Correcting Reality

For almost all MMOs, one of the first things you have to decide when creating a character is the gender of that character. Is it male or female?

Also for almost all MMOs, the choice is of importance only cosmetically (it affects how the avatar looks) or socially (people typically treat male and female characters differently).

What about tangible, in-world differences, though? Jaw-dropping mistakes aside, there usually are none. Male and female characters are identical in all respects. Neither is stronger. Neither is faster. Neither is nimbler. Clothes that fit one fit the other. They're identical.

In real life, however, men and women are not identical. Neither are people of different races (skin colour trades off creating vitamin D against resisting skin cancer). There are advantages and disadvantages. These are not, however, reflected in the implementation of MMOs.

Are MMOs correcting reality by ignoring these differences? Or are they painting a false picture?

Here's a question that may help focus the discussion. Suppose that a new MMO is coming out with a medieval fantasy setting, in which characters can have children so players can establish their own dynasties. Do male characters get to give birth to babies, or is it restricted only to female characters?

Richard

Comments

[Ricardo Rademacher]

1.

Correcting reality implies that there is a mistake there in the first place. Zero Sum Games and Play Balance are standard fare in MMO worlds but certainly not a real life reality. I think the mistake is in thinking that nature made a mistake in making us so different. In fact, if god is an MMO designer and we are his/her/it's virtual world, then he/she/it understood the need for inequity in order to make things interesting!

In fact, I strongly believe that the ONLY reason this is done is to maintain the highly vaulted Player Balance. After all, in a close-combat heavy world and given that men are on average stronger than women, then everyone would play a man to deal more damage. There would be an uproar from in game people (and real life activists like the ACLU) for making women "weak" and thus skew the game towards an all male population no matter how realistic this is.

I personally feel it is a lack of vision that is at fault; an unwillingness to buck the system in favor of different (ie: risky) games in lieu of the safe, gender bland experience. Take the birthing scenario you propose. This is a perfect example of a way you can make a great new game experience by playing TO the inequities not away. After all, in real life--to be specific, in real medieval life-- a woman could not impregnate herself. Hence in this game, she would have to seek out a male mate in order to establish a dynasty. The male player would also be under this compulsion for he can't do it alone either. This sets the stage for some great social interaction and even some gameplay dynamics as "the family" replaces "the party" in terms of grouping and adventuring... another bit of realism as anyone will tell you "the party is over!" as soon as their kid is born!

But oh no people will say; what about the solo player? Or what about homosexuals? Or what about underage kids exposed to this kind of content? Etc, Etc. There will always be people who will not fit into the games dynamic and it's a mistake for game designers... nay, world designers... to try to make a "one size fits all world". It makes for a terribly bland experience as most of us know from the current batch of MMOs and VWs.

Gender inequality can be a great dynamic in a game... if we are willing to take the risk and weather the storm that will naturally ensue.

[Jason]

2.

I'm pretty sure that some MUDs have implemented the "men are stronger, women are nimbler" stats adjustment. And MMOs have races, too -- usually with much more pronounced differences than mere real-world humans.

It would be interesting to have more subtle regional variations, though, like belonging to a particular family might make you more adept at arrow-making or something. In any case, it's more about making an interesting game than trying to reflect reality.

If you wanted to be realistic, in order to have children you'd have to have a spouse or at least a temporary partner -- but then again, since this is a fantasy setting, you could probably also have some kind of mystical sperm bank or mail-order babies. It might be too much of a stretch on suspension of disbelief for males to give birth though, unless you're running a seahorse MMO.

[Ga'len]

3.

You forgot what MMORPG really stands for. Many Men Online Role Playing Girls.

:P

[Schrodinger's Lolcat]

4.

I already solved this in a clever way, Bartle! How do I get someone to look at my design document for my MMO without having my ideas outright plundered or plain-old ignored. (Ideas are a dime a dozen according to my friends in the industry.)

Thoughts?

[Jeff H.]

5.

Are we talking about gender or sex?

[Richard Bartle]

6.

Jason>I'm pretty sure that some MUDs have implemented the "men are stronger, women are nimbler" stats adjustment.

Yes, they did - MUD1 was like this, in fact, although the difference didn't matter after about level 5 or so because by then all stats were at the max.

Richard

[Richard Bartle]

7.

Schrodinger's Lolcat>I already solved this in a clever way, Bartle!

Solved what, exactly?

>How do I get someone to look at my design document for my MMO without having my ideas outright plundered or plain-old ignored.

Find a professional MMO consultant and then pay them to look at it.

Richard

[Richard Bartle]

8.

Jeff H.>Are we talking about gender or sex?

Whichever you like.

As things stand, you have to have a working womb to give birth. If you want to invoke Fantasy to give wombs to people who don't have wombs, OK, that's fair enough: then, you'd be on the side of "correcting nature". If, however, you think that "real life" should take precedence, you'd say that people without wombs don't get to have babies.

If you want to make a distinction between male characters on the basis of whether the characters are (in game world terms) biologically male or whether they self-represent as male but have the necessary biological equipment to have babies, OK, that's fine. You still, at some point, have to decide whether a character that in theory models a kind of human being that can't have babies in real life could, in the virtual world, have babies.

Richard

[Nick Novitski]

9.

I suspect there would be quests to get NPC spouses (or perhaps you would have to "grind" to get enough "reputation"), and once a player has one, they can produce children with the same interface and mechanical ways. Spend points, watch cutscene, the child appears.

It's my understanding that the game Granado Espada, players take control of a family/dynasty of characters from the beginning. I think that goes to show that even obvious "mechanical" differences in real life can be smoothed over in a game somehow, and probably will continue to be.

[Schrodinger's Lolcat]

10.

>Solved what, exactly?

Human gender-oriented procreation conundrum. Did it without breaking any natural laws too!

>Find a professional MMO consultant and then pay them to look at it.

What does that get me exactly? Does the consultant then become my "agent" for my intellectual property and shop it around? Does he lend bits and pieces of it to interested studios in return for royalties?

Would a consultant do anything more than say, "wow those are some pretty nifty mechanics, might want to change this and this; good luck finding those millions of dollars!!"

Feedback is great and all, but that doesn't actually put it into the investors' hands with a little "Y/N?" tacked on to the end of it right?

By the by, what's your going rate? Exorbitant or stunningly bank-breaking? :)

[Jesse Scoble]

11.

Hi Richard,

It's an interesting point - but as pointed out in some of the comments, these kind of decisions (significant imbalance in game options & abilities) would make it a de facto niche game. Gamers like to feel that everything is on an equal playing field, and that getting a -1 to STR gives you a +1 somewhere else. (And games that make male characters stronger than female characters inherently smack of sexism, even though you could say a dwarf gets a +1 to STR and and elf gets a -1 to STR and games would generally be cool with it).

To move away from MMOs specifically for a second, I worked on the first adaptation of George Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" as a pen&paper RPG (the "A Game of Thrones RPG,"). If you don't know, it's a low-magic, gritty fantasy world, that is very concerned with family, duty, honor, and the politics of power.

(blockquote)Arya cocked her head to one side. “Can I be a king’s councillor and build castles and become the High Septon?”
“You,” Ned said, kissing her lightly on the brow, “will marry a king and rule his castle, and your sons will be knights and princes and lords and, yes, perhaps, even a High Septon.”
Arya screwed up her face. “No,” she said, “that’s Sansa.”(/blockquote)

If you try to adapt the novels faithfully, women are *highly* limited - although there are a few notable exceptions, women have far fewer rights and opportunities than do males of equal social standing (and that's a whole other topic you could expand upon; can I play a noble lord while you play a peasant and another player makes a lowly hedge knight, and would there be a difference in play? And would it be enjoyable?).
But because we know that there are few enough female gamers in pen&paper games, and sitting around a table playing a campaign is /not/ like reading a novel, we presented options. We basically wrote an essay that said: if you want to be true to the novels, you should do it this way (ban certain classes, limit certain combat abilities, favor male children in issues of family and politics). But if you have female characters (whether or not played by female players), and you don't want them to feel limited, you might lift the restrictions. It may not be as true to the novels, but hell, aren't we here to have fun and make our own stories?

[Jesse Scoble]

12.

Ugh - sorry about screwing up the HTML. Space cadet today...

[CherryBomb]

13.

The developers are not correcting reality, they are correcting their model so that it looks *more* like reality. If they created a race or sex with unbalanced abilities, most of the players would choose that one, and the world would look strange with all of the same type of characters in it. Being a female in real life does have some advantages, but they are advantages that are difficult to model. I won't go into the details here.

A bit off-topic: In China, where parents can only "roll one character" for their offspring, the choice is increasingly skewed towards a male. Life imitates art.

[Richard Bartle]

14.

Nick Novitski>I suspect there would be quests to get NPC spouses (or perhaps you would have to "grind" to get enough "reputation"), and once a player has one, they can produce children with the same interface and mechanical ways.

So male characters couldn't give birth, but they could acquire a female spouse to have the baby for them. That would put you on the side of go-with-reality rather than correct-reality, then?

>It's my understanding that the game Granado Espada, players take control of a family/dynasty of characters from the beginning.

Yes, there are games where this happens. The Guild is one (which forbids male characters from giving birth but allows female popes, so it's not entirely consistent).

Richard

[Richard Bartle]

15.

Schrodinger's Lolcat>Does the consultant then become my "agent" for my intellectual property and shop it around?

No, he or she doesn't. You asked "How do I get someone to look at my design document for my MMO without having my ideas outright plundered or plain-old ignored.". You didn't ask "How do I get someone to sell my idea to an MMO developer for phat lewt?".

>Would a consultant do anything more than say, "wow those are some pretty nifty mechanics, might want to change this and this; good luck finding those millions of dollars!!"

It depends on the consultant. All the ones I know would tell it to you straight: if they'd seen it before, they'd tell you; if they thought it was rubbish, they'd tell you; if they thought it could be improved, they'd tell you.

I'm pretty sure they'd all also tell you that you couldn't expect to get money for your idea unless it was staggeringly brilliant - so good that basically they'd want to pay you not to tell it to other people. I'm not aware of this ever having happened with MMOs, but you never know...

>Feedback is great and all, but that doesn't actually put it into the investors' hands with a little "Y/N?" tacked on to the end of it right?

Right. You might regard this as your IP, but whether you could patent it or not would require the advice of a specialist patent attorney (such people do exist for games). Your strategy then would be either to try sell the patent to an MMO developer or to wait until someone else invented it and put it into their MMO, then sue them a year after launch for breaching your patent.

>By the by, what's your going rate? Exorbitant or stunningly bank-breaking? :)

$1,200 a day plus expenses.

Richard

[Richard Bartle]

16.

Jesse Scoble>these kind of decisions (significant imbalance in game options & abilities) would make it a de facto niche game.

There's something wrong with niche games?

>Gamers like to feel that everything is on an equal playing field, and that getting a -1 to STR gives you a +1 somewhere else.

So this is correcting reality, which isn't quite so balanced?

What do you think about game settings that remove a sex entirely? Many genres based on historical situations are going to have not just a gender imbalance but a complete absence of one sex. "Escape from Colditz" is not going to have a mix of male and female captives. "The world of the three musketeers" might be attractive to female players, but they couldn't expect to play female musketeers without compromising the genre. Yes, they're niche, but they don't have any sense of fairness between the sexes because they only feature one (which might itself be regarded as unfair, of course).

>And games that make male characters stronger than female characters inherently smack of sexism

I chose "having babies" as my example because it's something that's pretty well binary. In real life, roughly 25% of women are taller than 50% of men (or, if you prefer, 50% of men are taller than 75% of women), so that's a more graduated thing. I don't know what the numbers are for upper body strength, but it would probably be a similar story: some number less than 50% of women are stronger than 50% of men in real life. If you think that this smacks of sexism and has no place in an MMO, OK, that puts you on the "correcting reality" side of the fence.

Richard

[Richard Bartle]

17.

CherryBomb>The developers are not correcting reality, they are correcting their model so that it looks *more* like reality.

So ... does this mean you would or wouldn't want male characters to have babies? Or would you prefer that developers should avoid implementing anything that forces them to make such a decision?

>If they created a race or sex with unbalanced abilities, most of the players would choose that one

So if male characters were to do more melee damage than female characters but the two were otherwise identical in all respects, everyone would choose to play a male character? Even the female players? Or would they simply not play?

Richard

[Andy Havens]

18.

Richard> Are MMOs correcting reality by ignoring these differences? Or are they painting a false picture?

False picture. No question. Because your character or avie or toon isn't really male or female. It's not a living creature that uses sexual reproduction. It's not a boy, girl, man, or woman.

You're not really deciding if your character is male or female. You're just deciding what you want it to look like. I could create a game where you play a dot; male dots are blue, female are pink.

Your character is a chit that simply looks more male or female than a chess king vs. a queen. The queen is female... right? Because she has a... round ball on her head. And the king is male because he's taller and has a cross on his. Right. Very distinctive secondary sexual characteristics. I like to play the queen 'cause I like looking at that round ball the whole game.

In Monopoly, the hat can move as fast as the car. That's just weird.

Richard>Do male characters get to give birth to babies, or is it restricted only to female characters?

If having a baby was an important part of the game, then other gender issues would need to be covered, too. A game could mimic types of our past's reality and assign specific roles that would have real, in game consequences. Or it could say that gender doesn't matter at all. If it's a fantasy MMO, babies could pop out of the faerie pouch or be found under lilac bushes.

[CherryBomb]

19.

Male characters having babies would be just a bit icky to most people, I think, but I was not really addressing that.

My point was that most people feel more comfortable in a persistent world where there are are a variety of avatars roaming around, kinda like the real world. It helps you have a sense of identity if you don't look like everyone else. In the real world, diversity is imposed on us by nature. We have no choice of avatars, so we live with the cards we are dealt and play them as best we can. To simulate this, developers have to make sure that no single type can dominate, because the players DO have a choice.

Not everyone would give up on female chars if they did less melee damage, with all else equal, but many would. You would not a game of clones only, but I know enough about how players maximize alla time to know that they would mostly play the strongest type.

[Souvik Mukherjee]

20.

I am still struggling to gather all my thoughts on this and am glad that Richard brought this up. Game characters often have strong links with reality as do characters in other kinds of fictional narratives and gender-issues have, therefore, always been relevant. The portrayal, however, depends on the degree of 'realism' and the assumptions of femininity involved. Chaucer's Wife of Bath and Dickens's Little Nell don't correspond to the same conception of femininity. Again, taking the chess-example above, the queen in chess is uncharacteristically powerful considering that such martial prowess is normally accorded to males. Marilyn Yalom's Birth of the Chess Queen points out how the Chess queen gained its new powers modelled on Isabella of Castile. In Indian chess, the queen (also called Mantri or 'minister') does not have the multi-square moves of the Western chess queen.

Making gender assumptions in MMOs will, therefore, be context-specific acts. Designing character capabilities would perhaps be better off trying to present gender-characteristics as they fit the mechanism of the game. Anyway, I'm surprised that Feminist theorists haven't latched on to this yet. I'm also left wondering whether all the comments are by males. It would be interesting to hear from female MMO designers ... or, at least, players.

Thanks for bringing this up, Richard. If you speak on this issue anywhere in the UK (outside of it, I am too poor to travel), I'll be very interested to go and listen.

[flashheart]

21.

This is another example, I think, of the debased character of MMORPGs. These games have managed to create a "fantasy" world which recreates the two most basic, tedious aspects of our mundane reality - working for money ("grinding") and race and sex inequality. Yay for the race to the bottom.

It's a fascinating social experiment though, that these companies thought the only way they could allow people to interact online was by reproducing the social relations of their physical reality. Not sure if that says more about the gamers or the designers.

[Ricardo Rademacher]

22.

Maybe this is or will become a distinguishing factor between a Virtual World and a MMOG (though I'm aware that an MMOG is a subset of a VW). A VW is trying to "emulate reality" more closely than a MMOG and thus, in this issue, should have women as child bearing and physically weaker while men would be stronger and unable to carry a child.

However, a MMOG (under this train of thought) in trying to entertain it's users with a game is trying to "correct reality". Real life is boring compared to the life of a Knight Errant or Sorcerer Supreme. Hence a MMOG will take all the tedium out of these things and make give a more "equal" vision of the world in terms of the sexes and all things being equal.

So maybe the "game" aspect is what allows us to freely play around with gender roles and equalize them while if we are trying to make something like the real world it might be more appropriate to include gender inequalities. I'm not saying an MMOG can't or shouldn't have gender inequalities --as per my previous post I think it could be fun -- but merely that since they "break the rules of reality" as a rule then they may be more apt to "correct reality" than a VW can.

Richard, you mention MUD1 as having a slight gender inequality... can you or anyone else list other VW's, MUD's, or MMOG's that have had a clear gender inequality and what happened?

[Traceur]

23.

very interesting question... not one that i can claim to have thought through completely.

hypothetically though, it shouldn't be much of a problem in terms of balance: if dozens of MMOs are able to depict the generic tale of orcs strong warriors & elven agile rogues, why can't the same balance be brought to gender roles?

that's being said, one problem i think MMORPGs in particular (apposed to MUDs that lack spatial representation) is a technical one:
while the male body is more easily maximized towards athletic endeavors, in the world of sports its clear that the female body has a higher reach in acrobatic endeavors: while women runners & body builders might be rare, good male gymnasts are even rarer.

but while brute strength & speed are easily represented by he classic RPG formula's calculated on CPUs, the same can't be said to attributes such as balance, flexibility, full body coordination, etc...

procedural animation i think might be a great step towards balancing this out: as we explore the intricacies of how our bodies move in RL, we will find many new attributes that haven't being considered implementing before.

however, one needs to consider that the majority of MMORPGs - themeparks - do not consider this in term of correcting reality, simply because the protagonists are the exception to the rule. female NPCs might correctly be weaker, but the females the players play aren't the regular females, their joan of arc, their xena the warrior princess... or whatever. the players do not represent the population of the world, they are - as a whole - the exceptions to it. and in games with repeating quests & instances where almost everyone can be the chosen one or any other protectionist title, females being exceptions to the common female population isn't anything special, it's the core around which these themeparks - these single-players in MMO environments - are designed around.

[Thomas]

24.

Excellent idea !

Let's have a game where white skinned characters level up by standing naked in the sun, generating vitamin D - how's that for grinding.

Blacks will not get this benefit, but will be resistant to skin cancer. Brilliant play balance.

Point is: games dont have to imitate all reality's issues.

[Richard Bartle]

25.

Souvik Mukherjee>I'm surprised that Feminist theorists haven't latched on to this yet.

They descended on textual worlds in the mid-1990s, wrote a slew of papers deciding how best to fit them into the feminist theories of the time, and then left. I don't know whether these theories are still in vogue, but the graphical element would probably add something to the mix even if they were. Just so long as they don't believe the survey responses people give when describing why they play cross-gender...

>I'm also left wondering whether all the comments are by males.

Well, males do have a point of view here: this is an issue that affects both genders. That said, it's not great to form a view based on evidence from only one perspective, you're right.

>If you speak on this issue anywhere in the UK (outside of it, I am too poor to travel), I'll be very interested to go and listen.

I'm very unlikely to speak about this, because it's hard to say anything about gender without appearing to be sexist. I'm interested in the subject of gender and MMOs, obviously, because I want to make better MMOs; however, I wouldn't want to put forward any related hypotheses because I would risk being torn apart.

I decided to make this post, however, because it does seem to me that there is a conflict in MMO design. Real-world differences are ignored in some areas (eg. gender) but given one level of indirection they're completely over the top (elves are effete and cultured; dwarves are boorish and ale-swigging) (and Scottish). On the one hand, stereotypes are studiously avoided even when they're correct (no womb, no baby!), yet on the other they're celebrated as adding to roleplay while saying some disturbing things about their equivalents in real life (it's OK to think everyone of one race has the same personality).

When the two collide, decisions have to be made. So: do you correct reality or do you paint a false picture?

Richard

[Richard]

26.

Ricardo Rademacher>you mention MUD1 as having a slight gender inequality... can you or anyone else list other VW's, MUD's, or MMOG's that have had a clear gender inequality and what happened?

Well how about I tell you about a superb MMO design for a company I did some consultation with about 5 years ago. Their idea was to base the game on European nobility around the year 1200 or so, and make gender roles operate like character classes. Basically, the men were knights who went off to fight each other and the women were managers who stayed behind and ran the castle and estate. Women had the babies and controlled their education for the first 12 years, whereupon the (official) father got to decide whether he or or the mother got to take over. At age 16, the character became playable.

There were some other possibilities, for example younger sons could be packed off to a monastery to be "stored" (no children but educated further, can be removed should the eldest son die) and women could go to a convent. There were some mixed-sex character classes such as troubadours.

This itself raised an interesting issue, epitomised by Joan of Arc. People who wished to play as a female knight were simply not allowed to do so - the class was unavailable to them, like you can't be an orc paladin in WoW. This division of roles by gender is much the same as it was in medieval times, however in real life we had Joan of Arc - a female knight. Players could argue that they should have been able to play a female knight, citing real-world precedent.

The thing is, in real life we pretty well only have Joan of Arc: one female knight among tens of thousands of male knights. Does this exception mean that the game should have allowed all female characters to play as knights if they wanted to? Or just one? Or none?

Again, it's a question of whether you want to reflect reality or correct reality.

Richard

[Traceur]

27.

Bartle, i get the impression your trying to get a clear answer from people, when (ironically) it was you who reframed the issue and gave a new perspective about it (correcting reality or replicating it), thus causing people to rethink their position on VR gender roles and try to figure it out rather then simply state a clear opinion...

that's being said, i've come to the conclusion that the question depends on the role in which the players take in the VR design as a whole:

do the players represent the worlds population itself (often found in the sandbox model) or the exceptional members within it (common to the themepark model)? are their generational mechanics in play here (birth)? do social dynamics get represented in the pre-defined gameplay at all (possibly bringing feminine social skills into play)? to what extent? what sort of society & social norm does it deliver (a medieval european society has F=breeders/M=everything-else while a native american society could have F=gatherers/M=hunters)? are the player characters designed around a human archetype (where males are stronger) or could they be designed around alternative archetypes (such as reptiles where it is often the opposite or an alien species which could have a dozen genders)?

each VR design team needs to make decisions about what kind of world it wants to represent and in what ways does it plan on representing them - gender roles are simply an aspect of the larger design and can not be taken separately.

and with so many questions that depend on game design - and many which i'm sure i haven't thought of - there simply can not be an all-in-one answer to this issue. each game to it's own.

[Richard Bartle]

28.

Traceur>i get the impression your trying to get a clear answer from people

I don't care what their answer is; the point is that people should have a clear answer for themselves.

>when (ironically) it was you who reframed the issue and gave a new perspective about it (correcting reality or replicating it), thus causing people to rethink their position on VR gender roles and try to figure it out rather then simply state a clear opinion...

I haven't stated my opinion because that doesn't matter. My aim is for people to form their own opinions in an area that they may not have thought they had an opinion about. Virtual worlds are both a homage and a critique of reality; where does one end and the other begin? Where should one end and the other begin?

>are their generational mechanics in play here (birth)?

The birth question was just an example of something that is a very strong difference between men and women, to make the decision clearer. There are other, greyer areas of difference, for example sprinting speed, where most men are faster than most women but some women are faster than most men. With giving birth, we still have a grey area (some women can't give birth - 90-year-olds, for example - and there's a female-to-male transsexual with a womb who is currently pregnant) but as technology currently stands it's reasonable to say that if you were born male then you won't give birth. That's why I chose this as a difference - I wasn't talking about birth as a game mechanic specifically.

>each VR design team needs to make decisions about what kind of world it wants to represent and in what ways does it plan on representing them

Indeed, but do they do this? Or do they stick with the status quo?

>there simply can not be an all-in-one answer to this issue.

But there are limits, perhaps? You seem to be saying that if the setting calls for it then it's fine to have differences between the sexes, whether or not it offends modern sensibilities? Some things which went on in the past and were regarded as perfectly normal would today be regarded somewhat differently; do we remain faithful to the genre if that's what we want, or do we "correct" it? When would you draw the line and say no, I'm not going to implement that no matter how much the genre demands it?

Richard

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

29.

Blargh, the only line you need to draw is when you force players to roleplay their own physical gender and other attributes... Beyond that it is all about aesthetics.

[David]

30.

Virtual worlds are an approximation of reality. First you have to figure out how of reality you want reflected in your MMO. A skill or class based MMO may not want gender, genetic or musculature differences to interfere in the dynamic of the game, especially since those latter differences can give preferential abilities.

I think the question if '[MMOs are] correcting reality by ignoring these differences' is an improper question. In a larger sense, all MMOs paint a false picture. FTL travel does not exist nor can human cast magic missile spells. Saying an MMO paints a false picture is a non-statement.

The medieval scenario also is probably a little vague as well. If you consider the Maple Story example, players "develop" sibling and offspring relationships with the somewhat creepy Maple family concept. It's not necessary to even need a game dynamic where males can have dynasties via fission reproduction if roleplay can suffice instead.

[SusanC]

31.

A couple of thoughts on this:

1. Most MMO's are very, very unrealistic in lots of ways. They are often based on novels or genres that aren't realistic either (e.g. The Lord of the Rings). But this doesn't matter: in cases where there is a conflict between realism and being fun to play, playability is clearly going to win. If you're going to suspend your disbelief enough to allow elves, magic swords and dragons sitting on loosely-supervised piles of gold, then a failure to accurately model the differences between mean stats for males vs females is neither here nor there.

2. Usually, MMO's let players choose which type of character they want to play out of the available options. If one race, class or sex has a clear advantage over the other, then most players (particularly powergamers) will go for it. So you need some kind of "game balance". For example: wizards can't wear armour. You might come up with some in-game explanation of this, but the real reason is so that fighters and magic users are about equally balanced. Making male and female mean stats equal is no more unrealistic than making arbitrary restrictions on casting spells while wearing armour.

3. In a pencil and paper RPG, the player characters usually represent a tiny, atypical fraction of the world's population. Most NPCs do the boring jobs, but the PCs get to be adventurers. They are the far end of a bell-curve. It's plausible that the mean of a stat among player characters is very different from the mean of that stat among the imagined population of NPCs. e.g. the females who are fighters are selected from the small fraction of the population who have stats that are up to it, etc.

4. Players (as opposed to their characters) come from the real world, and bring a lot of prior expectations and cultural assumptions with them. No matter how fantastical your game setting is, it will be infected with a strong dose of the real world via the players. A commitment to gender equality is a feature of many of the present, real-world cultures that the players come from, and you should expect this to filter through to your game setting. Much of science fiction is really about the present, not the future. In a similar way, MMO settings, no matter how fantastical, are often a reflection of the present.

5. At a mimimum, if your MMO is going to allow female player characters at all, there had better be something interesting for them to do. (I can think of pencil and paper RPG scenarios that have got this wrong). If the tasks in the game aren't equally approachable by characters of either sex, then there needs to be something interesting for both sexs to do. It's not satisfactory to build in a sex difference, and then only bother to model the parts of the world where male characters have an advantage.

[Ricardo Rademacher]

32.

>Well how about I tell you about a superb MMO >design for a company I did some consultation with >about 5 years ago.

That does sound interesting. I guess the biggest complaint players might have had is what you mentioned, pigeonholing you into a class merely by your choice of sex. Still, sounds like it could be a good game... this was 5 years ago so is the game still in production, did they shut down, or (more interestingly) are they out there now!? :)

>I'm very unlikely to speak about this, because >it's hard to say anything about gender without >appearing to be sexist.

Bah, Humbug Richard. It's not like you've cared what people think of what you say in the past AND IMO it's not what you say but how you act that makes you sexist. Merely discussing sexism doesn't make you sexist anymore than discussing murder and rape makes you a murderer and rapists.

So tell us how you REALLY feel, Richard! :P

[numtini]

33.

Players will play whatever benefits them the most within the game mechanics, regardless of what that forces them into. Players also want to play a character that appeals to them. While it may be "realistic" it's bad business to put these two things in conflict with each other.

[Ricardo Rademacher]

34.

>Players (as opposed to their characters) come from >the real world, and bring a lot of prior >
>expectations and cultural assumptions with them.

Now this is another interesting tangent for discussion: western vs. eastern portrayal of women in games.

By and large, the western woman is seen as more "free and reckless" than the eastern womans "docile and demure" stereotype. We see this effect in movies, books, and all manner of media. It doesn't mean that women need to be submissive in an eastern culture (some of the strongest, most agressive women I've met are of asian decent) but rather that this is the "pose" they project to the world.

Thus, when we make gender inequalities in a game, we are further divorcing ourselves from one culture or another. Make a medieval game with western roles would be non-sense to an eastern audience and vice-versa. That is why the birthing example is a good starting point: it's universal and culture free. The events leading up to it and after the birth are cultural, but the mechanics of pregnancy are universal and thus apt for any MMO.

So an interesting point emerges for me: even if we do put in gender inequalities in an MMO, there is still an element of "correctness" as we make our game western, eastern, southern, or whatever culture we pick!

[David]

35.

>That is why the birthing example is a good starting point: it's universal and culture free. The events leading up to it and after the birth are cultural, but the mechanics of pregnancy are universal and thus apt for any MMO.

Ah but that's rub, there is no pressing need to reflect the physical reality of pregnancy as a game mechanic. If we use a system where a player amasses a certain amount of game currency and then pays a stork to bring him a changling, that system should be equally valid in a MMO environment. I'm not understanding the fascination of reflecting reality. It's not like there is any MMO or MUD that requires sexual intercourse, impregnation, gestation, etc. Why should there be? A universal concept in real life does not mean it should be virtually.

Also while the mechanics of birthing are universal in real life, the culture of birthing is most definitely not the same (yes there is culture in birthing, it's called abortion/contraception). Westerners generally frown at the Asian practice of selective gender abortion or allowing female babies to die in favor of male babies. Figuring out how much reality you want is the key, not arguing that your world should be as life-like as possible.

[Richard Bartle]

36.

David>Virtual worlds are an approximation of reality.

Yes, they are. Well, they intersect with reality's implementation in a number of ways, most notably their naive physics. There are some things that people don't want to think about when they play, for example down is different from up; other things they're quite happy with being different, so long as there's some consistency about it (ie. rules to learn).

>I think the question if '[MMOs are] correcting reality by ignoring these differences' is an improper question. In a larger sense, all MMOs paint a false picture.

Yes, but sometimes this is for implementation reasons, sometimes for genre reasons, sometimes for design reasons. For design questions, someone has to make that decision.

>It's not necessary to even need a game dynamic where males can have dynasties via fission reproduction if roleplay can suffice instead.

So you're saying that Maple Story ducked the question rather than answering it. This would suggest that they wanted their male and female characters to be identical (correcting reality), but when faced with the question of who has the babies (reality undermines the fiction), they went with a fiction that meant they didn't have to say how babies appeared.

Well, that's a "correcting reality" approach, then. They wanted male and female characters to have no differences other than cosmetic ones, so airbrushed them out?

Richard

[Richard Bartle]

37.

SusanC>Most MMO's are very, very unrealistic in lots of ways.

Yes - not least of all being that they, unlike reality, aren't real.

>in cases where there is a conflict between realism and being fun to play, playability is clearly going to win.

Yes. However, if there's no conflict between reality and playability, then it's down to personal taste. If there are easy-to-implement playability improvements that are suggested by reality but you decide not to use them, well, that makes the decision not to use them political.

>Making male and female mean stats equal is no more unrealistic than making arbitrary restrictions on casting spells while wearing armour.

If elves and dwarfs and orcs and humans have different stats but are nevertheless balanced, you can do the same for male and female. Balance between characters isn't the issue here.

>A commitment to gender equality is a feature of many of the present, real-world cultures that the players come from, and you should expect this to filter through to your game setting.

Well, this is the heart of the matter. In the real world, there is a commitment to gender equality which is not reflected by reality: it doesn't matter how much you want men and women to be equal, men are not going to give birth. In the virtual world, we can do pretty much what we like, so if we want to make male and female characters both able to have babies, OK, we can do that. This would be "correcting reality". There's no gameplay reason why we need to do it, there's no genre reason why we need to do it: we're doing it because we want to do it.

>If the tasks in the game aren't equally approachable by characters of either sex, then there needs to be something interesting for both sexs to do.

Well in theory, no, there doesn't. Sure, you've wasted a lot of time implementing a gender if no-one is ever going to play it, but hey, someone might want to. Some of the text MUDs had 30 or more classes, some of which were very popular and others of which were next to useless. It's not at all impossible to create a virtual world which has a lot of fun for one sex and none for another. All it means is that few people will play that sex.

Of course, the difference is that people will complain about it because they want to play their own gender in the game world but feel that they are being penalised for doing so. This reveals something of a contradiction: people want the genders to be equal, but they themselves wish to privilege one over the other (if only for cosmetic reasons), therefore in their eyes the genders aren't equal.

>It's not satisfactory to build in a sex difference, and then only bother to model the parts of the world where male characters have an advantage.

Well, whether it's an advantage or a disadvantage to be the one who has the babies is a matter for debate. The point is, it's a difference.

Richard

[Richard Bartle]

38.

Ricardo Rademacher>I guess the biggest complaint players might have had is what you mentioned, pigeonholing you into a class merely by your choice of sex.

Ah, but you do have a choice of sex. In real life, you don't (well, not without alarming surgical procedures), which is why discrimination on the grounds of sex is A Bad Thing. Discrimination on the grounds of things you do have a choice about is fine. If you decide you will only eat green-coloured food, then you can't complain when you go to a restaurant and they only have peas, spinach and pistacchio ice cream for you.

In virtual worlds, you have a choice of which gender to play. If you think one gender sucks, play the other! Ah, but maybe you don't want to play the other because you have a particular investment in playing a particular one? OK, in that case, don't play the game.

>this was 5 years ago so is the game still in production, did they shut down, or (more interestingly) are they out there now!? :)

They didn't manage to raise the funds they needed. They got a few million as seed capital, but insufficient second-round investment to be able to continue.

>IMO it's not what you say but how you act that makes you sexist.
>So tell us how you REALLY feel, Richard! :P

No way - I might actually be sexist..!

>even if we do put in gender inequalities in an MMO, there is still an element of "correctness" as we make our game western, eastern, southern, or whatever culture we pick!

Yes, that's true. There's also mere opinion: the designer can ignore or enhance or subvert a culture, whether deliberately or subconsciously. The same applies to everything else in the virtual world: ultimately, it's there because the designer (or the business specification) wanted it there. This is what makes virtual world design art.

So are designers correcting reality because they want to, or because they can't be bothered with the hassle of not doing so?

Richard

[thoreau]

39.

I didn't see it mentioned in this thread, but didn't Age of Conan have a feature/bug that caused female avatars to swing their weapon slower than male avatars? I believe this caused quite a stir and forced Funcom to issue this statement:

"There should of course be no difference between a male and a female character of the same class (other than the looks). But we have gathered the feedback about this and are looking into it."

I guess the interesting part is the 'of course.'

Why must we choose between reflecting reality and correcting reality? Can't we simply offer up an alternate reality without being judgemental?

[David]

40.

@thoreau
"Why must we choose between reflecting reality and correcting reality? Can't we simply offer up an alternate reality without being judgemental?"

It's probably because there are debates about how life-like worlds need to be virtually. I think Richard is thinking MMOs are attempting to fix a problem with reality by equalizing the sexes. I think it's more likely that gender differences would make programming harder and not provide a better gaming environment. In other words, MMOs have a base reason for equalizing the sexes.

@Richard
"Well, that's a "correcting reality" approach, then. They wanted male and female characters to have no differences other than cosmetic ones, so airbrushed them out?"

Richard, I was just pointing out that your scenario was not an automatic mirror from reality to virtual reality. I haven't designed a MMO so I'm just assuming, but I don't think there is a high minded reason for MMOs equalizing the sexes. Game balance usually focuses on one or a few elements such as class, race, equipment, skills or levels. I haven't observed gender differences being used as a game balance difference outside of a few MUDs. I think game designers aren't using gender differences simply because they're focusing on differences that "matter" to the game balance they're selected.

[Nick G]

41.

What I find interesting about this discussion is that it’s based on the presumption that there are/should-be fundamental differentiations in player “class”. Gender, as Richard seems to have described it, comes down to variations in capabilities/stats – the same things that we typically see as “racial/class” qualities in existing MMOs.

Were we were to construct a world where male avatars were limited to playing weapon-users and female avatars limited to magic-users, then we’d certainly see a majority of players choosing gender strictly based on preferred play style (all other factors being appropriately balanced, of course). A world like this, on the other hand, would be an interesting test of how strongly some users need to represent their real-life gender identity within the virtual space. That strikes me as a something that Nick Yee might be interested in pursuing (if he hasn’t covered that base already, that is…)

One thing that continues to baffle me about contemporary MMO design is that we still see a slavish devotion to the notion of avatar class. Invariably, selecting a race/class is often one of the first things a new player is required to do when entering a game world. That choice is generally irrevocable. Woe to the Warcraft player who discovers that playing a Night Elf Druid isn’t all that fun for them, and who must now start a Gnome Rogue from level one (only to discover at some later date that they actually should have rolled a Dwarf Priest --- back to level one again). The penalty for making a wrong decision at a point when the player lacks any experience with the game world is, IMHO, unacceptably heinous.

Extending race/class restrictions to encompass gender selection (and whatever limitations that selection might impose) can only have negative implications within a virtual world. If our goal is to “correct reality”, then what we really need to provide is an opportunity for players to revise their initial in-game choices without excessive penalty – an option that is not often available in meat-space (in the real world we also have the benefit of ten or twenty years of social instruction before we have to make those *irrevocable* decisions).

Placing restrictions on players based on uninformed choices may make for interesting challenges downstream, but can only serve to frustrate people who are not hardcore gamers/residents. Unlike real life, players are free to abandon a virtual world where they haven’t managed to measure up to their own expectations and lack the ability to “change careers” midstream.

Ideally, MMOs correct reality by providing a player/resident with the ability to make choices that are unavailable to them in real-life. So, in answer to Richard’s proposition, the perfect environment for his medieval fantasy might restrict childbearing to female avatars, but would allow the player to change sex (and subsequently change back) without significant long-term penalty.

[Richard Bartle]

42.

thoreau>I didn't see it mentioned in this thread

I linked to it from "jaw-dropping mistakes" in the opening post.

>I guess the interesting part is the 'of course.'

Yes, it is indeed interesting. It places Funcom firmly on the "correcting reality" side. It also raises a new question: why do they think this? Is it that they genuinely want it for design or gameplay reasons? Is it a basic marketing decision, to avoid alienating people who want to play female characters? Are they afraid of offending some kind of thought police? Would it break laws if they didn't do it?

>Why must we choose between reflecting reality and correcting reality? Can't we simply offer up an alternate reality without being judgemental?

How could you avoid being judgemental (other than not knowing sufficient detail to have something about which to be judgemental)?

Richard

[Richard Bartle]

43.

David>I think Richard is thinking MMOs are attempting to fix a problem with reality by equalizing the sexes.

Well, a perceived problem, yes. Whether that is a problem they care about in itself or whether it's something they care about because of the consequences for them of not caring about it is another matter, of course.

>I think it's more likely that gender differences would make programming harder

Not by a great deal, no. Given the differences between classes in MMOs, a bit of gender difference here and there isn't going to amount to much.

As a trivial example, in the case of having babies it's only one line you need to add:
if (sex == FEMALE)

>I don't think there is a high minded reason for MMOs equalizing the sexes.

You could be right. It may be that one of the reasons they do equalise the sexes is because of the hassle they'd get from players (and non-players) if they didn't.

>I think game designers aren't using gender differences simply because they're focusing on differences that "matter" to the game balance they're selected.

So if they were creating an MMO where gender differences were called for in order to sustain the fiction (eg. 1920s gangsters, present-day prisons, a medieval monastery) then they'd impose those differences? Or would they shy away and allow female characters to take on roles that were only taken on by men (or, conceivably, women presenting as men) in their chosen genre?

Richard

[Richard Bartle]

44.

Nick G>What I find interesting about this discussion is that it’s based on the presumption that there are/should-be fundamental differentiations in player “class”.

Yes, class is an issue, too. We didn't have classes in the early MUDs: if you wanted to be a mage, you used magic a lot; if you wanted to be a rogue, you stole stuff from people; if you wanted to be a warrior, you hit things with swords.

Classes (like races) in today's MMOs offer gameplay decisions. Gender could, if designers wished, do the same. Designers don't wish, though. They're happy to make distinctions between two different races of elf, but not between two different genders.

>Gender, as Richard seems to have described it, comes down to variations in capabilities/stats – the same things that we typically see as “racial/class” qualities in existing MMOs.

Well, that's where the impact in gameplay would lie. Obviously there's a big difference in the artwork for gender, and there are social and psychological associations for the players, too.

>A world like this, on the other hand, would be an interesting test of how strongly some users need to represent their real-life gender identity within the virtual space.

Indeed. We might see people not playing the game because they felt uncomfortable that their own gender wasn't the one that best fitted the role they wanted.

MUD1 had a spell that you could use to change another player's gender. This made some players livid, but others didn't even notice ("oh, am I female at the moment?").

>That strikes me as a something that Nick Yee might be interested in pursuing (if he hasn’t covered that base already, that is…)

It's long been known that male players will play as female players more readily than female players will play as male players. As to whether more players would switch if there were a positive, gameplay-advantageous reason for doing so, well, maybe there's a PhD in there for someone...

>One thing that continues to baffle me about contemporary MMO design is that we still see a slavish devotion to the notion of avatar class.

Yes, I'm not a fan of classes myself. They make balance easier and stop everyone from gravitating to the same "tank wizard" style, but there are other ways around that (eg. yes, you can use magic, but you can't if you're wearing armour, which is too heavy to carry around in your backpack so you'd better decide before you set out which set of equipment you're going to need). Classes force people to play in a certain style, which I find too constraining on individuals' freedom; some people like the comfort of being given a definite direction and some rails to run on, though (although, again, there are ways round this without needing to fix classes).

>Extending race/class restrictions to encompass gender selection (and whatever limitations that selection might impose) can only have negative implications within a virtual world.

Or positive ones, if they make the world more believable? It might be a step too far in a gritty, dog-eat-dog hard Fantasy world if men can have babies.

>So, in answer to Richard’s proposition, the perfect environment for his medieval fantasy might restrict childbearing to female avatars, but would allow the player to change sex (and subsequently change back) without significant long-term penalty.

So you could do this with an EQ clone world, too, then: have female characters less physically strong than male characters but better able to heal, say, and then let players flip their gender whenever they liked?

It's still "correcting reality", of course...

Richard

[David]

45.

@Richard
"So if they were creating an MMO where gender differences were called for in order to sustain the fiction (eg. 1920s gangsters, present-day prisons, a medieval monastery) then they'd impose those differences? Or would they shy away and allow female characters to take on roles that were only taken on by men (or, conceivably, women presenting as men) in their chosen genre?"

I think that question is almost rhetorical. I don't think a game company that will allow a game that doesn't appeal to both genders in the game market knowing that MMOs have a market with both genders. So yes, they'll shy away and allow female characters to take on roles that in real life were conducted by men.

@Richard
"It's long been known that male players will play as female players more readily than female players will play as male players. As to whether more players would switch if there were a positive, gameplay-advantageous reason for doing so, well, maybe there's a PhD in there for someone..."

Is that really true? How would you verify something like that?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

46.

Yes, it is true that men are more interested in genderbending than women, but isn´t that true when it comes to real life transvestites and drag too? It is also true that men enjoy lesbian porn and objectify women sexually...

If you are going to go for a gender-skewed game, make it a female-characters only role-playing (acting) game.

You could also go for a men versus women game where both sides as collectives have to make tradeoffs for their gender. (Or muslems vs christians if you want more sparks...) Meaning, women and men are factions which can be modified globally. Then the women/men would have to decide what they want their gender to be like (strong, intelligent etc)

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

47.

Just to add some nuance before this turns into a sexist flame-war. Women also objectify men, of course, but they are less likely to admit it or pursue it openly...

Oh what the hell, let´s turn this into a sexist flamewar. IMO the main reasons for men getting more out of genderbending than women:

1. Men want to handle women, and women want to be handled by men. You gain control over a woman by playing a female character. Simple as that.

2. The RL roles for men provide less freedom that that of women, only recently has it become acceptable for men take care of babies for instance and men are still supposed not to cry. Women on the other hand have obtained the right to do everything a man can do and the right to be whatever women always have done in our culture. So their identity palette is broader than that of men. Men who pick up "female qualities" risk being accused of being "gay", which is taboo. That´s less taboo for women, young women can be lovers for fun and it is just "fooling around"... So: games provide opportunities for men to play around with female qualities in ways which would have been taboo in the real world.

3. Women grow up grooming their female presentation. They like to dress up and play with their presentationa and has learned this to be a vital skill. A virtual world is an extension of the clothing closet, so looking good is for many quite essential part of game play. Fewer men see this as a vital skill and spend their energy on seeking symbols of power: big car, guns, fancy job, money, being able to "handle" lots of women...

Ok. Then some nuance: all that stuff holds for both men and women, but it holds more for one gender than the other.

Oh yeah, I know this because I have great intuition. (a female skill, I´m sure...)

[Richard A. Bartle]

48.

David>I don't think a game company that will allow a game that doesn't appeal to both genders in the game market knowing that MMOs have a market with both genders.

Well, the company I mentioned earlier was going to do just that with its medieval period game, had it raised more money. Even if it hadn't, that doesn't mean that people won't do it in future, aiming for the niche market. Sure, you throw away half your potential users by ignoring one gender, but that still leaves a lot of people...

>Is that really true? How would you verify something like that?

Well, you'd do it by conducting surveys and by checking in cases where actual gender can be verified. Here's my favourite paper on the subject (from the textual world days).

Some places have rules against playing characters of the opposite gender, so they must be checking somehow...

Richard

[Traceur]

49.

>Indeed, but do they do this? Or do they stick with the status quo?
- richard bartle

i think i might have mis-represented my point: you've jumped 2 questions. an MMORPG designer needs to ask:
1) what does gender mean in the world i am trying to represent?
2) does the game i am making gives me the tool to represent it?
AND ONLY THEN CAN THE DESIGNER ASK:
3) do i want to represent it?
the majority of games simply do not reach the 3rd question, because gender-issues become nullified in the first 2 questions.

for example:
let's say i am designing a futuristic game with a human setting but where weight & physical strengths have no baring on actions, but it's in the near-future, so social stereotypes sitll hold, meaning the only role gender could have is mental or social,
- do i have game mechanics that can represent improved multi-tasking for women & improved spatial coordination for men? if i don't, then the question doesn't matter.
- do i have a hard-coded social structure through NPCs & limited interactions or forced responses? can i give women an emotional-understanding skill & man a dominance skill? if the answer is no, perhaps because it is more of a sandbox game where players make their own societies, then the question of gender roles again doesn't matter.

perhaps i am making a fantasy game, where physical differences still bare a lot of meaning, but i decided i am not implementing a class/caste/race system, and instead i am giving every player full customization of character attributes. so again, i might have one opinion or the other of gender-roles, but the game design i am implanting doesn't give me the tools to assign or enforce any gender roles.

in most MMORPG games today, because the player avatars represents heroic exceptions rather then the population, then neither questions become relevant. they don't reach question 3 of whether they want to implement gender roles, because they avoid question 1: the gender roles in the world they represent doesn't apply to the players in the first place.

on the other hand, if i am designing a Hellenic fantasy game, so only women can join the temple of Hera & only man can join the temple of Zeus, each giving unique gameplay abilities.
or to the extreme, i might design a game with a hard-coded Ojibwa tribal society, so only women are allowed to be crafters/gatherers, and only men are allowed to be warriors/hunters.

only then can a designer ask: do i want those restrictions? but most designers have never gotten to that point of asking the question, or where it bares any relevance.

now i know that there is a sandbox game which focuses almost entirely on human sexuality - i don't remember what it's called, it's an adult only game with some pretty interesting mechanisms representing everything from BDSM to prostitution to a voyeurism & exhibitionism. i also remember a game where you choose between playing a pilot & choosing the traffic controller, mimicking sort of a submissive/master inter dependency which might be thought of as one of gender roles (though different people would put different genders at either ends). but these are exceptions, few and rare.

[Richard Bartle]

50.

Traceur>the majority of games simply do not reach the 3rd question, because gender-issues become nullified in the first 2 questions.

Your first two points can come after the third. A designer can ask whether they want tangible gender differences, and, if they do, then whether it's meaningful for the genre and whether it's implementable in the design. The first and third question could even be regarded as the same question.

The difficult decision comes when a tangible difference between genders is prompted by the genre, is easy to implement, and the designer wants to do it, but decides not to because of other factors (eg. the flak their design might attract for having one gender "superior" to another).

>in most MMORPG games today, because the player avatars represents heroic exceptions rather then the population, then neither questions become relevant.

This is just hand-waving. It's how designers try to back off from having to make a decision that would actually make sense - they try to spin a fiction around it, just like they do any awkward game mechanic.

It would take a very exceptionally heroic man to give birth to a baby. If you have a game in which babies appear, you either have to go with reality and have only characters with working wombs give birth, or you have to "correct" reality by letting anyone give birth. Or, you can duck the question, although this is really just another way of saying that reality isn't doing it right.

>now i know that there is a sandbox game which focuses almost entirely on human sexuality - i don't remember what it's called

"Second Life".

(Oh, as we're talking on a subject about which people traditionally lose their sense of humour, I guess I should point out that the above line was intended as a joke).

Richard

[Traceur]

51.

look, let's take for example RLOL: real life off line. in that MMO there is a playable race called humans, where each gender has certain statistical superiorities to the other gender - statistical meaning that the majority of that gender has them. now while the damn dev's which we do not know whether they exist or not haven't released any gameplay info, but for a rough estimate the stats might go something like this:

men:
+40 in heredity swiftness
+30 in body heat
+20 in physical strength
+15 in social dominance
+10 in spatial awareness

women:
+40 in heredity control
+30 in emotional intelligence
+20 in multitasking
+15 in physical flexibility
+10 in agility

so they each have 115 points above the other. a fairly balanced system right?

now there are other MMOs who try to copycat RLOL, but here's the thing: non of them have all the systems that RLOL has. for example a great deal of them do not have predefined social reactions. so men loose their 15+ points in social dominance, but women loose their 30+ in emotional intelligence.
a great deal of those MMOs do not possess mental attributes: do men loose their +10 spatial awareness, but women loose +20 multitasking.
combine the two, and now man have 90 unique attribute points, but women have only 65 attribute points.

so because the dev's not have the systems - the basic tools - to represent all the aspects the RLOL has, you end up with an unbalanced game where choosing one gender (men) becomes preferable for choosing another gender (women), and because these other MMOs have a unique feature that RLOL doesn't - character choice - this would harm the diversity of characters in the game world.

and that is why MMORPGs who try to copycat RLOL do not get to the 3rd question - they fail on the second question.

and that is a result from choosing to copycat the human aspects of RLOL in the first place when they answer the first question. for example, what about a game with playable bees? should male characters only be born to fertilize the queen and then die straight away while female characters get to have all the other gameplay features? what about an alien game that has 7 genders? or a race of hermaphrodites?

[Steve]

52.

Richard brushed by a point that ran through my head as I read the thread: The concept of choice...games offer you a choice of gender, which does not reflect reality whatsoever.
What about a game that does not offer such choice?

Thinking of the dynastic games described, suppose those children that become playable at 16 ARE the next player to open an account. The new player simply 'breathes life' into the randomly chosen avatar. The player has no choice on gender (or birthright, even).

From that point on, the new player 'lives' their life as they choose. Stay and inherit the kingdom, move on and establish a kingdom of their own, become a ronin, etc. Likewise, as many are aware, the parents do not necessarily have a choice in the path their child takes.

But, I've digressed from the original question...I think if you're going to replicate the realism of gender, you need to fully replicate and take away the element of gender choice.

I guess I'm an all-or-nothing kind of guy.

Steve

[Steve]

53.

As an addendum:
Isn't it odd that in MMOs/VWs where gender is so not relevant to gameplay, we are still required to choose one?

Steve

[Richard A. Bartle]

54.

Steve>Isn't it odd that in MMOs/VWs where gender is so not relevant to gameplay, we are still required to choose one?

We didn't want gender in MUD1 (well, we didn't want to force the choice). However, the way the English language works, and the fact that MUD1 was a text world, meant that we pretty well had to do it. My own dialect uses the singular they, and I was in my 20s before I found out that "themself" wasn't generally regarded as a word. However, this wasn't something I could really extend into MUD1. The only other way round it that I could see was to go with names the whole time ("Richard has doused Richard's brand", that sort of thing) but that was hardly going to help immersion either...

Some of the MOOs that came out had (and have) multiple genders, and even include things like "the Royal we" and actual plurals (if your character is called Laurel and Hardy, then you would use this to get "Laurel and Hardy are here" etc.).

Pictures force the choice further, though.

Richard

[Greg]

55.

The first time I can remember seeing different stats by gender in a game was in an article by (if memory serves) Lew Pulsipher in Dragon, back in the late 70s. Women were basically inferior. I thought it sexist dreck. (Lew later designed the excellent boardgame BRITTANIA.)

Anyway, yes, Rich, if you are doing a medieval game with noble families where royal and noble families, and inheritance, is important, certainly only female characters give birth. And certainly inheritance is only through the male or line (plus or minus the odd Salic Law or two). And, if you are being honest in your Medieval history, women are except in very rare cases wholly subordinate to men. I suggest having players not represent individual characters, but instead the noble house, and if you really need an avatar per player, the current scion thereof. And yes, there should be permadeath if you let the house die out without an heir. Making sure you (or at least an uncle or nephew) has children is then a major gameplay concern, which sounds pretty reasonable.

Paradox's Crusader Kings is the only digital game that comes close here, though there was a Games Workshop boardgames back in the 80s that dealt with dynastic inheritance at this level of granularity too, but I don't recall it's name at the moment.

[Cunzy1 1]

56.

In pokemon some species come in two seperate genders, one has no gender but will breed with all others, some species are gender neutral and some species are all exclusively all female or all male.

Depending on what you are trying to breed for (combinations of mother/father can yield advantageous "natures", movesets otherwise unobtainable and in some instances a whole new species or prevolution altogether) you need a specific mother, father and occassionally item combination (items that affect the unborn pokemon or perhaps breeding aids, it doesn't bear further thought).

And egg then "appears" and although it is assumed I don't think it is ever implied that the female is the birther. There are ways around it unless of course you insist on cutscening the birth in process or by having characters talk about it in some detail.

[Cunzy1 1]

57.

Apologies for the double post.

I forgot to mention that unlike other MMOs, you don't really get to choose the gender of your fighters and you have to work very hard to ensure that you nuture your mons in order to get the best from them.

Every single pokemon (regardless of gender) is "genetically" different but it is a painstaking process to see these differences until about level 20 and by then you need to record every oponnent they have fought, do some number crunching to find out that although they have the right nature and moveset they are genetically very weak. You then abort them, sorry I meant set them free and start again.

In real terms steering your mon through every single fight from level 1-100 confers very tiny advantage in online competitive play but a difference that has been painstakingly calculated by the community for those who wish for their team to have the extra edge.

I also wanted to add that there is a tiny advantage conferred by playing one gender over another. There are certain moves that make the pokemon become infactuated with each other (and thus reduce their effectiveness in battle) but this only works if you are up against a pokemon of the opposite sex (shock horror, homophobia).

I don't know if the data exists but there could be a slight advantage gained by playing as a female (if the majority of other have female characters) to prevent such attraction. But considering that a majority of the critters you catch and breed are randomly m/f I doubt that any appreciable advantage could be conferred by playing m over f or the other way around.

Enough from me now.