All:
Thanks for the in-line catches! The Old Pinkie double use of “starving” was my fault; I was futzing with the description and forgot I’d already used the word once. And “norte” is an intentional usage. And we did indeed forget an article between “shudder” and “burn.”
I’m continually surprised and interested by reactions along the line of “why am I playing a man, exactly?” I want to C/P an answer I gave earlier about this issue and then add a couple of post-scripts.
[quote=]I’d also like to take @crownoflaurel’s feedback as a chance to address our protagonist. Specifically, @crownoflaurel wrote: "I’d advise giving the option to be a woman too."
The short answer is no – an understanding, I-see-where-you’re-coming-from no.
The long answer has to do with genre expectations and what Iced Oolong is doing.
Fallen London created a genre or a sub-genre all by itself. One of its best features is your ability to play anything – a man, a woman, a something, a golem – and to do anything. In Fallen London, you can do everything! You can be a master thief and a renowned scholar and a scrappy brawler and a Pawn in a Certain Game and probably a beekeeper and… and… the list goes on seemingly forever. With few exceptions, characters in Fallen London can have it all. Fallen London is a sandbox, and the fun of sandboxes is that you can build anything your heart desires.
Iced Oolong is a different kind of game. You can’t play anyone. Your character is the Protagonist. He comes complete with a past (which he can’t remember) and a name (ditto) and a sex and a gender and a strange intense interest in gunpowder-stained fingertips. You can’t play a woman in Iced Oolong for the same reason you can’t play a Martian astronaut in Fallen London: even sandboxes have rules. Those rules enable the game. In a real sandbox, the rule is that you get a box and a lot of sand and some water and maybe a pail and scoop and have at. You probably don’t get architectural drawings and you certainly don’t get self-replicating self-building super-sand. In Fallen London, the rule is that you can be anyone you want – as long as that person exists in the Fallen London universe and not a Heinlein novel. In Iced Oolong, the rule is that you get to play the Protagonist from the moment the game starts until it ends, and nobody else*.
That’s what I mean about genre expectations: you probably came into Iced Oolong expecting a sandbox, because that’s the genre so far – but what you got was closer to a traditional RPG or a novel.
Iced Oolong is all about choices. And choices need to have structure and consequences. We think the best way to make consequences have meaning is to clearly define their scope. One way we’re defining the scope is by limiting the player to the Protagonist. Think about it like this: is the decision to buy a $1000 cheeseburger more meaningful to you or to Mitt Romney? The odds are really, really good that it’s more meaningful to you, because Mitt Romney can afford a $1000 cheeseburger and you probably can’t. Or shouldn’t. (Although if you can, good on you!)
I hope that helps answer your question. We aren’t restricting your character options because we don’t want to write extra material or because we don’t want to write about women. We’re doing it because we think it will make a much better, more meaningful game.
- Exception: we have a number of side-stories planned that you can unlock with Nex. All of these stories are nonessential; hopefully they’ll also be fun to play and stimulating to read. Many of these side-stories will allow you to play as other characters and experience the events of the main story from other perspectives. Some of those other characters will be women. (If they weren’t, I’m positive the female contingent of our writing staff would thump me, and thump me, and never stop thumping.) [/quote]
Again, my take is that most of the frustration (“why can’t I play as X?”) comes down to genre expectations. FBG and Bioware – our undisputed narrative overlords – have done a great job enabling us to play whatever sex and gender configurations we’d like. And I love FBG and Bioware games! I love the sandbox-style gameplay, the ability to do anything and everything. But that’s not what we’re doing here, for several reasons:
- We think meaningful choices come from restrictions. The gender restriction is an obvious one, given that…
- Everyone is playing the same Protagonist – in very different ways, but with the same background, during which…
- A few key events would become colored very differently if the Protagonist weren’t a man, and while everyone on the Iced Oolong team strongly supports your right to self-identify as whatever gender (and sex, and sexual orientation, and ethnicity, and religion…) you choose, we’re mostly not telling a story about gender.
If you’re curious: we are mostly telling a story about 1.) choice, 2.) freedom-versus-protection, and 3.) violence, in that order. More broadly, we’re telling a story about Westerns, and how Westerns succeed (mostly at being cool whizz-bang Stories For Young Boys, which was my own context for e.g. Louis L’Amour) and how they fail (at emotional depth, at realistic consequences for choices, at any human resonance at all for violence).
Well, they are the size of Volkswagens. ; )