STORY - The flat male lead.

[Igor Hardy]

I too prefer creating female leads to male ones. (I'd take a guess that most man find women characters more interesting.)

Nevertheless, for my first game I decided to go with a male main hero and I gave him a past and plenty of characteristics. I didn't find it to be too hard, but it was a gradual process of molding of various concepts into something both interesting and consistent. This looked something like this:

First I took the archetype of a fantasy fiction dwarven warrior - a Gimli type, easily annoyed, always ready to fight, rather unrefined in his way of talking. Then I took some of these qualities to the extreme and made him quite unpleasant, crazy, and more of a villain (of the unpredictable psycho kind, and not the scheming kind). Then I wanted him to have some greater quest, some activity that is always on his mind. Ultimately, I settled for a personal enemy, someone who was once the hero's best friend to make things more complicated. The hero is chasing him to take revenge on him for a certain offense done to the hero's clan.

Another approach to enriching the character I had was to give him some physical characteristics that would affect the gameplay - things like poor sight. I also decided for him to be very antisocial and have problems talking with people - he needs to use items from the inventory to represent his general ideas. This of course was also part of using the character to build the gameplay. To some extent it was shaped to fit some gameplay ideas.

Finally, I added things like mother complex, memories from bloody battles, dead brother, hears voices, has strange visions, wants his things clean, and doesn't put bare hands on any outside stuff...

I think in the end he's pretty interesting.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Actually I'd wager the opposite is more true:

men tend to find male characters more interesting and women tend to find female characters more interesting.  Why?  Because we relate more easily to people of the same sex, generally; as men we understand (even if we don't agree with) the macho musings of a man in a story just as women understand the nurturing feelings of a woman character.  I'm not saying it's impossible for either sex to understand or relate to feelings commonly associated with the opposite sex, but it's certainly easier to relate to things you have an inherent understanding of.  For example, as a male author just how do you approach a scene in which a young girl experiences puberty (her period) for the first time?  Probably not with the ability or understanding of a woman who's actually experienced it and has discussed it with other women.  I mean, what does it REALLY feel like to know that you can now bear children?  As a man, can you honestly know that?  Conversely, can a woman really understand what it's like when a boy has his first erection?  I'm not trying to be crass or overly graphic, I'm just using rather specific and unique moments in a man/woman's development to illustrate my point.  

[Snarky]

Ummm, what about the nurturing feelings of a male character, Progz? (Which is to say that I don't think these are gender-specific emotions. There are women who "speak" swagger just as well as most men.)

I would also point out that "understand" != "find more interesting". I think it's fairly common for people to be more interested in stories about people of the opposite sex. Maybe not the majority, but enough that you can't really make a rule one way or the other. (This is just my intuition, obviously.)

Fair enough that there are experiences that are inherently gender-specific (though that doesn't mean they're completely incomprehensible to the other sex: I think most guys who watched Carrie understood in some way, to some extent, what she was going through), but how many games focus on or even touch upon those moments?

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

If you read what I wrote you'd see rather clearly that I never claimed there were gender specific 'feelings' but certainly gender specific 'moments' in development unique to a certain sex.  What I do believe and have observed is that there are clear traits and behaviors more commonly found in one sex than the other (I very rarely see (read: never) women walk around playing the 'local tough' and I live in an urban city of over 1.5 million people, just as I don't typically see men at a pedicurist or discussing the daily soaps).  It's less a matter of it being a possible and more about environmental and cultural conditioning that encourages men to behave one way and women another, and we naturally empathize with people with similar experiences to our own because it reminds us of our own experiences.  It's always seemed rather logical and common sense to me that members of one sex enjoy stories about their own more than the other overall because they can better relate to those characters and root for them.

[discordance]

On the other hand, I also enjoy stories about things that are unfamiliar to me -- foreign countries, odd people, bizarre circumstances, etc. Reading a story about someone of the opposite sex is an opportunity to get into someone else's head, to get an idea of what it feels like to be them (if it's well written, of course). This can also apply to people from different cultures, people with multiple heads, aliens, whatever. A good writer can make you empathize with something unfamiliar.

And, of course, trying to write from the perspective of such a person can also be an interesting challenge. You get to try to delve even deeper into someone else's head, because you have to, in a way, be that person. And it's often a lot more fun to try to be someone who's totally different from you -- for example, a girl. Gosh.

[Igor Hardy]

On the other hand, I also enjoy stories about things that are unfamiliar to me -- foreign countries, odd people, bizarre circumstances, etc. Reading a story about someone of the opposite sex is an opportunity to get into someone else's head, to get an idea of what it feels like to be them (if it's well written, of course). This can also apply to people from different cultures, people with multiple heads, aliens, whatever. A good writer can make you empathize with something unfamiliar.

And, of course, trying to write from the perspective of such a person can also be an interesting challenge. You get to try to delve even deeper into someone else's head, because you have to, in a way, be that person. And it's often a lot more fun to try to be someone who's totally different from you -- for example, a girl. Gosh.

My feelings exactly. There is a risk involved in writing about something not fully known to you and trying to get it right, but if you are interested in the topic it's usually worth it.

That said I find many women's feelings and problems more close to my own experiences than, for example, the popular American classification of boys into jocks and nerds which I never seen happen in real life.

[Andail]

I think it's interesting that this discussion has reached so deeply into the realm of gender theory, when very few games present any real character study whatsoever.

When was the last time you played a game that â€" in an informed and profound way -  discussed what it's like to be a man/woman? Maybe one out of fifty games features a protagonist and a plot that allow for a pertinent socio-cultural analysis. The rest are about pirates, adventurers, private eyes, apprentices, and whether they're male or female has more to do with esthetics and gimmicks rather than a desire to truly debate gender.

Men like to play women for several reasons (and this is very present in rpgs and mmorpgs; in WoW you have far more men playing women than actual women), but few have to do with wanting to be enlightened of how they work, think or function - instead it's more about identity and how you're perceived. It's like a social experiment; "I wonder how it would feel being female, for a change", and all you need is an avatar to maintain this illusion.

[Anian]

@Andail:
Though I don't think anybody would like to play a game like that...maybe there are some, since game like Sims are popular etc.. But would you really want to play an adventure game where you're a regular man but realistic more than a game with a hero that starts off as a regualr Joe but then becomes a hero as the story unfolds?
Thing is that most of the stories in adventure games are, in their essence, a story of a regular person becoming something more, evolving, turning into a "hero" (like saving the world and such). And it's not stereotyping, it's the fact that that's a basis for an interesting story - character faced with a certain situation and experience changes.

Men like playing women for one more reason, and this is kind of strange but socially interesting - you're treated better in some cases...don't know why exactly, but you get healed etc. more often...that's not always the case, but it's fun to see happening. Some feelings and social relationships are more pronounced in games, cause some filters are missing.
Plus there's always the fact that you get to look a woman's behind while playing a game (low polys just do it for some people )

[Intense Degree]

When was the last time you played a game that â€" in an informed and profound way -  discussed what it's like to be a man/woman? Maybe one out of fifty games features a protagonist and a plot that allow for a pertinent socio-cultural analysis. The rest are about pirates, adventurers, private eyes, apprentices, and whether they're male or female has more to do with esthetics and gimmicks rather than a desire to truly debate gender.

Of course many adventure game protagonists (and other genres too of course) are "blank canvases" so the player can project themselves onto them. Or sometimes just due to bad writing!

Even in games where the characters have definite personality of their own (looking at GK1 as an example) you are correct in that most (maybe all?) do not specifically deal with what it's like to be a man/woman, but I think anian is also correct when he says that nobody (or not many people) would want to play a game like that. Could well make interesting short stories but probably not so good in an adventure game.

I would even say that in GK1 the well formed characters are not limited to being just a man or a woman, but are men and women with different (and sometimes changing) personalities that are influenced by the fact that they are a man or a woman (i.e. this is just part of their characters). To me this is much more interesting in terms of a game, the overall character of the people involved rather than any debate on gender (for the purposes of this argument and IMO an isolated feature of personality/character).

[Snarky]

I don't think Andail was suggesting that a game that deals with being a man/woman would have to be some sort of sociological treatise. Because like you say, that doesn't sound like much fun.

But that doesn't mean that it couldn't prominently feature, in an informed and profound way, some of those experiences that ProgZmax talks about. That "My First Time" game concept that The Ivy did for GDC comes to mind. Games like that might allow people to reflect on the experiences of the other sex, could inform debates about gender, and sociology students could write their thesis about them if they wanted.

Similarly, I think it would be interesting to play a game with a black main character, where that was actually a point rather than just a palette variation. Doesn't mean it couldn't still tell an entertaining story. A game like The Shivah was enriched by featuring Jewish themes while still being a cool noir mystery, for example. But there really aren't a whole lot of adventure games like that. In the vast majority of cases, the main character comes from an almost completely anonymous background. (One of the reasons I was disappointed in Blackwell Unbound was that although it featured a female main character in the early 1970s, it more or less completely glossed over what that experience was like, and the cultural differences between then and now. I'm not saying the game should have turned into Mad Men, but by pretending that it was a non-issue both the world and the character came to seem less real.)

[Intense Degree]

I don't think Andail was suggesting that a game that deals with being a man/woman would have to be some sort of sociological treatise. Because like you say, that doesn't sound like much fun.

Apologies to Andail if I misunderstood here.

But that doesn't mean that it couldn't prominently feature, in an informed and profound way, some of those experiences that ProgZmax talks about. That "My First Time" game concept that The Ivy did for GDC comes to mind. Games like that might allow people to reflect on the experiences of the other sex, could inform debates about gender, and sociology students could write their thesis about them if they wanted.

Firstly, with the greatest respect to The Ivy, whose games I love and are roughly 7 million times better than anything I could do, this is fine for a short game but I wonder whether it would work consistently for a longer (i.e. full length) game?

Similarly, I think it would be interesting to play a game with a black main character, where that was actually a point rather than just a palette variation. Doesn't mean it couldn't still tell an entertaining story. A game like The Shivah was enriched by featuring Jewish themes while still being a cool noir mystery, for example. But there really aren't a whole lot of adventure games like that. In the vast majority of cases, the main character comes from an almost completely anonymous background. (One of the reasons I was disappointed in Blackwell Unbound was that although it featured a female main character in the early 1970s, it more or less completely glossed over what that experience was like, and the cultural differences between then and now. I'm not saying the game should have turned into Mad Men, but by pretending that it was a non-issue both the world and the character came to seem less real.)

I think we're now agreeing, as having a black/Jewish protagonist, with the "black" or "Jewish" part as one facet of his character (rather than a game focused (sp?) particularly on that aspect), ties in with what I said (or at least what I meant ) regarding GK above.