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The broader debate of women in videogames needs no introduction, regardless of one\u2019s stance on the matter. Everyone with an Internet connection and at least some investment in videogame culture has heard stories of the industry\u2019s gender bias (which we\u2019ll go ahead and assert is very readily apparent<\/i>).<\/p>\n
Now, Desktop Dungeons itself isn\u2019t some haven of progressive social ideas and forward thinking. We didn\u2019t start the game with an overarching agenda in that area \u2013 but during the course of development, we were heavily informed by the dialogues, rants and documentaries around the topic of female portrayal and how some games screw that up so badly.<\/p>\n
The time at which we truly started ramping up our in-studio policy of awareness about DD females was at the beginning of the beta build, when we had the opportunity to reset a lot of things (in particular, our art style). But we also had to contend with two major problems: one, our work on visuals was usually tied in with coding priorities, particularly during the early dev cycle. Thinking about stuff was one matter, doing it was another.<\/p>\n
Our second issue was that despite being strongly opinionated on these matters with a firm, feminism-friendly stance, the challenges we encountered in representing our women fairly and respectfully were numerous and rooted in some really deep-seated bias.<\/p>\n
So what we ended up presenting was a product that had a mind to at least not completely<\/em> screw up. In some parts.<\/p>\n Though Desktop Dungeons has always been gender neutral in its story and mechanics, it came out the door with a male-slanted art roster. For the freeware version, the entire character sheet was male, only accommodating women when third parties made custom tilesets available. And when the Beta came around, we only began work on active female representation after we\u2019d already dealt with the male graphics as our norm.<\/p>\n This was an intimidating task. We already had a unique character portrait for every race and class combo in the game (as a rough estimate, that\u2019s about 120 different pics). Adding females to the combinatorial mix instantly doubled<\/i> that number and we were additionally burdened with the requirement of not doing things the simple and \u201cacceptable\u201d way.<\/p>\n Quite frankly, we wanted the women in DD\u2019s universe to be adventurers first and runway models second. This adjustment turned out to be startlingly non-trivial \u2013 you\u2019d think that a bunch of supposedly conscious, mindful individuals would instantly be able to nail a \u201cgood female look\u201d (bonus points for having a woman on our crew, right?), but huge swathes of our artistic language tended to be informed by sexist and one-dimensional portrayals. We regularly surprised ourselves with how much we took for granted.<\/p>\n And it wasn\u2019t good enough for us to simply react with deliberate ugliness or typically masculine factors \u2013 the idea was for Desktop Dungeons to remove the gender binary entirely instead of just making everyone a man. In de-emphasising sex as much as possible, we hoped that players would be able to enjoy a more gender agnostic environment in general. Some of our proudest mechanical tweaks involved removing<\/i> notices and choices in particular areas. Male \/ female adventurer rolls were deliberately made random. Gender-neutral character names were popularised in places. On closer inspection, one may notice the remarkable similarity between the in-dungeon sprites of male and female elves. And we have some quiet thoughts about the fluid nature of our beloved Kingdom Taxidermist.Shorthands for the feminine kept crawling into our work when we weren\u2019t paying attention \u2013 smooth skin, homogenised facial structures, evidence of makeup, you name it. Even characters who we thought would easily sidestep trouble (like the female wizard) simply looked like young, pretty women in grunge costume rather than hardboiled dungeoneers. Portraits for some species went through several drafts just to deprogram our subconscious idea of what felt normal and right.<\/p>\n In some of the more egregious cases, time and pressure still had us throwing up our hands and going with what was easiest for us with slightly disappointing results \u2026 like bringing in an entire cast of female goblins relying on secondary markers like eyelashes and lipstick. We also messed up pretty badly by whitewashing our cast (with the occasional blue-skinned Bloodmage, but that doesn\u2019t really count). And for the most part, enemy rosters and main story characters still reflect a heavy male bias. Our only obviously female vicious-tier boss is identified primarily by her role as a matronly figure. And while DD largely averts the problem of the overall female body getting needless sexualisation, we\u2019ve gotta admit that the Earthmother still looks rather \u201cgenerically hot\u201d.<\/p>\n![\"femalehumansTrio\"](\"http:\/\/www.qcfdesign.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/femalehumansTrio.png\")
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