#failing gracefully

[uxoftravel]

Designing for sabotage: this salt dispenser can easily be unscrewed to make refilling easier. It also results in mischievous customers being able to loosen the lid, resulting in a torrent of salt for the next customer. The bartender says it is common.

[tariqk]

The broader debate of women in videogames needs no introduction, regardless of one’s stance on the matter. Everyone with an Internet connection and at least some investment in videogame culture has heard stories of the industry’s gender bias (which we’ll go ahead and assert is very readily apparent).

Now, Desktop Dungeons itself isn’t some haven of progressive social ideas and forward thinking. We didn’t start the game with an overarching agenda in that area – 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.

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.

A pretty good breakdown on what it took to get proper gender representation in gaming, and, most interestingly, where they failed:

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 … 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’t 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’ve gotta admit that the Earthmother still looks rather “generically hot”.

I mean, yeah. They could have done better. But they tried, and, best of all, they documented the potential challenges and pitfalls that other game developers can follow. Now everyone has to do better.