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 LordofHats wrote:

 Seaward wrote:
I'm not sure I follow. I don't think of a woman who doesn't shave her legs as being manly, and I own more than my fair share of salmon-colored shirts.

They're just examples. As a group our society at large has an idea of what it means to be male and female. It's not just biology it's sociology and psychology (various other 'ologies' I'm sure as well). While as individuals we might ignore some while using others or arguably be transsex and completely flip them around or fuss them all together or however you want to think about that issue. But as a society we have norms that are common to us. Men are expected to get jobs and protect their families, women are expected to nurture children, boys like to wrestle and girls like to play dress up and have tea parties. These things shift and change over time of course and are often subverted (stay at home dads are getting more common) but these cultural expectations exist.

Are you conflating gender with gender roles?

In what sense is gender not bound up in gender roles? Are you conflating gender with sex?

 Seaward wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:

 Seaward wrote:
I'm not sure I follow. I don't think of a woman who doesn't shave her legs as being manly, and I own more than my fair share of salmon-colored shirts.

They're just examples. As a group our society at large has an idea of what it means to be male and female. It's not just biology it's sociology and psychology (various other 'ologies' I'm sure as well). While as individuals we might ignore some while using others or arguably be transsex and completely flip them around or fuss them all together or however you want to think about that issue. But as a society we have norms that are common to us. Men are expected to get jobs and protect their families, women are expected to nurture children, boys like to wrestle and girls like to play dress up and have tea parties. These things shift and change over time of course and are often subverted (stay at home dads are getting more common) but these cultural expectations exist.

Are you conflating gender with gender roles?

Gender is gener roles. Generally people conflate biological sex with gender. Sex is having an X chromosone or a Y chromosone. Gender is the collection of ideas and expectations associated with sex. I.E. Gender is the cultural value of femininity and masculinity which includes gender roles.

EDIT: Traditionall biological sex is unchangable. You either have two XX's or a X and a Y. Traditional thought on that is of course wanning as the transsex movement picks up steam. Gender however has always been fluid. It changes even from one person to another while collectively we can identify a consensus on gender.

 Seaward wrote:

 Cheesecat wrote:

 Seaward wrote:

 Lynata wrote:
I'd be interested in what exactly you think a "woman" is, though, in terms of preferences and behaviour, and what you think about the individuals who would not conform to these standards you'd hold them to.

Do we define "woman" or "man" based on preferences or behavior, now, rather than the biology?

Well in theory your sex (the biological distinction of male and female) could be male but you do such a convincing job of being the role of a female that your gender is female (the social distinction of male and female).

I'm not entirely sure I buy that theory.

Well if someone looks like a female and identifies themselves as such but is biologically a male how are you going to know any better?

Yeah...

Sexual Identity is complicated.
Gender Identity is complicated.
Biology itself is complicated. EG Klinefelter Syndrome

 Cheesecat wrote:
Well if someone looks like a female and identifies themselves as such but is biologically a male how are you going to know any better?

On the other hand, what does it matter? I mean, there remains a difference in pretending, however convincingly, to be a woman and actually being a woman. I certainly agree that said difference is a complex space, however.

But at that point, we're getting into something that isn't really yet an issue in video games.

Looks like my edit wasn't fast enough.

When "difference" leads to "segregation" (as the industry has since realised itself), this is hardly loaded rhetoric. Actually, this is the very subject we're discussing here, and just because it's an inconvenient realisation it doesn't change the facts.

I further maintain that Alien is a perfect example for why your argument doesn't work out and is, in fact, self-contradictory. I find it fascinating that you do not see the parallels between that movie and Mass Effect in that you could easily say both scripts were "merely written as male being default", and that in ME the option of playing Shepard as a female was for "having a wider audience". Yet interestingly, for you one "default male" is an example for "why gender matters", and the other is a "transvestite".
It also does not matter at all that there never was a "Malerip": We are discussing gender perceptions and stereotypes as propagated by the makers, and in the context of games and movies this means the scripts. The scripts in Alien and Mass Effect do not change based on the gender of the protagonist - one does not have the option in the first place, and the other does not care (aside from a few romance options).

So, thanks, and right back at ya @ "you don't know what you're talking about"

I get the feeling that your real problem is that Shep is acting "too" manly, in that she punches more than Ripley and is generally somewhat more aggressive, which in your opinion is apparently something a woman shouldn't do. Hence my question to elaborate on your reasons for what exactly makes Shep a "transvestite". You've come up with this claim, yet continue to dodge questions to expand on what exactly led you to this sentiment. If this is based on the "default male" in the script, then I suppose both Femshep and Ripley are "transvestites", though I would argue that, perhaps, the "default male" is just not actually as gender-explicit as some people would like to believe when it comes to behavioural patterns and preferences (see LordofHats's post).

 Lynata wrote:
When "difference" leads to "segregation"

You aren't even using the word segregation correctly. The word you're looking for is exclusion.

 Lynata wrote:
you could easily say both scripts were "merely written as male being default"

The ME games and Alien film do not begin and end with scripts. I really wish you would read my posts more carefully because it's awfully tiresome to have to explain again what I've already laid out: the ME games, as in the final products, were made and marketed with a default male character while Alien was made and marketed with an explicitly female character. We know Shepherd is a default male because this is EA's marketing stance. Shepherd is a man who can be played in "transvestite" mode as a "woman" where by "woman" we just mean the default male rendered in a female body with a female voice. Regardless of O'Bannon's original script ideas (which by the way wasn't even the final shooting script), Ripley is a woman. The producers chose to make this film about a woman, not a default male dressed up as a woman.

 Lynata wrote:
I get the feeling that your real problem is that Shep is acting "too" manly, in that she punches more than Ripley and is generally somewhat more aggressive, which in your opinion is apparently something a woman shouldn't do.

More proof that you either will not or cannot understand my posts. Instead you make up fantasy arguments. It's absurd.

Manchu wrote:You aren't even using the word segregation correctly. The word you're looking for is exclusion.

No, thanks, I mean segregation. Female characters, in most cases, do not seem to be excluded from games altogether, they are just treated differently.
That is the very topic of this thread.

Manchu wrote:The ME games and Alien film do not begin and end with scripts. I really wish you would read my posts more carefully because it's awfully tiresome to have to explain again what I've already laid out: the ME games, as in the final products, were made and marketed with a default male character while Alien was made and marketed with an explicitly female character.

Discussions between us are always awfully tiresome - I thought both of us had already gotten used to that?
But if you feel like you need to talk to me as if I was a child, I can return the favour: Again, it does not matter how the products were marketed, we were discussing the characters here, and they are affected only by how they were written. The motifs of the writers simply do not matter.

Manchu wrote:More proof that you either will not or cannot understand my posts. Instead you make up fantasy arguments. It's absurd.

You are dodging the question, sir.

Segregation does not generically mean treating people differently. It means keeping people separate based on some classification. The term is not relevant to this discussion.

It absolutely matters how characters are marketed. For one thing, it is evidence of what EA wants us to think of Shepherd and therefore evidence of how EA (and to some extent, BioWare as their subsidiary) thinks of the character. It's not me who says Shepherd is male first and foremost; that fact has been comprehensively demonstrated by EA (and BioWare) over the years.

How a character is written is only the be-all-end-all of a character that exists only in a formal text. Any other character, like one in a movie or videogame, is defined by other dimensions. Ripley is a woman not only because she was cast as a woman but also because she was played by a woman and because the whole film was shot and marketed assuming her womanhood. Therefore, a plethora of creative choices (e.g., on the part of other actors) were made on the basis of this assumption. By contrast, the ME games were made and marketed assuming a default male character. The closest Shepherd gets is in the creative choices Jennifer Hale made in feminizing the character. That's the heart of the distinction: a character being a woman as opposed to a character being feminized.

And just to be clear, I'm not going to engage any of your fantasy arguments.

The classification is gender, and the people are the characters in the game - or rather, how they are treated by the writers. As such, the term is very relevant to this discussion.

And I still cannot agree with your reasoning. You are simply assuming that the writers at EA hold the same opinion about gender as you (even though you continue to refuse explaining what you actually mean by this, attempting to brush it off as a "fantasy argument"), rather than simply operating (and also marketing) on the same "default male" premises that you believe sets the writing of Alien apart.

Even following your argument about perception for a moment, there is a rather large crowd of fans out there who think "Femshep" is the better version of the character - so if perception is more important than script, I guess there's a glitch in your theory. Or maybe we should simply accept that individual preferences still outweigh any form of marketing rather than brainwashing 100% of the playerbase into playing the default Maleshep.

Ultimately, ME was marketed with the default Maleshep because they needed one face character for the people - that this had any influence on the writing is nothing but a theory of yours, which does not synch very well with the actual product when you consider that various dialogues and of course the romance options are gender-sensitive, rather than the player character just "switching skin" - though even this would be acceptable to me, because I view people as individuals with both different and overlapping characteristics that need not depend on their sex.
Also, let's not pretend as if BioWare would not have marketed FemShep at all (though one may speculate that this was merely a response to fan demand ... again placing more importance on perception over marketing).

Down with the patriarchy etc.

 Lynata wrote:
You are simply assuming that the writers at EA hold the same opinion about gender as you

Not at all, for it's immaterial; at least regarding the particulars. That is to say, it does not matter what exactly employees at EA or BioWare think makes a woman a woman or a man a man. All that we need to know is that they consider Shepherd to a man in the first place, which is to say a man by default. This is not an assumption; rather, it's a conclusion based on the facts of marketing.

 Lynata wrote:
Even following your argument about perception for a moment,

I am not making an argument about perception.

 Lynata wrote:
there is a rather large crowd of fans out there who think "Femshep" is the better version of the character

That may very well be. But even if we knew that X% of players preferred FemShep we do not therefore also know why. Perhaps they think the role is more suitable for a woman, perhaps they do not like the male voice acting, perhaps they are simply tired of playing male characters in games like ME. In any case, even if we also knew why some group of ME players preferred FemShep, it does not alter the fact that EA has chosen to represent the character as male by default. And thus for FemShep to be the male Shepherd "dressed up" like a woman rather than vice versa.

 Lynata wrote:
various dialogues and of course the romance options are gender-sensitive, rather than the player character just "switching skin"

And yet all these minor changes do not amount to more than the same kind of "reskinning" that we have visually and audially.

Manchu wrote:
I don't like the approach of dealing with gender by dismissing it; i.e., the "transvestite approach" one finds in Mass Effect and Dragon Age II.

If the problem is lack of female protagonists, the answer can't be processing gender into something so superficial as to be interchangeable.

I think possibly the idea of video games having gender swaps has grown out of proportion. It isn't a complete solution and all kinds of other issues with gender still exist even if this option were granted. Rather, the idea of giving people the option to play as either gender is suggested just as one small step forward, and also as a way of getting people to actually think about the issue a bit more.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 LordofHats wrote:
Hence why pink is a 'girly color' and men can be hairy which is seen as manly but women shave their legs. .

And in both cases they are relatively recent changes. Plenty of us likely knew people who were alive when the changes happened. And yet here we are and pink as a girl's colour and girls having smooth legs are such essential notions that its hard to really get my head around the idea that it was ever any different.

 sebster wrote:
Rather, the idea of giving people the option to play as either gender is suggested just as one small step forward, and also as a way of getting people to actually think about the issue a bit more.

And yet as we can see it creates its own problems when thinking about gender. Specifically, I am talking about the idea that gender as a thing generally (rather than gender as thing in video games) is interchangeable. In a society that still largely considers male to be default, this has some very problematic implications.

Manchu wrote:
The ME games and Alien film do not begin and end with scripts. I really wish you would read my posts more carefully because it's awfully tiresome to have to explain again what I've already laid out: the ME games, as in the final products, were made and marketed with a default male character while Alien was made and marketed with an explicitly female character. We know Shepherd is a default male because this is EA's marketing stance. Shepherd is a man who can be played in "transvestite" mode as a "woman" where by "woman" we just mean the default male rendered in a female body with a female voice. Regardless of O'Bannon's original script ideas (which by the way wasn't even the final shooting script), Ripley is a woman. The producers chose to make this film about a woman, not a default male dressed up as a woman.

I think the major difference is that Alien is a very good movie. There's a substance and believability to not just Ripley but the whole crew of the Nostromo that makes each of them a real person. It's the combination of script, direction and performance that brings a reality that's outside of the character's summary on the page.

Compare this to say, Salt, where the script had floated around Hollywood for a long time with Salt as a male character, until Jolie attached to the project and everyone started talking about how much more interesting it was now. Except it wasn't, male or female it was still an underwritten character in a tedious movie. You could have made the character a black transvestite and it wouldn't have made anything in the script feel out of place.

The point is that when a computer game establishes characters with the depth of Salt we call it wonderful. That isn't a criticism of computer games, they are as they are because complex characters don't really work. This is because it basically makes no sense at all to write a deep character with all kinds of complex motivations that explain how the character will act, and then give that character over to the player so he can fire rockets at all the walls in case it triggers a secret room. Good computer game writing, such as Half Life, doesn't define the character, because that would only cause frustrating limits on the player (what do you mean my character won't hack apart all of those crates because that's the kind of thing that he finds a brutish waste of time considering his education as an engineer - I'm playing the character and I want to see if there's anything in these crates).


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Manchu wrote:
And yet as we can see it creates its own problems when thinking about gender. Specifically, I am talking about the idea that gender as a thing generally (rather than gender as thing in video games) is interchangeable. In a society that still largely considers male to be default, this has some very problematic implications.

I think it can cause problems, if we think about as simplistically as you say - that we can just flip genders and be done with it. And I agree that kind of thinking does happen, such as those crazy schools that are trying to treat everyone in a gender neutral way.

But the gender swap thing, I think, is talking about the idea that every kid should get to play as an action hero they get to identify with, and most kids will more readily identify with their own gender. It isn't about the idea that in the real world you can just swap gender and nothing else changes, instead it is just recognising that most computer game characters are very simple and you could easily swap their gender without causing a problem.

I generally agree with you regarding shallow characterization in video games. It's related in two ways: First, I think that on balance a gender-swappable character is less likely to be deeply characterized. Second, or perhaps more specifically, there's the distinction between (strong female) characters and strong (female characters).

But I ultimately think it's a separate point. My concern is that the "transvestite" approach actually reinforces the default quality of maleness in video games rather than confronting it because it merely disguises the continued preeminence of maleness as gender neutrality. Instead of using bows, developers and publishers use breasts to signal femaleness. The message is that women are free to live up to being men, which strikes me as similarly disempowering if more insidious.

Hi! I just noticed this thread. The video was pretty good and hopefully made some people aware of the issue.

Coming in at this point, though: wow, female Shepard is a "transvestite"? Egregious example of gender policing right there.

That said, there's merit to what Manchu is touching on. Our culture tends to glorify things it sees as masculine and denigrate things it sees as feminine. Characters like Shepard are acting in a role our society casts as masculine and doing things it says are masculine (fighting people, being in the military, punching reporters, flying space ships, and so on).

Of course, there's nothing that's actually masculine about shooting things, punching reporters or flying space ships - those are just things our culture has arbitrarily decided are masculine, like it's decided the colour pink, knitting and caring for people are feminine. These aren't immutable - they're things that have changed over time (AFAIK, pink used to be considered masculine and blue feminine, as one example).

So to an extent, what characters like Shep are doing is saying, hey, women can do all this cool stuff that society considers valuable, but also masculine. They don't actually challenge the notion that what's valuable is what's masculine.

Now, I disagree that Shep et all "reinforce the default quality of maleness." To an extent, I think they say that these valuable things are actually neutral, not masculine at all, and that's really valuable. But it's true that they don't address the devaluation of the feminine.

 Lynata wrote:

Manchu wrote:You aren't even using the word segregation correctly. The word you're looking for is exclusion.

No, thanks, I mean segregation. Female characters, in most cases, do not seem to be excluded from games altogether, they are just treated differently.
That is the very topic of this thread.

Manchu wrote:The ME games and Alien film do not begin and end with scripts. I really wish you would read my posts more carefully because it's awfully tiresome to have to explain again what I've already laid out: the ME games, as in the final products, were made and marketed with a default male character while Alien was made and marketed with an explicitly female character.

Discussions between us are always awfully tiresome - I thought both of us had already gotten used to that?
But if you feel like you need to talk to me as if I was a child, I can return the favour: Again, it does not matter how the products were marketed, we were discussing the characters here, and they are affected only by how they were written. The motifs of the writers simply do not matter.

Manchu wrote:More proof that you either will not or cannot understand my posts. Instead you make up fantasy arguments. It's absurd.

You are dodging the question, sir.

"Easy you two. Break it up! Break it up!"

*Lynata and Manchu each head to their corners of the boxing ring*

Me (lynata's boxing coach): *hands lynata some water to cool herself down* "Alright aim for his face. It's his weak spot."



Seriously though you guys you're getting rather upset. Calm down.

I'm not fond of the whole men vs women topics. I'm here from time to time to check on some stuff but threads like this tend to go in that direction.

-------------

Anyway I can't say I know as much about this stuff as some may or may pretend to but I think mass effect 3 had plenty of fem-shep advertising. It first one didn't to my knowledge. I understand why people like fem-shep though. I might play as the guy because I am one but she's a pretty character with a good voice actor and seems to be a possible good female role model in a type of entertainment that doesn't have many. Regardless of fem-shep or male-shep I think it is true that women often don't have enough characters and stuff in games. Perhaps adventure games were a bit better with this but perhaps some of it is what people believe their audience wants. I still think it's a bigger deal to make a game good first but to have your secondary objective is to make the women more represented and give them better characters. Perhaps some genres of games are better than others with this. Rpg's and adventure games seem to attract more women.

As far as women playing games goes I would like there to be more female gamers. I don't want it to be an all guys club whether it is or isn't or what perception it has. Female gamers are attractive to me just because it's a similar interest to what I have. I hope that doesn't throw me into a bad group. I just would like there to be more women that like what I like. There's no harm in that. I've had friends that have nothing in common with me. It tends not to last long because we have no idea what to do together even if they're nice and good people. At least with female gamers I'm interested in what they like.

I will agree it sounds more like segregation than exclusion for games with women. You want to know wants funny though. Children are excluded from most games. Look at how many games you play and how few kids are in a lot of em. They exist in the walking dead game but for the most part in most games they are only brought in as some special point of the story. You won't see too many in a lot of games where you see just adults walking around. I suppose in some cases it makes sense as people don't want to see kids possibly die in games or in a military ship to ship battle but sometimes they just aren't there at all almost as if everybody just went sterile at some point. I'm glad some games are fixing this like skyrim had kids but not every game has them.

Anyway a lot of things are excluded from games and most media in general. How much do you see movies or TV with slowed people or people with lots of disorders? It's being alleviated but it's usually a plot point of the show or movie without just adding them in there as a character. Bonus points for south park for even showing these sorts of people and not being the focus of the whole story but having a part in the story from time to time.

Personally I couldn't care how it was advertised but I find open-ended games to be often worse than others think they are. The problem is nobody really shows what happens with any of your choices. I think there was an article on dorkly that summed up how I felt about the beginning of KotOR 2. Basically regardless of going sith or jedi all the big events ended up with the same results somehow. Not only that but some plot points that had a choice about making them fit all the choices rather than the game figuring which route you chose and developing towards it. They basically made all the details vague as if everybody suffered amnesia during all the important bits. It's like the developer puts a gun to your head for wanting to know more about certain events. Anyway I'm sorry to say I don't know enough of most RPG's but open-ended and sandbox games seem a lot less interesting when done than on paper usually. The more sandbox it is the more copy/paste it is and the worse the graphics and story there often tends to be.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
I'm not fond of the whole men vs women topics.

But this isn't "Men vs. Women". Discussing female portrayal and use in video games isn't pitting one sex against the other.

"Trope": A common or overused theme v.s. women
= An overused theme against women

The "discussion" is taking two choices of games developers and slapping labels on each of them. The "vs" also sets the tone for antagonism, is there intent for opposition or hostility? Really?

I think just by the names given, make them offensive, I wonder who came up with the label?

Is their overuse in itself offensive?

Ms Male Character: One script or role was made and the look and sound of the character is configurable. Who is to say that the original character was created as an aggressive gender neutral? Many of these games are action so a "genteel" character is not a good fit.
Changing the packaging for the same game to make it attractive to another target audience with no change to the core game dynamic is offensive no matter if "they put a bow on it' or not.
Summary: To even try to make a distinction of a gender behavior would be a failure from the start.

Smurfette Principle: The one token character. That has been an attempt at being inclusive, not exclusive to gender but to race as well in past media product. By just having one character that stands out from the rest draws attention to the difference. To be "special" for no reason can be wrong when we wonder what the motivations were to put them in the game.
Summary: Two choices here: the character is special because it suits the plot or bury all the characters in huge variation of gender, race and body types.

I think the true issue is not enough variation in programmers to defend the choices made. If Masseffect was made by all female programmers what would be said then?

 HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
wow, female Shepard is a "transvestite"? Egregious example of gender policing right there

 HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
To an extent, I think they say that these valuable things are actually neutral, not masculine at all, and that's really valuable. But it's true that they don't address the devaluation of the feminine.

I'm not assigning gender to Shepherd; I'm reporting on the gender assigned to Shepherd by EA. FemShep, as the name implies, is the female version of a character who is male by default. That is to say, you get FemShep when you dress up the male character as a female, or as the analogy goes, when you create a "transvestite version" of the character. The implication is not that Shepherd's role in the game is gender neutral. Instead, the "transvestite" approach implies that male remains default and core whereas female is a superficial and whimsical layer of customizability.

Manchu wrote:

 HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
wow, female Shepard is a "transvestite"? Egregious example of gender policing right there

 HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
To an extent, I think they say that these valuable things are actually neutral, not masculine at all, and that's really valuable. But it's true that they don't address the devaluation of the feminine.

Spoiler:

I'm not assigning gender to Shepherd; I'm reporting on the gender assigned to Shepherd by EA. FemShep, as the name implies, is the female version of a character who is male by default. That is to say, you get FemShep when you dress up the male character as a female, or as the analogy goes, when you create a "transvestite version" of the character. The implication is not that Shepherd's role in the game is gender neutral. Instead, the "transvestite" approach implies that male remains default and core whereas female is a superficial and whimsical layer of customizability.

Sorry if I missed it but do you have a source? A brief search on the subject suggested the two versions of the character were developed at the same time as equally important and that it was a marketing decision to focus on the male Shepard for the promotional material.

The hypothetical source you are asking for is irrelevant to my argument. Again, I am not making a conclusion about Shepherd's gender from the character's development. Rather, I am reporting that EA considers Shepherd to be a male by default. Put it another way, Shepherd's gender from EA's point of view is not the subject of an argument I am making; it is a self-evident fact based on EA's marketing strategy.

Instead of attacking its premises, how about addressing my actual argument that dressing up the default male in the supposed trappings of femaleness only reinforces the standing gender bias?

A great counterexample of FemShep is Samus. FemShep is created by "wrapping" female signifiers over a male default. With Samus, players intially assume she is male because of her "wrapping" -- both literally in terms of her armor and figuratively in terms of her role as an action protagonist. But underneath the armor, at her "core," Samus turns out to be female -- and this only at the end of the game, by which point her status as protagonist is unquestionable. This was shocking precisely because it directly confronted powerfully entrenched expectations that male is the default.

It seems like your idea that Shepard is a "transvestite character" is based on the promotional materials of the game rather than the actual development of the game.

 HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
It seems like your idea that Shepard is a "transvestite character" is based on the promotional materials of the game rather than the actual development of the game.

Yes, that is exactly what I wrote:

Manchu wrote:
I am not making a conclusion about Shepherd's gender from the character's development. Rather, I am reporting that EA considers Shepherd to be a male by default. Put it another way, Shepherd's gender from EA's point of view is not the subject of an argument I am making; it is a self-evident fact based on EA's marketing strategy.

Just to take the bit a teensy bit, I think it is foolish to believe that games are not developed with marketing in mind. Regardless, marketing is obviously important, and arguably more important than development, when it comes to generating expectations about gender. Generally speaking, gamers refer to male Shepherd as Shepherd and female Shepherd as FemShep. I doubt that would that be the case if Shepherd was overwhelmingly marketed as female.

But, again, aside from needling its premises, there's also the substance of the actual argument ...

 HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
It seems like your idea that Shepard is a "transvestite character" is based on the promotional materials of the game rather than the actual development of the game.

Development of the game; Open game create new file. What is the default sex of Shepard (he's a dude). FemShep for all her popularity, which really was more love for Jennifer Hale's voice acting than anything pretaining to Shepard's actual character, was only acknowledged once in EA's marketing on a special run of the game's box art.

This even carries over into other Biowre products. Though Revan and the Exile are the only MC with canon character outside their games it's often taken for granted that the Warden and Hawke were male in 'pseudo-canon' by fans and by Bioware. The female option is just there and never shot down because bad things happened when Revan was forever declared a dude (Bioware learned fast, declaration from KotOR's writer not withstanding).

Manchu wrote:

 HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
It seems like your idea that Shepard is a "transvestite character" is based on the promotional materials of the game rather than the actual development of the game.

Yes, that is exactly what I wrote:

Manchu wrote:
I am not making a conclusion about Shepherd's gender from the character's development. Rather, I am reporting that EA considers Shepherd to be a male by default. Put it another way, Shepherd's gender from EA's point of view is not the subject of an argument I am making; it is a self-evident fact based on EA's marketing strategy.

I think it is foolish to believe that games are not developed with marketing in mind. Regardless, marketing is obviously important when it comes to generating expectations about gender. Generally speaking, gamers refer to male Shepherd as Shepherd and female Shepherd as FemShep. I doubt that would that be the case if Shepherd was overwhelmingly marketed as female.

I apologise for having a half-reply to your post above; I replied before you edited the last bit in. I thought I had addressed what I took as the meat of your argument in my initial post in the thread, with masculinity v femininity and the default and stuff.

"Transvestite" as a label on these characters is gender policing in that it puts standards on how men and women are allowed to act. That is objectionable for, I hope, obvious reasons.

Shepard was certainly marketed (at least, marketed in the sense of who went in the ads - it was very obvious to people who were interested in looking that you could pick the gender of the main character) as male. Saying that, therefore, Shepard was not developed as both versions in tandem, with neither having precedence, and that the male one is thus the authentic version is a leap, especially given Bioware's previous titles. It's also contrary to what we know of the game's development.

If the story was made with the male character in mind and then the gender was just swapped for the female version with no other changes then that could be privileging a male-centric worldview. That said, I don't think most games explore social issues deeply enough for it to make a difference. The variation in behaviour between individuals is far larger than variation due to gender. Sure, by doing it we'll miss the section where our heroine logs onto a wargaming forum, reads a thread about sexism and ends up feeling on edge, making a few heartfelt posts and leaves feeling drained by the experience, but if that's really important we can add it in anyway - there's nothing saying both genders' stories have to be identical, even if the female one is based on the male original.

I believe the Jedi Exile from Knights of the Old Republic 2 was declared as canon Female.

 HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
"Transvestite" as a label on these characters is gender policing in that it puts standards on how men and women are allowed to act. That is objectionable for, I hope, obvious reasons.

Well thanks for extrapolating but I think you're still missing the point. I am not using the word "transvestite" uncritically but rather metaphorically as a criticism. To wit, I am using the word to show how I think gender-swappable player characters can reinforce "standards on how men and women are allowed to act." More specifically, I am arguing that "dressing up" a default male character as female has problematic implications about what being a valuable female should mean.

 HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
Saying that, therefore, Shepard was not developed as both versions in tandem

First, I don't rely on the point -- I consider it irrelevant to my argument and responded merely because you insist on it. Second, I don't think it's really a leap at all. Publishers are extensively involved with development. It makes very little sense to me that EA would only make a marketing decision about the game after it was completely developed. And even if that could be the case with ME1, it doesn't explain ME2 and ME3.

 HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
It's also contrary to what we know of the game's development.

Or, more accurately, it is contrary to what was publicly stated (just trusting you on this one) by the company in question about a sensitive issue in the context of marketing.

 HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
logs onto a wargaming forum, reads a thread about sexism and ends up feeling on edge, making a few heartfelt posts and leaves feeling drained by the experience

I would agree that this experience is equally available to males and females.