intfiction.org

Yeah, me too. And after that I didn't draw women because I was an awkward teenager and I was nervous about drawing women who were recognisably women but not creepily sexualised or, y'know, had a million erase-and-redraw lines around the breasts. Then I went through a phase of mostly drawing women in elaborate, complex-patterned clothes that obfuscated everything below the neck.

Yeah, in my opinion and only my opinion, I don't want to hector any individual creator if their muse tells them only to create male characters. I'm not sure that the collected stories of J.G. Ballard have a single female viewpoint character,* and though his treatment of women is certainly a limitation, I like his work. But I think it's a good idea to try to find out whether you really are that limited.

...and if you can't write women characters or people who aren't white, don't go around pretending that you've written The Novel That Explains America, OK, Mr. Franzen?

*Well, there's a paragraph in Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer, and some of the fragments in The Beach Murders.

Well, for me, this topic was more about, how do you create a character? Or how do you create something that will be not-predicted?

Obviously I don't need a permission slip, but I don't want to be totally clueless about things. And to me, woman vs man is the most obvious and evident change to make to try something new. Having something like an Orc as a character isn't really a meaningful try to me, because orcs have their own stereotypes/conventions and almost functional specifications, and if you mess that up, people can laugh a bit. Nationalities and sexes don't have that.

I suppose it's not just about making the choice and having a reason to but also having people to bounce it off so the ridiculous bits get plowed over. I mean, it probably seems duh-obvious to say this, but I'd like to see people take risks and position themselves to and it's interesting to see why/how some people did this.

I remember some creative writing exercises where the class was asked to do this sort of thing and I felt I couldn't do so on demand & it felt pretty hampering. So I was thinking back to some of that while reading this topic, and it's good to see ways around it or different ways to think of it rather than "I'd better stick to X, because it was no fun to try anything different."

Also, my character is no longer referred to as 'son' in my latest revision.

My game "Don't Pee Yourself!" features a strong female protagonist.

I had fun with the common assumption that a protagonist must be male in that game.

I've written a couple other games with female protagonists, but only because they were birthday games for female friends. I think they worked pretty well, though!

For the most part, I try to make most of my games gender neutral if it's not important to the story or design. Otherwise I think it would be jarring for the player.

Haha! That was a great game.

If I remember correctly, I think I tried sitting down first, then went back to see if standing was possible.

It's odd. I've written some static fiction from a female perspective, and nearly all my RPG characters (Pen & Paper and on the PC) are female , yet so far only two of IF games (and both in german) feature (explicitly) female protagonists.

Thanks! Yeah, women can often play the game without realising they're a female character because they don't try standing up! One exception was a friend who was disappointed because she was hoping to realise her fantasy of peeing while standing.

It's probably my best game which... I'm not sure how I feel about. I was originally going save it for IFCOMP because I thought it would be hilarious, but my friend Anna Anthropy convinced me to release it earlier because she wanted to tell others about it.