Heroic Women to Inspire Game Designers Creator Interview .

While wandering through Facebook as I often do when I’m supposed to be working I stumbled upon what is possibly the most important Facebook Community out there for gamers; Heroic Women to Inspire Game Designers. This community has been getting regular doses of heroic women who did awesome thing for nearly a year now. So I was eager to find out more about the group. A quick message to the group turned into an exciting interview opportunity in which I got to ask the man behind it all, Ernest Adams a little bit about himself and his views on the gaming community.

 

I’d like to start off with an introduction. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Sure. I’m a game design consultant and part-time professor at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. I’ve been in the game industry since 1989, first as a programmer and then as a game designer, writer, and audio/video producer. I began at a startup, then moved to Electronic Arts for 8 years, mostly on the Madden NFL franchise, before going freelance. I also founded the International Game Developers’ Association in 1994 to help counter the threat of censorship against video games.

 

What inspired you to create the Heroic Women To Inspire Game Designers Facebook community?

I was irritated at hearing game developers claim that the reason there are so few female protagonists in games is that there are no real heroic women to serve as models. That’s obviously false, but I wanted to assemble the proof. I just keep finding more and more all the time.

What do you hope to accomplish with the community?

I’m not really trying to build a community, although I’m always delighted when people submit their own candidate heroic women. I want it to be available to anyone who is looking for inspiration, and to serve as a counter-argument. Now when anyone gets told that there are no heroic women, they can point to this. Ideally I would like both game designers and game development students and teachers to treat it as a resource.

 

How do you select which women to feature on the page and which ones not to?

They need to be women who showed physical or moral courage, persistence, or resourcefulness. Just being the first woman to do something isn’t enough. I’m chiefly (but not exclusively) interested in adventurous women because they’re the ones whose stories are most easily adapted to video games. However, I also include women who worked in a male-dominated field because I know they had to overcome prejudices and obstacles along the way.

I don’t generally include women who were heroic in a bad cause. There must have been any number of brave women on the Axis side in the Second World War (though none of those regimes had much use for women as anything but mothers), but I haven’t included them. For the most part I also don’t include women who were brave but ruthless or cruel along with it. But there are a few exceptions: Artemisia I of Caria was commanding a naval battle and intentionally sank one of her own side’s ships in order to make the enemy think that she was a friend.

 

Do you have any hopes to expand the community beyond Facebook?

I’ve created a Pinterest page which is a mirror of the Facebook page, also called Heroic Women to Inspire Game Designers. Pinterest has the advantage that you can categorize the pins, so I have divided them into military heroines, medical ones, journalists, artists, and so on. I doubt if I will take it beyond that, although I would like for a lot of people to link to it. Unfortunately I don’t have time to build it into a real community or a blog; as I say, it’s just a resource.

 

Why do you think there aren’t more female protagonists in games?

It’s a combination of factors. It’s not just a big misogynist male conspiracy, though there are certainly a few misogynist male game designers around. I think the widespread belief that video games are “boys’ toys” is part of it; and there’s a misconception that games with female protagonists don’t sell well, or that men won’t play as one. (The Tomb Raider and Metroid series are obvious proof that that is false.) But perhaps the biggest reason is that most game designers are male, and not many of them have given much thought to it. They simply don’t know how to make decent female protagonists. Ragnar Tørnquist is our Joss Whedon, the male game designer in the industry who consistently creates good female characters with real depth.

 

Do you think the creators of MMOs do a better job with female characters than those making single player games?

There are so many MMOs around that it’s hard to generalize. Certainly the creators of MMOs are more inclined to expect female players than the creators of, say, Call of Duty. And they build worlds full of people for players to interact with, not just grunts for them to shoot at. So on the whole I think they probably are more likely to think about female characters, yes.

Is there anything that we as gamers can do to encourage developers to create more female protagonists?

Yes – keep asking for them! Contact the game designers and let them know that you want them! Praise the good ones and thank their developers. The more voices the industry hears demanding female protagonists, the more likely they are to make them.

 

What would you say to people who say that the gaming industry is fine as it is and that female representation in games isn’t an issue?

Leaving aside the question of social justice or common decency, which mean nothing to some people, I would say to them that they’re leaving money on the table. I wrote an article called “We Don’t Need the Haters (and I Can Prove It)” that used actual numbers from the MobyGames database to show how skewed it is to have so many female players and so few female protagonists. If we could make games that appealed to more women, we’d make more money; it’s that simple. There is a noisy minority of men who swear blind that they’ll quit gaming if we do that, but frankly, there aren’t enough of those men to bother with – let ‘em go. Besides, they’re almost certainly lying.

 

Are there any female NPCs in MMOs that you feel are more harmful to equal representation of the genders than helpful?

I’m afraid I’m just not that familiar with enough MMOs to name any specific female NPCs who are a problem. Certainly female characters that are nothing but hypersexualized eye-candy, such as those in Scarlet Blade, don’t encourage women to play and don’t encourage appropriate attitudes among male players.

 

If you could talk to all game developers and say just one thing what would it be?

You have the power to change the world. Every game is a ripple in the stream, and it affects its players and its developers and other games. Artists and writers and filmmakers already know this, and we should know it too. Will you change the world for good, or for ill?

 

Your community has already started inspiring people from all across the world, can you tell us one way in which has had an impact?

Yes! Professor Nia Wearn of Staffordshire University in England gave out an assignment to her students to make games based on the Heroic Women list. She ended up with three Grace Darling boat related games, two jungle related Juliane Koepcke survival platformers, one with a burning plane, one Amelia Earhart game you couldn’t win, and a bomber game based on the Russian Night Witches with all the instructions for the plane in Russian. I’m completely delighted. If we can get more students thinking along these lines, we can change the way designers approach the task.

(Since this interview BAFTA Scotland has also hosted a game jam in which all the games feature women from the Heroic Women to Inspire Game Designers page. Check out #YNotJam for more information)

 

A lot of people equate a good female protagonist with being unattractive or not sexy, can a female character be both sexually appealing and a strong female protagonist or are they mutually exclusive?

Of course they’re not mutually exclusive, and our definition of sexy is much too narrow. Characters that look like porn stars are aimed at adolescents or those with adolescent mentalities, but the audience for video games is far larger than that. Competence is sexy. Confidence is sexy. Resourcefulness is sexy. Intelligence is sexy. Grace and courage and compassion are sexy. And, yes, the ability to hold your own in a fight is too.

 

What hopes do you have for the future of gaming?

That’s much too general a question. I hope they’ll be imaginative and diverse and everyone from two-year-olds to the elderly will play and enjoy and learn from them. And I hope that they will come to be appreciated as a vibrant, joyous part of our culture.

 

Finally, I’d like to end by asking you which real life heroic woman inspires you most?

That’s a tough one; there are so many and they’re so different, but Harriet Tubman really stands out. She was born into slavery, escaped, then went back on no less than 19 secret missions to sneak other slaves out of the South along the Underground Railroad, over 300 slaves in all. She would certainly have been hanged or shot if she were caught, and it doesn’t get much braver than that. She was a spy for the Union Army during the Civil War, and after the war became an activist for woman suffrage. Her story would make a brilliant video game if it were sensitively handled, and it’s a travesty that no one has made a movie about her. For a modern instance I would choose Malala Yousafzai. I don’t personally know any individual, male or female, as brave as she is.

 

I would like to once again thank Ernest for taking the time to answer these questions and encourage you all to join the Facebook community. Share this with your favorite game developers. There are already some pretty amazing women highlighted on the group and I cannot wait to see who gets put up next!