Is this behaviour much harder to defend than seeing a face in the aforementioned circle?

It should be incredibly harder to defend, because it's part of the system by which cultural biases are propagated and marginalization occurs.

It's a tendency that may never be completely defeated, but we shouldn't hesitate to poke it with a stick every once in a while, question it in ourselves and others, and definitely not defend.

Male default (along with white default and other defaults in the dominant cultural paradigm) are part of what makes it hard to get representation for people outside the default in "mainstream" entertainment media.

For instance: a movie or comic with predominantly or exclusively white cast is "for everyone"; there's no special point seen in its casting, but something with a minority cast is seen as "special interest" with a narrow appeal. It's a self-fulfilling prophesy because as long as the people producing and distributing the media position things according to the default, the audience becomes more accustomed to seeing things that way.

See also: A Batman/Superman comic arc called (and about) "Supergirl" was retitled as "Apocalypse" when animated, because a movie called "Supergirl" would have been "for girls." Disney's adaptation of Rapunzel was retitled "Tangled" so that boys wouldn't see it as a "princess" (girl's) movie.

Content producers operating inside of reality must bow to this paradigm to some degree, but that doesn't mean anyone should be defending it... and ideally, every once in a while, a content producer will do something to challenge it or make people think about it.

This stuff matters! This stuff is the reason that DC Comics feels comfortable saying that 25% of its editorial staff being women is a lot, or why some people think that 3 out of 9 supreme court justices being women represents some alarming trend of women taking over. Nobody blinked when man after man was appointed, but two women in a row is seen as an agenda... men are natural happenstance; woman are a special case.

Related reading:

http://perilousadventures.net/0809/nonexistence.html

http://booklifenow.com/2010/03/ nisi-shawl-and-cynthia-ward-on-roaars-and-the-unmarked-state/

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/11/21/ gendered-toy-advertising/

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/06/11/ a-cop-car-for-you-little-police-boy/

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/01/09/ socialization-and-gendered-job-segregation/

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/08/02/ kids-luggage-normalizes-gendered-occupations/

(That last one is especially egregious: boy's version of carryon luggage is blue and marketed as being for little "pilots" while girl's is positioned as being for "pilot assistants", which isn't even a real thing... the co-pilot is also in fact a pilot. Somebody realized that calling the girl's version for being "flight attendants" was "not politically correct" but it never occurred to them to just have them both be pilots? Or to sell one kind of luggage? Or market the colors independently of gender/perceived appropriate future careers?)

@SuperAntx:

No misunderstanding on my part.


I'm telling you: the icon has no neck. If you want to say that makes it look like a person wearing a helmet, I'll be inclined to agree. But you and Toadfish are apparently comfortable saying that when you see an icon with no neck, there must be a neck and that neck must say something about the gender of the icon.

Your edit shows a 50% difference in the width of the "neck". With that level of difference, you really think that one explicitly shows "a guy with a beefy neck" and the other shows a person with a non-descript neck?

Aside from editing the neck, your edits also unnecessarily put the arms in more passive positions. Leaving aside what that says about one's perception of gender, that doesn't begin to work for this project. The fact that the icon is made to hold (and, in a rather primitive fashion, use) weapons is a key factor in the pose I chose.

AlexandraErin wrote:

I'm telling you: the icon has no neck. If you want to say that makes it look like a person wearing a helmet, I'll be inclined to agree. But you and Toadfish are apparently comfortable saying that when you see an icon with no neck, there must be a neck and that neck must say something about the gender of the icon.

If your icon is a human, then it must have a neck. Humans have necks, your icon has a neck. The fact that your character's neck is the same width as the rest of the head means the neck is really thick and meaty, meaning that neck belongs to a fairly burly man.

If you were playing a game with physics-based ballistics and you shot an arrow, you would expect that arrow to travel in an arc, right? It's not supposed to travel up, or in circles, or flip around in mid-air and change direction. It's supposed to obey the laws of gravity.

Your icon would be better as a square, if you aim is for the player to not interpret a specific gender. I (and most people) tend not to associate gender on a square.

Hence why I never stopped to consider the gender of the snake in old Nokia phone's Snake game. Because you know, it's a snake, and that's really all that mattered for the game. There was no expectation of gender. Gender plays no significant role in my understanding of what the snake is, it's properties etc.

On people, many people expect gender. Some do not, most do. What gender we expect of course really depends on the person.

Hence that interesting revelation people sometimes had when as a kid finding out that Metroid's main character was a woman, even though the old NES/SNES sprite-work didn't really convey any obvious gender.

If you as an artist intend no gender, that's a whole other matter to what people interpret.

@Stephen001:

Right, but that's a square *snake*. Snakes have sex, but unless they're being presented as a human-like character or their sex is important to the story, we don't really "gender" reptiles in our heads the way we would people, or mammals with more obvious-to-us sexual dimorphism (buck vs. doe, for instance.)

If you were told that the square were a pilot or a police officer or a barbarian warrior or an intergalactic bounty hunter (and you didn't have Samus Aran as a go-to example for that), would you so easily see the character represented by the square as genderless?

I know people will take the icon however they choose to take it. The point is to get people to think about it. The vast majority of the people who can't shake the default will probably be using the icon as a male figure if they're playing at all, and since no one's going to be running around in the undifferentiated default icon very much there will be other gender markers available to people who want their character to make a more explicit statement one way or the other.

@Stephen001:

If you're in the habit of only ever thinking one thing about something, then you're probably not the target audience of that particular wrinkle of the game.

The main point of this game is actually "Hey, I personally have fond memories of playing the Ultima Trilogy." The "gender neutral" aspect is not the entirety of the game. It's really quite incidental. I'm not making a dungeon crawling tile based RPG called "RetroQuest" with the sole aim of breaking down norms in this area.

I imagine that most people who play probably won't even give it a second thought... if they're playing a female character, they'll gravitate towards accessories/customizations that they feel represent that.

But even that (most people not thinking about it) is part of the point, because if at a later point they notice it or see somebody pointing out "Hey, isn't it funny how we're all using the same base icon..." or whatever, they'll already be immersed in the game and used to thinking of Green Blob #3 as a base person rather than a man.

And if they never ever do think about it?

Mission accomplished.

AlexandraErin wrote:
"(That last one is especially egregious: boy's version of carryon luggage is blue and marketed as being for little 'pilots' while girl's is positioned as being for 'pilot assistants'...)"

If you had read the thread underneath and not the just the ranting woman, you would have read that "ASST" stood for "assorted."

@Stephen001:

...and now we come to the point where I'm starting to wonder if you're a troll uninterested in an actual dialogue or conversation. Everybody else, no matter how mired they are in the default view, I'm willing to assume is arguing in good faith. You? You seem to be more interested in scoring points, no matter how you have to twist words to do so.

The ultimate goal (not one I'm going to personally achieve, obviously) is a world where people just accept a sexless gingerbread "man"-like figure as a person without any implicit or explicit gender. So if a given person plays the game and never think twice about the same Green Blob being used for both male and female characters, then there's nothing further that needs to be done on that score.

On the other hand, if someone does notice... well, they're going to think about it. And maybe they'll conclude that I'm lazy. Maybe they'll lament the fact that there's no "female" icon. Or maybe they'll realize how easy it is to take the figure as a woman and come to a realization about their own assumptions. I can't control or predict individual responses... though I can provoke them.

I'm not sure why you keep harping on about the point of this post in relation to that. Do you think for some reason that all new players are going to have their browser routed here? I used a blog space allocated to me to muse about what I'm doing. Is that weird?

I believe that I would peg Gwen Sharp as the ranting woman. While we may have varying definitions of the word rant, I believe that Emily H. qualifies too. She saw something on a website and drew an assumption based on ignorance and wrote a blogger who shared a related ideal, who then, blindly following her assumption, blogged about it. Neither of these women thought to check and see what the abbreviation "asst" stands for. Either they were ranting about it, or they're just uneducated. Unlike they treated Target, I was granting them the benefit of the doubt.

@Hiro: Your definition of a "rant" is not one I'm familiar with. The post was clearly made with incomplete information, but that's not what typifies a rant.

@Forum_account:

The fact that "short" hair and "narrow" hips and a male chest (a male chest is not a blank and flat expanse) are seen as "nothing" to which "something" must be added to signify a woman is exactly the phenomenon under discussion here.