It's a Man's Enigma Sector (May 21, 2011)

[Bandit LOAF]

Alexander Bevier, a journalist covering the LOGIN 2011 conference live-tweeted a seminar on the portrayal of women in games... and in the process provided a fascinating anecdote from Crusade, Wing Commander II and Freedom Flight writer Ellen Beeman (then Ellen Guon):

Beeman talks about working on Wing Commander back in the day. She claims that she could reskin the character to female in 30 minutes.
8:22 PM May 17th via web

...She could also test to see if women could buy it that way, and she was dismissed. "it's not worth you time"
8:22 PM May 17th via web

It would be a hard sell for women to take interest in a flight sim, but today, she believes that there's a good niche for women playing.
8:23 PM May 17th via web

Very interesting! It really wouldn't be difficult to swap the Blair and Angel talking heads in Wing Commander II--and very little of the dialogue would need to be modified. Would you have played a Wing Commander with a female lead?

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Original update published on May 21, 2011

 

[Dondragmer]

Yes, I definitely would have played a Wing Commander with a female lead. However, I always find it odd when people ask the question. The whole point of most computer games is to be something we're not - whether it's a 27th-century fighter pilot, a spellcasting elf, or an MIT physics PhD with a crowbar and a gravity gun. Yet for some reason gender scares people.

I am not suggesting that women gamers should have been happy to play as Christopher Blair. Given that most media continue to marginalise women in both overt and subtle ways*, the protagonist's gender does matter, and it would have been nice if Wing Commander had bucked the trend. I wonder if anyone remembered this conversation when they made the Starlancer, where the protagonist's gender can be chosen.

The option alone is also insufficient - a frustrating number of games allow it, yet the script clearly assumes that the player (not the character) is always male. Another weird one is the Commander and Conquer series. Several have the conceit that you, the person sitting at your computer at home, are interacting through a videoconferencing system. So why do so many of the women in these games flirt with the 'Commander' for no apparent reason?

* Before you post asserting that modern media do not marginalise women, please read a few articles at The Hathor Legacy.

 

[t.c.cgi]

Yet for some reason gender scares people.

I'm not scared of the gender so much as the hypersexualization of women that happens in order to appeal to hormonal teenage boys. Wing Commander was an interesting place in gaming because that didn't happen in any of its incarnations (even when we had a pornstar for a crew chief).

It is very interesting that the possibility of selecting the gender of the protagonist could have been done as early as WC2. I can't say I would have tried it out, and I can see how it was rejected due to the game's existing/perceived market. Definitely an awesome bit of trivia.

 

[Mace]

First thing that comes to mind is the re-imagened starbuck from BSG, and that was not much of a succes.

 

[Bob McDob]

It seems like it would have overcomplicated things - at the very least, the motion capture sequences with Angel would have had to be shot twice. It might have limited later expansion, too, although I don't think, say, Rebel Assault II tarried very long with the question (YOU ARE NOW AND HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A MAN)

As far as Starlancer goes, being able to choose sex was a nice touch, but I always went with male - not that it even mattered, for all the difference it made. I think maybe the salutes and greetings in the hallway cinematics were different? It comes down to how much time and money you're willing to spend to make your player avatar's chromosomes really matter.

 

[AD]

It seems like it would have overcomplicated things - at the very least, the motion capture sequences with Angel would have had to be shot twice. It might have limited later expansion, too, although I don't think, say, Rebel Assault II tarried very long with the question (YOU ARE NOW AND HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A MAN)

Back with WC1 and 2 I really don't think so. Imagine that if you choose Male, Angel is how we know her to be but if you chose Female, Angel (or another name) now has Bluehair's head and the player has Angel's head. It's still the same people kissing. There's no need to redo a black shilouette of the same to people whose roles are reversed. The art assets are nearly identical though maybe we would need a less frowny Bluehair.

The thing that would have limited this back in 1990 would obviously been the text, where some dialogue would need to be gender specific, and in WC2 you have the problem of recording lines of dialogue for the few audio scenes twice (those fools blame him/her for the Tiger's Claw destruction).

 

[ChrisReid]

If any game could fit this in seamlessly though, it's WC. There's already so much text that's variable based on your character input name and performance during the mission. We have "those fools blame him" because it was written for a male character, but you could just simply rewrite it to be ambiguous if you wanted male/female - rephrase it from him to "them" or just find another way to say it altogether.

 

[Farbourne]

If any game could fit this in seamlessly though, it's WC. There's already so much text that's variable based on your character input name and performance during the mission. We have "those fools blame him" because it was written for a male character, but you could just simply rewrite it to be ambiguous if you wanted male/female - rephrase it from him to "them" or just find another way to say it altogether.

Yes, you could just as easily write the line as "Those fools blame the very pilot that almost save the Tiger's Claw!"

One game series that has always done a pretty nice job with the gender option is the Knights of the Old Republic series. The player can play male or female, and it changes a relative small (i.e. cost effective) number of game aspects, but adds enough diversity that it adds replayability. (Despite occasional dialog errors). It is a little strange, however, that every quest that requires flirting to complete, always takes place in a location where there conveniently always happen to be exactly two lonely souls looking for companionship...one male and one female...and both unaware of the other!

 

[Bandit LOAF]

I guess if I were producing Wing Commander II I would want to know what the overall benefit was. Is there some compelling addition to the game itself to having a female player option beyond an appeal to an audience I don't think exists? Because just swapping Angel and Blair's talking heads and sanding down the dialog a bit so it's gender-neutral all the time is something that's doable but it isn't necessarily something that adds anything really special to the game.

I'd argue that changing the dialogue even that little bit hurts the game a little--you're sort of giving it an expiration date where everyone will transition from thinking it's neat how they worked it out to thinking it's kind of a joke. Look at Valve and the Half Life games--refusing to let Gordon Freeman speak goes from being a clever way to make 'you' the player to being something that's so annoying that they constantly have to hang a lampshade on it to make it tolerable.

And as sorry as I am to say it, I think it probably was a completely realistic view that in 1990-1 there was not a female audience for Wing Commander games. I just can't bring myself to fault Origin for that decision. Now, the removal of the gender (and other customizations) from the Ultima series in the later games is another matter...

(In fact, if you're making this kind of addition to Wing Commander II from a marketing standpoint then it probably would have made a lot more sense to try and add an option for an asian Blair or a black Blair first.)