Don’t wanna be a boy
Since posting about Esther MacCallum-Stewart’s article on gender bending in computer games, I’ve been thinking about early examples of female player-characters. Esther mentioned Gauntlet, a 1985 arcade machine (later converted to the C64 and other plartforms) where players could choose from 4 characters, one of whom was female (Thyra the Valkyrie). That was one of the earliest games where male players could choose to swap gender but not the only one. Below are some Commodore 64 games that I remember from the 80s in which boys could be (or in some cases would have to be) girls.
Cauldron (1985): No choice here - the PC was a witch on a mission to destroy an evil anthropomorphic giant pumpkin (no, really). Obviously an ugly, old witch with green skin and a broomstick is one of the most negative female stereotypes you can get (and let’s not forget that many women were killed because of it in the early-modern period) but that doesn’t seem to have put male gamers off from playing the game. More likely to put people off was the fact that it was so fucking hard. Did anyone ever finish it? In the sequel the witch became the enemy and the player took the role of a male pumpkin who was out to destroy her. If anything this was even harder…
Everyone’s A Wally (1985): An aadvark (that’s “arcade adventure” for anyone who’s too old. Or too young…) featuring 5 player characters: the eponymous Wally, his wife Wilma, and the imaginatively named Tom, Dick and Harry. 20% female and 80% male isn’t exactly gender balanced, and the roles of the characters are quite stereotypical (the men are builders, plumbers, electricians etc) but changing characters in the game was an interesting twist. This wasn’t just an option: if you wanted to finish the game you had to play every character, because they each had special abilities which were necessary to complete all the tasks.
Mama Llama (1985): Not a woman but a non-human female. The player controlled the eponymous llama who was accompanied by her offspring and a flying robot - anything can happen in the crazy world of Jeff Minter.
Leather Goddesses of Phobos (1986): A text adventure where the player chooses at the start whether to play as a man or a woman. Unlike Everyone’s A Wally, once the character is chosen you stay in it for the rest of the game, and the characters don’t have different abilities. As it’s a text adventure, you can’t see yourself, but you could get a description by typing “exam self”. The gender you choose doesn’t really affect the gameplay - it’s the same for both sexes, but that effectively means that it treats men and women as equal.
Barbarian II - The Dungeon of Drax (1988): In the original Barbarian, Princess Mariana was a stereotypical passive victim who had to be rescued from an evil wizard by the equally stereotypical barbarian warrior. By the time of the sequel she had turned into a proto-Lara Croft butt-kicking heroine in combat lingerie. Maybe not much of an advance, especially considering that in publicity material she was played by Page 3 girl Maria Whittaker, but not much is still some. Like Leather Goddesses, the player could choose at the start of the game whether to play Mariana or the male barbarian, and the gameplay wasn’t much different for either of them.
These are only what I can remember off the top of my head. There might be more among the 15,800 C64 games in the Gamebase64 database but probably nowhere near 50%. Even though there’s nothing like gender equality here, there are plenty of examples to support Esther’s point that gender swapping in computer games isn’t very new or strange. The fact that female players pretty much had to swap gender most of the time makes it even less unusual.
Comment by Brett — 12:54 am, 19 March 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
Valkyrie needs food … badly! That game sucked up my twenty-cent pieces like no other.
I can’t think of many games where you could play a female character, which probably says more about my predilection back then for shoot ‘em ups and wargames than anything else! But it seems to me that a more relevant precursor to MMORPGs, which Esther doesn’t seem to mention (based on: hasty inspection) is simply the good old tabletop RPG. (It’s role-playing, for one thing, so there’s the imagination aspect that you might not get while manipulating 16×16 sprites on a CRT; more importantly, a character’s gender was a matter of choice.) I’d often play female characters (though I’m not sure if they predominated), and thinking back, I think it was teenaged hormones … ie, if I was going to be spending a fair bit of time visualising another person in my head, why not make it an attractive female? For that matter, I often still do this when playing CRPGs. Which would all to seem to fit in with Esther’s findings.
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 10:12 am, 19 March 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
That’s a really good point that I hadn’t thought of. I spent loads of time playing tabletop RPGs as a teenager and although I don’t think I ever played a female character, some of my male friends did, and I don’t remember thinking it was strange. This does link to what Esther was saying about online RPGs: gender is just one of several choices you can make about your character, along with race and class. In tabletop there’s also alignment, which is likely to have a bigger effect on how you play the character than gender.
With RPGs there tends to be more identification between player and character. The boundary between player and avatar is maybe not so fuzzy in 2D 3rd person computer games. Did players generally think of the witch in Cauldron as themselves, or just a thing on the screen?
Comment by Esther — 4:42 pm, 8 April 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
Hehe, caught by my own cutting room floor! I did have a section on this, but although there are modules where you do need certain characters to be adopted, it was too difficult for me to prove/explain, whereas the game example were all concrete examples. In tabletop, characters are usually generated in a more freeform manner; simply because you can be a 7ft wolf person and get away with it! Of course the game master also assumes multiple identities of all sorts of different people throughout the game. From personal experience, I played a very long tabletop campaign for several years where two of the men were female characters, and a separate one where I was male. Similarly, I can also remember people playing asexual and gay characters. Sadly in the end however, there just wasn’t enough room for this, which usually needs a whole raft of further explaination added to it…
E x
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 8:14 pm, 8 April 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
All I can say is the floor of your cutting room must be a really interesting place. :)