This month, I’m staying in the dorms at Abertay University in Dundee, Scotland. Dundee is a beautiful city, and Abertay is an interesting university to me because they have a computer games department that focuses on the development, design, technology, and management of games. Last night, their chapter of the International Game Developers Association hosted a talk with Ed Fries, one of the developers of the Xbox. Fries talked about his early professional years and how he came to be a programmer for Microsoft working on the launch of the Xbox.
The talk was interesting, but also a bit frustrating. He was pretty focused on presenting himself as a programmer, rather than a creative person. And, he talked about how he first learned to program games by creating clones of games such as Frogger. It was his Frogger clone that first gained him the attention of and later his first job at a game company. But, of course, they had to change the game enough so that it wasn’t such a blatant rip off. As such, they decided to make it more of a medieval game where you must save the princess. But, Fries said they didn’t know how to make a female character. It was too hard. I know I should expect this type of comment. It’s not new, and he was talking about the 80’s. But, still, I was sort of blown away by his cavalier dismissal of the female character. It was too hard. So, instead of a female character, they just drew some lips to signify the female character. I think it was around this point that I looked around the room to see the ratio of male to female. And, as expected, there were only a handful of females in attendance. I didn’t stay for the Q&A session at the end, and I regret that on one hand. On the other hand, how would he have answered my question? How can we counter a defense of “we don’t know how” “it’s too hard”?
In some sense, I was thinking of the recent Assassin’s Creed controversy while he was talking about how it was too hard to make a female character. Except this is both not the same and exactly the same. The female character integration in Assassin’s Creed would, I’m sure, be much harder than creating a female character (instead of lips) in a Frogger clone. But, games like the Frogger clone (and others) set the tone back in the 80’s. It’s too hard, so let just draw some lips. Think about that for a second. The truth is, it wasn’t too hard. Creating a female character instead of lips wasn’t too hard. I mean, they had to draw the lips; they already had a male character, why not just modify the male character? Why draw lips? Instead, I think the “too hard” of the 80’s became the “it’s too expensive” arguments of “doubling the work” of developing Assassin’s Creed.
I fundamentally hate the word “lazy,” but I’m going to go ahead and use it here. This was a lazy argument, if not lazy programming. I’m hesitant to call it lazy programming because it seems to me that creating a whole new “lips” character would actually take more work than simply modifying the code for the already existing male character. But, it is a lazy argument. And, Fries delivered it so casually as if, of course, it’s too hard to make female characters; as if, of course, we all agree that this is so. I was pretty stunned and then, I was pretty frustrated with myself for being stunned. Because of course this is nothing new at all.
But, Fries did have other interesting thing to say about the industry and somewhat about the future of the industry. Today, I was focused on the difficulty of creating early female characters, but perhaps next week, I will discuss some of the other themes of his talk. I’ll admit, I did find it somewhat amusing that I came to Scotland and then went to an American talk.
