Gender in FL and Sunless Sea

Fallen London
1

Alexis got interviewed by Autostraddle. It’s interesting, and may or may not contain access codes.

I’m glad the ‘er, sir…’ thing won’t be in Sunless Sea. While no doubt well meant, I’ve always found it a little sad that Fallen Londoners react with that sort of discomfort, and it’s jarring in a game which otherwise suggests that less import is attached to a person’s gender than to their attitude to pastries. Also, it’s lovely to see that FL’s approach to gender has inspired a bunch of people to comment gleefully. (From an earlier post: ‘i live in veilgarden too we should queer the whole block’.) More games should do this.

That said, I do think Alexis is maybe a little cavalier about what you lose by treating gender and orientation as basically irrelevant (historical accuracy, ‘texture’), but maybe that’s just because he’s speaking in the context of the type of writing Failbetter mostly do, which operates at an unusual level of abstraction, somewhere between the level of a traditional RPG or adventure game and the level of a simulation. I don’t think you could invert the genders of the cast of The Walking Dead and get plausible characters, or even the same plot – and Omid and Christa, for example, who gently subvert certain stereotypes, would be far less interesting.

Anyway, it’s a good interview. If anyone’s interested in gender issues in games generally, I recommend Anita Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency.

Also, I wish to confess that for the longest time, I thought Alexis was female.
edited by Flyte on 9/17/2013

2

I enjoyed both articles. There’s vast enthusiasm in the comments.

I also mistook Alexis as a woman at first. I was mildly disappointed to discover he was, in fact, not a tigress lady adorned with a velvet fez hat. It’s uncertain whether I expected too much or too little.

3

[color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]That’s a perniciously out-of-context quote. :-) I don’t think we disagree at all, and I’m sure it’s an accidental misread, but I was making a different point that I feel quite strongly about, and I want to make it clear.[/color]
[color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]
[/color]
[color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]What I said was that making the game largely gender-blind ‘throws away some of the texture of nineteenth-century sea-faring myth and history’. And as I then go on to point out, if this were (for instance) a Sarah Waters novel then gender would absolutely be at the core of the story.[/color]
[color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]
[/color]
[color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]I don’t mean to suggest for a moment that gender is unimportant to every story, or even every videogame story. I do think - and I’d like to thank Dan Houser for demonstrating this point so very effectively, this week - that choosing fidelity to source material over accessibility to all players rarely improves the game.[/color]
[color=#009900]
EDIT: I understand some folk think I’m a girl even after seeing the video. I guess the captions are fairly subtle. :-)[/color][li]
edited by Alexis on 9/17/2013

4

[quote=Alexis Kennedy]
[color=#009900]EDIT: I understand some folk think I’m a girl even after seeing the video. I guess the captions are fairly subtle. :-)[/color][li]
edited by Alexis on 9/17/2013[/quote][/li][li]
[/li][li]You will always be a beautiful girl to me.
[/li]

5

[quote=babelfishwars][quote=Alexis Kennedy]
[color=#009900]EDIT: I understand some folk think I’m a girl even after seeing the video. I guess the captions are fairly subtle. :-)[/color][li]
edited by Alexis on 9/17/2013[/quote][/li][li]
[/li][li]You will always be a beautiful girl to me.
[/li][/quote]

I’m going to have to stick with &quottiger in a fez&quot, myself.

6

A few thoughts!

First: The &quotSir, er, madam&quot routine still gets the odd giggle out of me - I like the idea that the stuffier class of Londoner still has trouble adapting to the realities of the Neath - but I am glad that Sunless Sea won’t filter character portraits by gender. While I appreciate the range of ambiguous, covered-up and non-human portraits we have available, surely the whole point is that we can look like whatever we want to look like and it’s still up to us what that means in terms of gender!

Second, even if we take Alexis’s quote out of context, there’s a difference between a game like The Walking Dead and a game like Sunless Sea. Walking Dead has a set cast of characters, with very complex pre-determined character development based on the narrow range of choices the player can make. It’s a well-balanced machine, and there’s not much we could change about it without upsetting the mechanisms. Sunless Sea is (from what previews we’ve seen) much more open-ended and about choosing our own goals. In such a game, attaching too much baggage to gender would be arbitrarily limiting certain characters’ development, where in Walking Dead it would be enhancing the richness of their story.

Finally, I just want to say that I adored Omid and Christa. Favourite characters in the series after Lee and Clem. Really hope they return for season 2.

7

Just for the record, I always thought of Alexis as male. Don’t know why, but I did.

As for gender neutrality, it’s a blessing to me. The reason? I’m a transwoman myself. Given a choice in games, I always play females and I love it. The option to play someone who is just neutral is wonderful, and it adds a dimension of play to the whole process that’s fantastic.

As for “throwing away a layer”, I don’t see that in any level. I mean, you have animated corpses from the sea, what are effectively squid and octopi walking around and talking to you, tigers on their hind legs and putting humans in cages, and devils. To have a Londoner thing it’s odd to have a genetic male in a beautiful frock with some cosmetics on in the face of THAT… well, it strikes me as the lesser of many MANY evils.

I sometimes do want to be able to create my own and upload my own cameo, but what I have available is good enough.

And the “er, sir” thing… having been on the RL end of this, it’s not so much their discomfort as trying to find some way to address someone who presents as neither male nor female. I mean, you can’t say “So… it, can I have your name please?” in a polite conversation. There aren’t any gender neutral pronouns (unlike now when there is zie and zir and so on) at the time, and since London tends to be courteous no matter how odd, not knowing how to address someone is going to cause trips over the tongue and bobbles. I guess that Alexis may be able to add in gender neutral pronouns and change that bit of code, but I don’t see it happening really.

8

You’ve just reminded me how I got into Fallen London in the first place! It was passed along a grapevine of friends of unconventional genders, precisely because of its inclusiveness, and, naturally, when it reached me, it pushed all of my buttons to the point that I’m still madly into it all these years later.

(The pronouns thing is tricky, isn’t it? There’s the singular ‘they’, which isn’t exactly incorrect, but it usually refers to someone unknown, someone hypothetical - not someone definite and actual who happens to exist in a linguistic gap. Perhaps one of the Neathy authorities - the Illuminated College, or a respected Nocturnal poet, or perhaps even Mr Pages - should pronounce upon the issue. “Thon” is period-appropriate and suitably resonant, for instance!

(Do we know that the tigers walk on two legs? I always assumed that they were padding around on their four massive paws as usual, and just happened to be talking and wearing hats and smoking hashish at the same time.)

9

I’d like to see some better alternative for neutral gender conversation, too. What about keeping this “err… oh yes” thing for low-level actions, but change it to something more formal when you progress up the social ladder. Surely people would know how to adress Person of Some Importance?

10

[quote=Sir Frederick Tanah-Chook](The pronouns thing is tricky, isn’t it? There’s the singular ‘they’, which isn’t exactly incorrect, but it usually refers to someone unknown, someone hypothetical - not someone definite and actual who happens to exist in a linguistic gap. Perhaps one of the Neathy authorities - the Illuminated College, or a respected Nocturnal poet, or perhaps even Mr Pages - should pronounce upon the issue. &quotThon&quot is period-appropriate and suitably resonant, for instance!

(Do we know that the tigers walk on two legs? I always assumed that they were padding around on their four massive paws as usual, and just happened to be talking and wearing hats and smoking hashish at the same time.)[/quote]
&quotThey&quot is correct IF you are talking about someone, not to them. So there’s not a real good system of address to someone of gender neutral gender. You could come up with one, a new language, or just adopt the terms that have been coined and go on from there, but really the easiest thing to do is simply talk to zem with their name. No muss, no fuss.

As for walking tigers, it’s probably something that is easily done. They are partially bipedal like bears. So it would be no stretch to have some stand on their hind legs and walk around. Plus I see the Labyrinth Tigers like the Rakasha of India.

[li]

11

Wait, what? Really?

12

I’m searching the archives, and I can’t find any reference to tigers handling anything with their forepaws. The Tiger Keeper’s (who I am now habitually mentally equating with Alexis, yes) office contains an apparently little-used desk, a chaise, a hookah and several hats - and we see him smoking the hookah and wearing the hats, but it’s never explicit how he’s picking them up. There’s no mention of doors tall enough to admit a bipedal tiger. Whenever a tiger needs something done, they have a human do it for them - be it hauling rostygold or glazing an ungulate. In short, the practicalities of tiger life seem to be unclear!
edited by Sir Frederick Tanah-Chook on 9/18/2013

13

Hmmmm, A MYSTERY!!! Now we must solve it!

14

I always thought the mention of the “apparently little used” desk was in fact a hint to the fact that the Tiger-Keeper himself didn’t use it, but I could be overreading. My bet is on the tigers being phisically absolutely normal tigers, only able to speak and probably intelligent enough to use their paws to operate simple machinery, like a hookah - though probably it has to be prepared by their servants, a tiger’s paw being too large and lacking in opposable thumbs to performs such fine procedures as to stuff tobacco (or else) into the device. But it is all speculation - for examble, cats are able to speak too but behave like normal cats; rats, instead, come into a bipedal variety with perfectly functional arms and hands. Tigers in the Labyrinth could follow one template or the other.

(OK, sorry, I’m completely derailing the thread. I’d place a little question mark on the whole matter, and if further evidence should arise, we can open up a dedicated thread in the Salons ^^)

15

[quote=Alexis Kennedy][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]I understand some folk think I’m a girl even after seeing the video.[/color][/quote]In the face of your colleagues’ beardy signifiers, your bare cheeks are gendered like pink ribbons.

[quote][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]I don’t think we disagree at all[/color][/quote]You may be right. I certainly agree that ‘it’s in the source material’ is rarely a good reason for fictionalised bigotry. I guess I was reacting to this, which struck me as a slightly imperialistic statement about video games:

[quote][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]The story remains largely gender-blind… But one thing we’ve realised in the last four years is: so what? Ultimately, this is not Sarah Waters writing a painstakingly researched exploration of life in the nineteenth century, this is a video game.[/color][/quote]But maybe, as you say, that was a misreading; and anyway, I can get behind what you say in your post.

Frederick, I agree it’s sensible and desirable for Sunless Sea to handle gender differently from a game like The Walking Dead. I tried to say so, in what I now find a rather poorly crafted post. (This was not my fault; I have good reason to believe it was sabotaged by patriarchal gremlins.) I think The Walking Dead is a good example, because it isn’t about gender, and there isn’t much discrimination. But the characters’ genders clearly aren’t optional or cosmetic: I think the game shows that you can’t really get away from gender in any medium if you portray people with enough plausibility and depth.

On modes of address in Fallen London. If this were going to change, I imagine the best way would be to create an ‘Addressed as’ quality, as in Cabinet Noir. But it would be a pain to implement (unleashing a script on existing storylets, adding a must event to assign the quality), and I’m not sure it needs to happen.

On possibly bipedal cats. I read The Moonstone recently, and couldn’t really dig the murderous inscrutable Orientals. But halfway through, I realised they were actually large cats. This helped a lot. Suddenly their inept juggling was interesting (how do they juggle at all? With paws, or teeth?), and I could just about believe in their difficulties with postal addresses, if not the content of their letters:

[quote][color=#777777]In the name of the Regent of the Night… Brothers, turn your faces to the south, and come to me in the street of many noises, which leads down to the muddy river.[/color][/quote]Collins’ research is pretty funny, by the way. He wrote to a colonial official. Can a Brahmin who goes overseas regain his caste? – Yes, if he has a lot of money. – That’s too scrutable, I’m just going to make stuff up. Tell me about their atrocious Hindoo orgies. – They don’t have orgies, or at least, they don’t invite us. – Okay, no orgies, Dickens won’t print that stuff in All the Year Round anyway.
edited by Flyte on 9/18/2013

16

I suppose the big difference is between a character that the developers write and a character that the player writes. In Walking Dead, the developers control all the story variables - we’re not so much shaping Lee’s character as having it revealed to us. We choose whether his kind, paternal side or his angry, resentful side comes to the fore, but they’re both part of his character from the moment we meet him.

When we talk about an RPG like Fallen London or what we’ve seen of the story side of Sunless Sea, though, we’re largely talking about original player characters - and there’s nothing absolutely established about them except that they seem able to pass for human. Failbetter have always let us develop our PCs as we see fit, and there’s no practical way to continue that -and- build 19th century gender roles into the game mechanics.

They can write their own NPCs how they like, of course, and gender issues do pop up - the Barbed Wit and the Itinerant Physician are obvious examples. The general focus does seem to be less individual characters, more vast mysteries and unknowable horrors - while, come to think of it, Walking Dead revealed next to nothing about the causes, mechanics or global implications of the dead rising, focussing almost entirely on the small-scale human aspects.

17

Just my two cents on the issue of gender neutral addresses: a) while I am someone who has been addressed IRL as “sir-ma’am-sir” or other unusual combinations, I found the “sir, er, ma-er, yes” address in Fallen London to be chuckle-worthy; b) I love that Sunless Sea will let you pick your terms of address, and that it will include “Citizen”. If people have felt hurt after being addressed by the current gender netural address, switching to “citizen” wouldn’t bother me.

Also, I would just like to say that FL’s open approach to gender was and is extremely refreshing, and one of the first things to grab me when I was beginning to play.

18

Not that “Citizen” carries any assumptions about class, privilege, or “us vs. them”. Not until it’s time to vote; do Rubbery Men vote? Are they subjects of Her Majesty? What about devils - are they entitled to equal process of law, or are they “resident aliens”? Also, does Parliament in Fallen London still govern the rest of the British Empire?

19

That’s a good point, and thank you for bringing it up. Do you favour the game using one of the gender-neutral pronouns, or something else entirely?

Also, on the issue of citizenship: what about survivors from earlier cities, like the Khanate and certain tomb colonists?

Edited for clarity.
edited by Rook Crofton on 11/15/2013

20

There’s a great deal we don’t know about the remnants of the Parliament and the British political system… but I suspect “Citizen” in this case reflects the honorifics used during the French Revolution. If, as FBG have hinted, there’ll be some sort of branching system of titles, I’d not be surprised if, in addition to “Citizen”, there were titles used by similarly egalitarian movements - “Comrade,” “Friend,” “Brother/Sister,” and so on.