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

[Thierry]

On Thursday 28 February 2008 02:50:27 Kathryn wrote:
> I've been addicted to a number of computer games over the years, ranging
> from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri to James Bond first-person shooters and,
> more recently, Battle for Wesnoth (open source!).  I'm not easily offended
> by gender stereotypes in computer games... I've always joked that
> busty/lusty female characters merely reflect the un-realised fantasies of
> the people who code, design (even play) the games themselves. :p

There's probably a lot of truth in that. ^^
Although I believe that many game developers also do it because it's a trend, 
because so many others are doing it as well, and it seems to sell well.

> However, I do tend to favour female protagonists if they are available (and
> not just a cop-out alternative to the male version/s).  For example, in
> Alpha Centauri I usually played the nature-loving Dierdre Sky or the
> Spartan war-monger Santiago.  The former character since I'm a bit of a
> 'greenie' and the latter when I was in the mood for a digital blood-bath. 
> The gender balance was pretty good in that game - 3 women (only one of them
> overly girly) to choose from versus 4 men.
>
> I agree with Lucy's comments.  It should be relatively simple to create
> equality within a computer game - offer engaging and believable characters
> of both sexes, with matching levels of skill (even if the skills aren't
> identical across the sexes).   In Wesnoth it's a bit annoying that the lead
> characters are - in the games I've played - all male, and the same applies
> to the generic minions (cavalry, archers, footpads etc).

Apparantly that has changed - they introduced a lot of female versions for 
every job - at least in the elves group.
I'm not sure how it goes for the male lead, though - it's probably not easy to 
just switch Konrad with a female version. :)

> Good luck with the game... how far along is it, conceptually?

We have the entire gameplay and story on paper. What's mostly happening is 
that we discuss what's there, and replace certain parts with others. I 
recently replaced half of the locations to get better quality, rather than 
the insane amount of different locations we had.
Ross - the programmer in our team - is working on his engine Teria, which we 
will use for the game. It's hard to get a sense of when it will be useable, 
since he keeps rewriting parts he doesn't like all that much, and keeps 
adding newer / better features. He's currently taking a month or two break, 
but I believe that we shoul have a useable version by August, and can start 
making our proof of concept.