn't have a male Amazon or female Barbarian.  It was a great game, but this
annoyed me.  If I recall correctly, Dungeon Siege (while failing in other areas
of playability) solved this by having no classes and Titan Quest solved it by
allowing you practically no character customisability (male or female, pick your
tunic colour) but allowing you to pick whatever classes you wanted.  All three
of these games are very female friendly, in my opinion.

I know that there are differences in the real world about how people respond to
others of the same and different genders.  But you've got the opportunity to
create a game-world where this isn't so much the case.  I'd love a game that
used this opportunity to it's full.

I don't know what style of game you're talking about, but many of the popular
games contain puzzle solving (or exploring), an interesting story arc, things
that change the game-play (new weapons (think Half-life 2's gravity gun), new
toys (think the spinning top and other access toys from Zelda) or different
"chapters", new powers (think materia in FFVII and cards in FFVIII), challenges
(boss battles) etc.  None of these need to be gender specific.  If your hero can
be of either gender and still have all the scenes make sense, you've done it.

All the best,

	J

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