Thanks to E. Izawa of the Women-Dev list for pointing to an interesting interview with Anastasia Odiakova, beta liason for Wild West Sim MMOG. While the game's plans to implement a system for player offspring (new players will be "born" into readymade families of other players) is interesting, the vision of what women will do in the game (not to mention what they might want out of one) seems a bit... narrow:
"Female characters will have more of an impact in WWS than in any other RPG. Since new players are introduced into the game as offspring of existing players, women are an absolute requirement for the game world.”
As the author of the piece notes, being seen as valuable to a game by virtue of a uterus might cause some pause. I think it's downright creepy. Ms Odiakova goes on to note that prostitution will also be a legit part of the game and that the goal isn't historical accuracy "but rather 100% accurate to the romanticized version of the era...". Of course, whose romanticized story is getting told is still key. I continue to wonder when the idea that it's not simply a matter of inclusion, but the content and context of the inclusion, will sink in.
Lest this get written off as just some random cluelessness/bad wording/design choice we should not forget it comes pretty close on the heels of the Intel IT Manager game incident (memorycard, watercoolergames, and vesterblog on that). You remember, the one where you couldn't hire women? ;) I've written elsewhere that I think it's actually pretty amazing how many women play despite games often working to disenfranchise them. But do we write off WWS as an anomaly or are there still ways MMOGs need a good dose of critical analysis/design interventions around gender? (And I'm not even touching on the issue of race, something that really needs to be picked up on more.)
