Female Characters

Talk about the latest LRR video or discuss your past favorites.
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Re: NEW VIDEO - Female Characters

Postby My pseudonym is Ix » 07 Jul 2014, 10:17

mariomario42 wrote:
Merrymaker_Mortalis wrote:I know female and male armour is practically identical. I mean, suites of armour were sort of mass-produced to a certain measurement. The only time you could have customised armour is when you commissioned it.
Look at Brienne's armour from Game of Thrones. That suite could probably be also worn by a man.

Armour made from leather and cloth might be different, since the material is more flexible. Cloth armour might be more "to fit". Would Leather Armour have straps, so it would be "One Size Fits All".

I know some people play these RPG games for the fashion and expression. But you're probably better off playing RPGs where the female armour sets are "anatomically correct" because they would have focused on prettiness.



I can see this two ways. If you want a more historic game, it will come with the fact that the overwhelming majority a knights were male.


'Overwhelming majority' doesn't come into it- they were all men. Not only did women not fight, they would almost certainly have not been physically able to- armour was heavy stuff and only those who had spent their entire lives training (noblemen) were able to wear it and be able to fight effectively. A few odd rebellious women might have made it into the ranks of the common folk, but they would have been rare (fighting meant you weren't there to work the land, and your family could well starve), and in any case wouldn't have worn armour. There simply was no such thing as female armour- and even if there was, it would have had exactly the same breastplate as male armour because otherwise it would have been a) weak and b) nigh-on impossible to forge.

The one exception to the rule is Jean d'Arc, but it is worth remembering she was a common girl who had spent her life working the land (so she was stronger than most noblewomen) who offered her services when her country was ruled by a clinical madmen and was approximately two inches from total annihilation. The Dauphin was desperate by the time she came along, and probably would have let a baby lead their troops into battle if he thought God had sent them. Even then, she didn't have to fight in her armour- she was more of a general in the modern sense, being a totally inexperienced fighter but a surprisingly amazing strategist who would sit back and direct her troops in maneuvres that completely surprised the English and sent army after army routing. If she wore armour at all, it would have been an oversized man's breastplate- she was eventually burned at the stake not for war crimes but for dressing as a man, betrayed by her own countrymen.

Sorry about that, my inner history nerd took over
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Re: Female Characters

Postby LunarJade » 07 Jul 2014, 10:39

Beej had told me about this video and I'm glad to see it up today. The delivery was great and made it a lot funnier than I was expecting it to be.

Also I would recommend Monster Tale for the DS. Its a Metroidvania type with a female lead. I don't know if it really can be found in stores anymore, I happened to find it in a bargain bin a while back.
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Re: NEW VIDEO - Female Characters

Postby CitronPie » 07 Jul 2014, 10:59

mariomario42 wrote:
I think this is more on a case to case basis. Smaller companies that are trying to make a polished game, that work might be too much money/work for them. Character model is one thing, but any game that has equipable armor/clothing requires male and female versions of each.

Does it? I'm just thinking of Saint's Row, where everyone can wear everything and you have a pretty wide range of possible body types. Besides which, a lot of armor would pretty much be unisex in design - you don't hug the contours of the body, after all - and you can probably just design everyone to have similar body sizes so the armor would work either way if your resources are that limited.
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Re: Female Characters

Postby Master Gunner » 07 Jul 2014, 11:00

Sampy wrote:My wife and I have a joke whenever we see a Surface in a TV show that Microsoft now pays for "all of TV."

Good to see we are branching out into web comedy as well. Welcome to the corporate family!

I have a Surface Pro through work, and it really is a very nice device.
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Re: NEW VIDEO - Female Characters

Postby Master Gunner » 07 Jul 2014, 11:16

My pseudonym is Ix wrote:If she wore armour at all, it would have been an oversized man's breastplate- she was eventually burned at the stake not for war crimes but for dressing as a man, betrayed by her own countrymen.


Just to clarify your wording here, she did wear armour, and it was in the same style as male armour at the time. While there are no direct portraits of her that survive, contemporary descriptions and paintings from the years soon after portray a typical suit of armour of the period, unique primarily in that it was undecorated (some suits of armour could be outright garish in showing off the colours and coat of arms of the knight wearing it).
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Re: NEW VIDEO - Female Characters

Postby My pseudonym is Ix » 07 Jul 2014, 11:25

Master Gunner wrote:
My pseudonym is Ix wrote:If she wore armour at all, it would have been an oversized man's breastplate- she was eventually burned at the stake not for war crimes but for dressing as a man, betrayed by her own countrymen.


Just to clarify your wording here, she did wear armour, and it was in the same style as male armour at the time. While there are no direct portraits of her that survive, contemporary descriptions and paintings from the years soon after portray a typical suit of armour of the period, unique primarily in that it was undecorated (some suits of armour could be outright garish in showing off the colours and coat of arms of the knight wearing it).


My knowledge of Jean d'Arc is somewhat hazy- I was hedging my bets on my mental image of her being innacurate, as they so often are.
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Re: Female Characters

Postby AdmiralMemo » 07 Jul 2014, 11:30

I'm reading the Youtube comments on this video, and I'm just like...
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Graham wrote:The point is: Nyeh nyeh nyeh. I'm an old man.
LRRcast wrote:Paul: That does not answer that question at all.
James: Who cares about that question? That's a good answer.

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Re: Female Characters

Postby Master Gunner » 07 Jul 2014, 11:31

I refresh my memory on Jean d'Arc every time the subject of female armour comes up. As far as I know, she really is the only women that would have ever worn actual plate armour. The odd female monarch may have had armour made for them, but it would have being ceremonial rather than intended for battle (and I know Queen Elizabeth was not among them).
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Re: Female Characters

Postby Bratmon » 07 Jul 2014, 14:21

Well this video answers all the questions I could possibly have. About anything.
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Re: Female Characters

Postby AdmiralMemo » 07 Jul 2014, 16:34

So, either you view it as entertainment and have fun...

Or you take it seriously, in which case...
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Graham wrote:The point is: Nyeh nyeh nyeh. I'm an old man.
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Re: NEW VIDEO - Female Characters

Postby milow » 07 Jul 2014, 16:40

SamSamSam wrote:How many games are there where you can ONLY play a female character?

Off the top of my head I can only think of Tomb Raider, Metroid, Portal and some indies.
Compared to the 1000s of games that are male only.

Oh, there's Super Princess Peach too


I'm late to this conversation, but a favorite that I always remember is Cate Archer in No One Lives Forever (NOLF) and it's sequel (NOLF 2), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Operative:_No_One_Lives_Forever.

I enjoyed the humor and commentary in this week's video. I'm wondering if I should read the comments at the Escapist and on YouTube, or if I should remain blissfully unaware.
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Re: Female Characters

Postby AdmiralMemo » 07 Jul 2014, 17:13

Escapist comments on this one are currently tame, but who knows if that might change.
Graham wrote:The point is: Nyeh nyeh nyeh. I'm an old man.
LRRcast wrote:Paul: That does not answer that question at all.
James: Who cares about that question? That's a good answer.

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Re: Female Characters

Postby phlip » 07 Jul 2014, 17:43

I've noticed that the Escapist comments on videos like this tend to be more full of "this comment thread is going to be awful" than actual awful posts... though on the occasion that the awful posts do show up, it tends to be amazingly awful. While YouTube is amazingly awful as just background radiation... it's always there, and there's not much you can do to avoid it.
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Re: Female Characters

Postby J_S_Bach » 08 Jul 2014, 00:54

Great video!
I've seen mention of Tomb Raider pop up in a few posts and I'm curious if the LRR community considers Lara Croft (specifically from 2013 Tomb Raider) to be a positive female role model and how 2013 Lara compares to her other iterations?

Also if you would be kind enough to indulge this thought experiment of mine:
It is a valid complaint that not enough video games feature a female lead (something I believe needs to be fixed at an educational level) but if we are to ask developers to give us the option of playing a female character if it's also fair to ask for options for male characters in games like Tomb Raider, Portal, Metroid, Mirror's Edge, etc. it's just a thought that's been keeping me up and would like others opinions.
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Re: Female Characters

Postby Lurkon » 08 Jul 2014, 01:19

J_S_Bach wrote:Great video!
I've seen mention of Tomb Raider pop up in a few posts and I'm curious if the LRR community considers Lara Croft (specifically from 2013 Tomb Raider) to be a positive female role model and how 2013 Lara compares to her other iterations?

Also if you would be kind enough to indulge this thought experiment of mine:
It is a valid complaint that not enough video games feature a female lead (something I believe needs to be fixed at an educational level) but if we are to ask developers to give us the option of playing a female character if it's also fair to ask for options for male characters in games like Tomb Raider, Portal, Metroid, Mirror's Edge, etc. it's just a thought that's been keeping me up and would like others opinions.

I don't think so. The idea here is that we have a static character in such games that needs that constant gender in order to tell its story. I can point out a few games (Mass Effect 1, 2, and 3, Saints Row 3 and 4 [maybe the earlier ones? I don't know]) that have fully voiced protagonists with a variable gender, but the amount of work that needs to go into that seems to me to be kind of immense.
In my mind, what we're talking about here is less "We must have the option to play as a female in every game." and more "Here is a situation where we should be able to play a female and we can't.". Should we have the option to play a female in Prototype? No, because it is the story of Alex Mercer. If the developers had chosen to make it the story of Alexis Mercer, then similarly we shouldn't have the option to instead play as a male. However, we start running into problems when we're looking at a game like Skyrim where we suddenly can't play a female for some reason. What, narratively, would that restriction give us? I don't think it would give us much of anything at all considering the character is essentially a blank slate when you start the game.

Of course, the issue sparking all this debate (for the moment) is the multiplayer of an Assassin's Creed game. This is a place where being able to chose the character you play makes a lot of sense, even if that choice is aesthetic. To use one of your examples, it would be as though Tomb Raider had a multiplayer section in which you all ran around a forest shooting each other with bows, but everyone had to play as Lara. In that situation, I think it makes sense to have the option to play a male character, not in the main game, which is the story of Lara Croft, but in the hypothetical multiplayer, which isn't really intended to be much of a story.
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Re: Female Characters

Postby J_S_Bach » 08 Jul 2014, 01:37

Lurkon wrote:
J_S_Bach wrote:Great video!
I've seen mention of Tomb Raider pop up in a few posts and I'm curious if the LRR community considers Lara Croft (specifically from 2013 Tomb Raider) to be a positive female role model and how 2013 Lara compares to her other iterations?

Also if you would be kind enough to indulge this thought experiment of mine:
It is a valid complaint that not enough video games feature a female lead (something I believe needs to be fixed at an educational level) but if we are to ask developers to give us the option of playing a female character if it's also fair to ask for options for male characters in games like Tomb Raider, Portal, Metroid, Mirror's Edge, etc. it's just a thought that's been keeping me up and would like others opinions.

I don't think so. The idea here is that we have a static character in such games that needs that constant gender in order to tell its story. I can point out a few games (Mass Effect 1, 2, and 3, Saints Row 3 and 4 [maybe the earlier ones? I don't know]) that have fully voiced protagonists with a variable gender, but the amount of work that needs to go into that seems to me to be kind of immense.
In my mind, what we're talking about here is less "We must have the option to play as a female in every game." and more "Here is a situation where we should be able to play a female and we can't.". Should we have the option to play a female in Prototype? No, because it is the story of Alex Mercer. If the developers had chosen to make it the story of Alexis Mercer, then similarly we shouldn't have the option to instead play as a male. However, we start running into problems when we're looking at a game like Skyrim where we suddenly can't play a female for some reason. What, narratively, would that restriction give us? I don't think it would give us much of anything at all considering the character is essentially a blank slate when you start the game.

Of course, the issue sparking all this debate (for the moment) is the multiplayer of an Assassin's Creed game. This is a place where being able to chose the character you play makes a lot of sense, even if that choice is aesthetic. To use one of your examples, it would be as though Tomb Raider had a multiplayer section in which you all ran around a forest shooting each other with bows, but everyone had to play as Lara. In that situation, I think it makes sense to have the option to play a male character, not in the main game, which is the story of Lara Croft, but in the hypothetical multiplayer, which isn't really intended to be much of a story.


Part of me feels that Ubisoft gets some flak unfairly in regards to the multiplayer of ACU since everyone will see themselves as the main character, Arno, and as you made a point with Alex Mercer, the developers want to tell the story of Arno. However Ubisoft did shoot themselves in the foot when it came to FarCry4 saying that a female protagonist "was in the works" but was scrapped due to budget or some such other nonsense.

And, if I'm not mistaken, Tomb Raider (2013) did have a multiplayer mode (I haven't played it because from my understanding it isn't very good) but I have only seen male character models for it. Why didn't this get deservedly criticized?
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Re: Female Characters

Postby AdmiralMemo » 08 Jul 2014, 01:45

Lurkon wrote:The idea here is that we have a static character in such games that needs that constant gender in order to tell its story.
And while that is true, there is the tangentially related issue of the "Steves" in gaming, as Alex puts them.

Even if you can't point to a single game, like Prototype, and say "That specific game should've had a female protagonist," you can still see this massive flood of games with the same generic mid-20s white dude as the protagonist and see it's a problem. For every Tomb Raider, Among the Sleep, or The Last of Us, there are at least 10 CoD or Halo clones out there with Steve as their protagonist.
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Re: NEW VIDEO - Female Characters

Postby JayBlanc » 08 Jul 2014, 02:01

My pseudonym is Ix wrote:'Overwhelming majority' doesn't come into it- they were all men. Not only did women not fight, they would almost certainly have not been physically able to- armour was heavy stuff and only those who had spent their entire lives training (noblemen) were able to wear it and be able to fight effectively. A few odd rebellious women might have made it into the ranks of the common folk, but they would have been rare (fighting meant you weren't there to work the land, and your family could well starve), and in any case wouldn't have worn armour. There simply was no such thing as female armour- and even if there was, it would have had exactly the same breastplate as male armour because otherwise it would have been a) weak and b) nigh-on impossible to forge.

The one exception to the rule is Jean d'Arc, but it is worth remembering she was a common girl who had spent her life working the land (so she was stronger than most noblewomen) who offered her services when her country was ruled by a clinical madmen and was approximately two inches from total annihilation. The Dauphin was desperate by the time she came along, and probably would have let a baby lead their troops into battle if he thought God had sent them. Even then, she didn't have to fight in her armour- she was more of a general in the modern sense, being a totally inexperienced fighter but a surprisingly amazing strategist who would sit back and direct her troops in maneuvres that completely surprised the English and sent army after army routing. If she wore armour at all, it would have been an oversized man's breastplate- she was eventually burned at the stake not for war crimes but for dressing as a man, betrayed by her own countrymen.

Sorry about that, my inner history nerd took over


Your inner history nerd needs to go back to school. There are two major fallacies here I'm going to have to address...

1) "Armour was heavy stuff and only those who had spent their entire lives training (noblemen) were able to wear it and be able to fight effectively"

So what? Plate armour didn't go to most anyone, there's a reason it was so rare. Plate armour was designed to do two things, and those two things only, defend against sword, defend against arrow. Plate armour was actually a liability when faced against a line of pike, and there was even the almost specialised "war hammer" which was designed to either shatter cast plate, or dent forged plate at the chest or neck where it would suffocate it's own wearer.

As such, plate armour only really served one purpose. Turning soft targets in your C&C into armoured ones to prevent decapitation strikes by archer. (And at the relevant era, that meant aiming a volley of relatively un-aimed arrows on the position the leaders are.) That's why Knights and such got the armour, because they were being protected from stray arrows and thrown instruments. And of course it would have been idiocy to weigh them down with something heavy when they might need to move location quite quickly, which is why Plate is actually very thin, and while heavy, not as heavy as you would imagine. It is not intended to withstand heavy attack, but deflect strikes.

The 'romantic' notions of Plate in combat come from that other 'romantic' effort of the Era, the tournaments and jousts. Those were really the only times that plate armour fought against plate armour. Not because the plate was any worthwhile protection in such personal combat, but because it had become a symbol of status.

Now onto the second fallacy...

2) "The one exception to the rule is Jean d'Arc"

Going to post an image here...

Image

This is a lady by the name of Hangaku Gozen, she was a samuri of the Heian and the Kamakura periods, she commanded an army of 3,000 and is pictured here wearing... Drum Roll Please... Resin Plate Armour.

Moving back to European style metal plate armour... We have good ole Catherine of Aragon, wearer of full plate armour when she was commanding the raising of armies in defence against the Scots. Joanna of Flanders who, here let's go with another picture...

Image

...who led the Montfortists during the War of the Breton Succession. Led, and won the War of the Breton Succession.

Sure, if you say that "Jean d'Arc" is an exceptional anomoly you could dismiss women wearing plate as insignificant... But She Was Not. Even when history of those eras was recorded by those who would give many more pages to insignificant minor male nobles over female warriors, there is a wealth of data on female warriors, many of whom are known to have explicitly worn plate, or would be expected to have worn plate in the positions of commanding battles. Excluding women from battle is a notion that is relatively recent arising in the 18th century era of such 'romantic' notions about the proper women's place and done out of no real reason because women are entirely capable of being very fierce and capable in combat.

Thus, I conclude, you are entirely incorrect.
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Re: Female Characters

Postby J_S_Bach » 08 Jul 2014, 04:13

AdmiralMemo wrote:And while that is true, there is the tangentially related issue of the "Steves" in gaming, as Alex puts them.

Even if you can't point to a single game, like Prototype, and say "That specific game should've had a female protagonist," you can still see this massive flood of games with the same generic mid-20s white dude as the protagonist and see it's a problem. For every Tomb Raider, Among the Sleep, or The Last of Us, there are at least 10 CoD or Halo clones out there with Steve as their protagonist.


As I said in my original post I agree with Yahtzee Croshaw's opinion that this is because the game industry needs more woman in game development. Gamer culture needs to cultivate a better environment and make it easier for woman to make names for themselves in the game industry. Having women tell stories about and/or with female protagonists is much better than having men do it. But unfortunately right now there are more men in game design than women and here's hoping that changes soon.

Also, I feel that the AAA industry is the last place we should be looking to lead this change since AAA only mimics what is currently popular. It's the smaller and indie developers that are best suited to serve this role.
With CoD and Halo they are sold for the multiplayer, not the single player experience. I would argue that in those instances where the character is not central nor important to gameplay or the enjoyment of the gameplay is the place where these "Steves" belong. Let's face facts there wouldn't be all of these FPS and "Steve" clones if they didn't make the companies that make them their money back.
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Re: NEW VIDEO - Female Characters

Postby Matt » 08 Jul 2014, 09:34

JayBlanc wrote: Even when history of those eras was recorded by those who would give many more pages to insignificant minor male nobles over female warriors


I thought of pointing out (but didn't because I'm not familiar enough with the history of the time) that historical canon is fairly well understood to have written out or obscured the contributions and actions of individuals that didn't conform no a white-male archetype except where it was fundamentally impossible to do so.

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Re: Female Characters

Postby JayBlanc » 08 Jul 2014, 09:44

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Re: NEW VIDEO - Female Characters

Postby My pseudonym is Ix » 08 Jul 2014, 10:24

JayBlanc wrote:
My pseudonym is Ix wrote:'Overwhelming majority' doesn't come into it- they were all men. Not only did women not fight, they would almost certainly have not been physically able to- armour was heavy stuff and only those who had spent their entire lives training (noblemen) were able to wear it and be able to fight effectively. A few odd rebellious women might have made it into the ranks of the common folk, but they would have been rare (fighting meant you weren't there to work the land, and your family could well starve), and in any case wouldn't have worn armour. There simply was no such thing as female armour- and even if there was, it would have had exactly the same breastplate as male armour because otherwise it would have been a) weak and b) nigh-on impossible to forge.

The one exception to the rule is Jean d'Arc, but it is worth remembering she was a common girl who had spent her life working the land (so she was stronger than most noblewomen) who offered her services when her country was ruled by a clinical madmen and was approximately two inches from total annihilation. The Dauphin was desperate by the time she came along, and probably would have let a baby lead their troops into battle if he thought God had sent them. Even then, she didn't have to fight in her armour- she was more of a general in the modern sense, being a totally inexperienced fighter but a surprisingly amazing strategist who would sit back and direct her troops in maneuvres that completely surprised the English and sent army after army routing. If she wore armour at all, it would have been an oversized man's breastplate- she was eventually burned at the stake not for war crimes but for dressing as a man, betrayed by her own countrymen.

Sorry about that, my inner history nerd took over


Your inner history nerd needs to go back to school. There are two major fallacies here I'm going to have to address...

1) "Armour was heavy stuff and only those who had spent their entire lives training (noblemen) were able to wear it and be able to fight effectively"

So what? Plate armour didn't go to most anyone, there's a reason it was so rare. Plate armour was designed to do two things, and those two things only, defend against sword, defend against arrow. Plate armour was actually a liability when faced against a line of pike, and there was even the almost specialised "war hammer" which was designed to either shatter cast plate, or dent forged plate at the chest or neck where it would suffocate it's own wearer.

As such, plate armour only really served one purpose. Turning soft targets in your C&C into armoured ones to prevent decapitation strikes by archer. (And at the relevant era, that meant aiming a volley of relatively un-aimed arrows on the position the leaders are.) That's why Knights and such got the armour, because they were being protected from stray arrows and thrown instruments. And of course it would have been idiocy to weigh them down with something heavy when they might need to move location quite quickly, which is why Plate is actually very thin, and while heavy, not as heavy as you would imagine. It is not intended to withstand heavy attack, but deflect strikes.

The 'romantic' notions of Plate in combat come from that other 'romantic' effort of the Era, the tournaments and jousts. Those were really the only times that plate armour fought against plate armour. Not because the plate was any worthwhile protection in such personal combat, but because it had become a symbol of status.

Now onto the second fallacy...

2) "The one exception to the rule is Jean d'Arc"

Going to post an image here...

Image

This is a lady by the name of Hangaku Gozen, she was a samuri of the Heian and the Kamakura periods, she commanded an army of 3,000 and is pictured here wearing... Drum Roll Please... Resin Plate Armour.

Moving back to European style metal plate armour... We have good ole Catherine of Aragon, wearer of full plate armour when she was commanding the raising of armies in defence against the Scots. Joanna of Flanders who, here let's go with another picture...

Image

...who led the Montfortists during the War of the Breton Succession. Led, and won the War of the Breton Succession.

Sure, if you say that "Jean d'Arc" is an exceptional anomoly you could dismiss women wearing plate as insignificant... But She Was Not. Even when history of those eras was recorded by those who would give many more pages to insignificant minor male nobles over female warriors, there is a wealth of data on female warriors, many of whom are known to have explicitly worn plate, or would be expected to have worn plate in the positions of commanding battles. Excluding women from battle is a notion that is relatively recent arising in the 18th century era of such 'romantic' notions about the proper women's place and done out of no real reason because women are entirely capable of being very fierce and capable in combat.

Thus, I conclude, you are entirely incorrect.


I will happily concede to your superior knowledge on the latter point- I certainly have no issue with the idea of women being fierce warriors on the battlefield (as a female friend of mine will attest next time we have a combat session), and even though I disagree with the idea that 'a woman's proper place' is a relatively modern phenomenon I'm not surprised to hear Jean wasn't the only example- as I said, it's a bit later than my prdominant period of interest. To clarify on the former- I should have clarified rather than assumed knowledge of plate's rarity as a more predominant factor than physical ability, but was more trying to explain why nobody 'just tried it out'. Armour was heavy, even if it wasn't the 12 million tons people often think, particularly with the padding that had to go underneath to support it, and knights trained almost daily to be fit enough to wear it- point being their wives would hardly be able to try some on on a whim. Also worth mentioning to all still interested was how colossally expensive armour was; in the 1100s it worked out as the equivalent to around £3 million in today's money, and I doubt it would have gone down much in the intervening years.

Either way, I don't think we were actually disagreeing with one another on that point.

The note about forging was clarified by a friend who is a smith and has some experience of (although he's never made) modern-day recreations of plate, so I stand by his comments on that one.
"Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not Image it after all."
CulturalGeekGirl
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Re: Female Characters

Postby CulturalGeekGirl » 08 Jul 2014, 11:34

I worked on one of the most historically/mythologically-driven games of all time: the classic MMO "Dark Age of Camelot." It featured three realms, one based on Arthurian legend and English history, one based on Norse mythology and Scandinavian history, and one based on Celtic myth and Irish history. It had female playable characters, and it came out over ten years ago. We had plenty of mythological, historical, and literary scholars who played our game, but complaints about female characters ruining the "immersion" or "accuracy" were pretty rare.

One of the reasons I like the MMO genre is that everyone just assumes that there will be male and female playable characters - it's been the industry standard since the genre's inception. And once you start development with that assumption, it really isn't that onerous. As for historical accuracy, well... there actually is a decent amount of information relating to real female armor - some ceremonial, some not. Mostly, it differs from male armor simply by having a few different dimensions - chest to waist to hip ratios being different. That's pretty much how armor was handled in Camelot: identical armor for both genders, with just a bit of tailoring to make it suit different body types.

Evidence suggests that women have been involved in combat (and a lot of other stuff) pretty consistently for most of known history, but a lot of bad research, bias, and deliberate female erasure has occurred. We Have Always Fought was a good article going around a year ago that explained some of this. Archaeologists keep finding people buried with weapons and assuming the skeletons are male, only to have tests done years later prove they were female. People used to assume cave paintings were mostly done by men, but analysis of the relative hand sizes of the handprint "signatures" that accompany them has recently suggested that these artists were more often female than male. And now that we're starting to see more links between viking women and combat, we're starting to ask the question "why did we think only men did the combat, again?" and the answer is usually "duh, well we just naturally assumed!"

Of course, knights and samurai are easy-to-cherry-pick narrowly-defined class-based roles that were overwhelmingly male. Ok. Give me your top 10 samurai or knight simulators that are all about following the orders given to you by your lord in a world that contains no magic. That's what a "historically accurate" knight or samurai game would look like, if your goal was to capture the most typical experience of someone in that role at the time. If you're already going to go against historical reality enough to give your character personal agency in what was typically a rigidly hierarchical system, then you might as well also explore the edge-cases where women had similar roles, even if they weren't officially designated as samurai or knights. And if you're altering your setting enough to include magic, dragons, demons, time travel, or the undead... well then you've pretty much got no excuse.

Various World/European wars are also interesting to look at because sure, most official military combat roles were for dudes. But if you research people who were running around being awesome spies, resistance fighters, assassins, and intelligence agents, there were a huge number of ladies. That's putting aside people like the night witches, the Soviet Union's elite force of female bomber pilots. Or the Soviet lady who bought a tank to kill Nazis with while on a quest to avenge her dead husband. Yeah, the Soviets were waaaaaaaaaay ahead of us at this point, women-in-combat-wise.

What other wars you got? As we've already established, the most famous assassin of the French Revolution was a woman, and for the Napoleonic wars, you've got Juana Galán (tell me you wouldn't enjoy a social links/tower defense town game where you played as a smoking-hot brunette who had godlike combat abilities with a stick, and I will call you a god-damned liar). Fact is, women have always been on the front lines in nominally non-combat roles, and gotten caught up in actual fighting as a result. Heck, think about it... what better way to show actual combat skill progression than to have your main character be someone untrained who is literally learning to fight as you go?

History is filled with stories of women who have fought, and that's just what's survived several centuries of a historical and literary tradition utterly dominated by white men who just assumed, by default, that anything interesting they discovered was probably done by a white dude, often with basically zero justification. Did you know that the historical figure more closely analgous to the Lone Ranger was black? You probably didn't, because a few generations of writers have gone around stalwartly whitewashing and gender-erasing portrayals of various historical eras, basically just assuming by default that white guys were the only people who mattered.

If you're putting limitations on your story by picking the narrowest possible social group and saying "Oh, I want my main character to be typical, in everything other than ability level, social mobility, daily life, type of missions they're involved in, and kill count," then you've gotta look deeper at who is creating those limitations. It's not history... it's you.
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Trisha Lynn
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Re: Female Characters

Postby Trisha Lynn » 08 Jul 2014, 14:25

CulturalGeekGirl wrote:I worked on one of the most historically/mythologically-driven games of all time: the classic MMO "Dark Age of Camelot."

*snip*

If you're putting limitations on your story by picking the narrowest possible social group and saying "Oh, I want my main character to be typical, in everything other than ability level, social mobility, daily life, type of missions they're involved in, and kill count," then you've gotta look deeper at who is creating those limitations. It's not history... it's you.


Boom! Headshot!

Going back to the idea that if you have a specific story about a specific character and the character is one specific gender, there's really not much you can do about that. The people who created Lara Croft thought it would be cool if their archeological adventurer was a woman and planned her story and backstory that way. That's cool, same as how the people who created Nathan Drake did with their stories. For games like those, it's okay to have the lead be one specific gender as long as you have people of other gender in the game with reasonable characteristics/personalities, etc. When it comes to multiplayer games, however--and this issue is specifically what's at hand, not single character/single person campaigns--then there's no excuse.

Mass Effect is the first single-player campaign game that I played where the story didn't make a differentiation in what your character's gender was. At the same time, however, when I played the original campaign first as a dude and then as woman, I definitely felt that the choices I made had an influence in where the story went and how "Renegade" my female Shepherd became.

Speaking as someone who works for an indie game developer now, these are definitely conversations I look forward to, provided that people don't turn into giant squids of anger during them.


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Littha
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Re: NEW VIDEO - Female Characters

Postby Littha » 09 Jul 2014, 08:01

Lurkon wrote:
SamSamSam wrote:How many games are there where you can ONLY play a female character?

Off the top of my head I can only think of Tomb Raider, Metroid, Portal and some indies.
Compared to the 1000s of games that are male only.

Oh, there's Super Princess Peach too

The first one I thought of was Mirror's Edge. (Just adding to the tiny tiny list.)
ETA: Remember Me.


off the top of my head...
Okami
Final Fantasy X-2
Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns
Transistor
Child of Light
Assassins Creed III: Liberation
Beyond: Two Souls

There are probably an awful lot more out there but I cant think of any more at the moment.

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