The Gears of War games are the only console shooter series that I really enjoy, for a number of reasons. First, and most importantly – split-screen co-op. I love the instant collaboration and the sense of working towards a common goal but I’m sure as hell not going to put a second set-up in the study to play a game with my boyfriend.

Secondly – the characterisations. There’s plenty of narrative that helps motivate you beyond “shoot-everything-that-moves”. I loved Dom’s character development in Gears 2 and the relationships between Baird, Marcus, Dom and (of course) the Cole Train are always good for a laugh.

Thirdly, CHEEVOS. Gears of War was the first game to properly incorporate achievements for co-op players, for which I am very grateful. Finally – grenades and the chainsaw bayonet. My analogue stick aiming skills are woefully inadequate for most shooters and the power of that chainsaw and the grenades gives no-hopers like me a fighting chance.

Rod "@GearsViking" Fergusson - Executive Producer of for Gears of War

One of the things that I’m very happy about is that Anya’s on the box now. She’s not just sitting in her pencil skirt doing nothing and talking in your ear. Can you tell me more about the decision behind that?

Rod Fergusson: Yeah, it really comes out of two places – one is that we wanted it for the gamers. When you go to a poster signing and you go to like, a comic-con or something where you get a chance to meet fans face-to-face, you’re surprised at how many female gamers actually play Gears of War. It’s got a reputation of being this thick-necked testosterone, male-oriented game and so to find all these female players was kind of surprising. Part of the decision of having female characters is to allow for female gamers to actually have that reflection of themselves in the game. Like you’ve seen downstairs even.[referring to the twenty games journalists below us in the hands-on multiplayer preview] I think probably yourself and others…

Yeah, there’s like three of us [female games writers] downstairs.

RF: Lauren [Wainwright] downstairs; she picked Anya – she wanted to be the woman in the game, right? So from that perspective it was like, okay how do we help our fans have what they want to have? See them personalise their experience in the game.

"You see Anya with a bayonet"

Do you have women running around the world? ‘Cause I know there weren’t before. I’m wandering around going “Why is everybody fighting to keep humans alive? You have no women. You’re all gonna die out.”

RF: [laughs] There is that. If you read the comic books, there’s a story called the Barren series and it was really they kind of tried get a little bit into that. Part of the fiction we had was the notion that any women that were fertile were actually shuffled off to try to reproduce and regrow the civilisation, whereas those that were infertile or barren were the ones that became the soldiers. So that was sort of the separation of society. The comic kind of gets into the dark underbelly of that. I mean, it’s already dark but the even darker side of it.

That was kind of where we went with that. We’re sort of like, okay there’s a place – I think their term was “birthing farms”. There’s a place that people go to try to rebuild the human population. Depending on how much you want to dig into that particular thing, it can get pretty interesting.

That’s what I love about working with Karen Traviss on the books is that she’s able to take a lot of stuff that we hint or allude to and go really really deep into it in the novels or Josh Ortega took really deep in the comic books. It’s been fun to explore the other aspects of the franchise beyond just what we’ve shown in the game. Coz some things in the game, it would hurt pace to slow it down and try to explain every single thing. Some things you kind of just have to blow past and hope people can keep up and know there’s another place they can go find it.

I interviewed Mike Laidlaw about gender as well, a while ago. A few people seem to think that maybe it would be easier to attract women because they need “different kinds of play” What do you think of that?

RF: It’s probably true but that’s not something we’re going after for Gears of War. We didn’t change Gears of War to try to lure more female gamers. Part of the what we found was that with even without female characters we had a lot of female gamers. There’s a lot of gamers – female players – who want the experience that is Gears of War – not “Okay, how do we make it more social for the female gamer?” It feels a little pandering to me.

Anya's ready for revenge

From my experience it seems like you’re doing it right anyway, in that we – I’m crap at shooting – and we now have 2 different types of bayonet and a whole lot of grenades, so I’m good. I’m catered for.

RF: Well there you go. The sawed-off shotgun is your friend; all you gotta do is get close and you don’t even need to aim. You just have to get close and you can take somebody out. You’re not good at shooting? Then the sawed off is a good way to go.

My thanks go to Fergusson for the interview. Gears of War 3 is scheduled for release on 20th September 2011. If you pre-order from GAME or Gamestation, you get to access the multiplayer beta in April. Go read my Gears of War 3 multiplayer preview coverage for more details.

Among other things, we talked about the challenge involved in making a protagonist with whom all fans can identify. As a leading RPG development house, BioWare has supported female avatars all the way back to the original 1998 PC version of Baldur’s Gate and is known for integrating gender and sexuality into their worlds (albeit with varying levels of success).

Debbie Timmins: [When it comes to female and homosexual characters] How do you find that affects the whole design?

Mike Laidlaw: I don’t think it does actually. I think… an awareness of it, and just understanding that it’s something you want to incorporate… if you do it right and you build for it from the ground up, and you have a writing team that’s good at that kind of stuff; it doesn’t add a particularly heavy load on top of it.

Sorceress Hawke sets the world on fire

Having a character notice that you’re playing a female is not a huge amount of effort once you figure out how to do it once. It’s like “Oh yeah, we’ll just do this check” and then away we go. We can write some alternate lines. Not to trivialise the effort that’s involved but it is something that, when it becomes habitual, is not arduous.

DT: Do you think games in general are going more that way [i.e. inclusive], or less?

ML: I don’t know. It’s one of those things where I think as an industry the awareness and comprehension of female gamers, let’s say, is certainly something that everyone is keenly aware of. Whether you’re putting it in the somewhat mercenary context of “untapped market potential”… or you’re looking at it from a standpoint of “are there alternate game type or alternate game needs you could be serving that might actually appeal more to a female audience?” which is clearly out there.

Warrior fem-Hawke kicks villainous butt

DT: Mass Effect. Well, the advertising more than the design

ML: Sure, but I mean there’s also the push of the iconic character, right? Someone that’s recognisable; face of the game kind of thing. Do you muddy the waters if you suddenly have two characters? That’s like, “Wait, do I play two people now?” and that kind of stuff so it’s just a matter of having clarity.

In our case it’s been leading with a male character on the majority of stuff but making sure that there are some events where it’s like “Ok, so while we’re talking about character customisation, let’s take advantage of that and talk about, y’know let’s roll a female character and make sure that she’s taking the lead for this time. It just helps contextualise it.

DT: Does that happen?

ML: Yeah, actually. I did a live chat last week that was like, 20 minutes of me playing the game as female Hawke. So that stuff’s always fun. And it’s good especially when you can deliver it in a way where the medium is the message. “Yes, we have character customisation, speaking of which, check out a customised character, right?” and so on. So you keep it to the feature and the point and people kind of come out of it going “That’s really cool” as opposed to “Wait, confused,” which is always bad.

DT: Does your wife play games?

ML: Yeah, yeah. She’s pretty avid, actually. She’s beat Dragon Age 2 three times now. Origins probably four or five. She digs into a JPRG as well, I think Grandia 3 or something, she just demolished. We have a baby now so things are a little tighter in terms of time but yeah, she still loves it. She’ll sit down with shooters, sit down with just about anything really. Tends to like RPGs, tends to like things that are a little bit less twitchy but can play either.

DT: So she’s definitely not one of the untapped market potential ladies at all.

ML: Nooo, I don’t think so. I mean, she keeps stealing my games. Which is good, which is good. I love it. And then, you know, some casual stuff too. That’s kind of cool, like Echo Bazaar is the one we’ve both been playing through recently that’s been kind of cool – neat text-based kind of stuff.

Male Hawke bloodies the battlefield

The Guardian has posted much more info about Laidlaw, Camarillo and Shift 2′s Andy Tudor from the Gamesblog Live events – definitely worth reading.

Has a character redesign ruined how you feel about a character?

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! I was a big fan of Lara Croft as a teenager. In a world saturated with male action stars, male scientists and, of course, male archaeologists, Lara was a welcome sight. Here was a kick-ass woman who could climb up impossibly high walls, pilot speedboats and take on a pack of tigers while doing backflips. She faced down T-Rexes and supernatural monstrosities of the highest order. And she did it all by herself.

Hollywood gets involved and what do they do? Give her a man. But not just one. Nooo, now Lara needs a whole pack of men to help her out. Men researching what to do, men whispering in her ear to tell her where to go, men telling her how to use her own equipment. In one fell swoop she was reduced from self-sufficient adventuress trailblazer to just another woman who can’t handle things by herself.

Not impressed. Not impressed at all.

This post was part of Gamer Banter, a monthly video game discussion coordinated by Terry at Game Couch. If you’re interested in being part of this, please email him for details.

• Silvercube: Perfect Dark Missing Perfection
• Sniping Mizzy: Man, You Got Reaaaaaal Ugly
• Pioneer Project: A Change in Development
• Oxcgn: New Look Character Redesigns A Good Idea – Or Bad?

Finally… I no longer need to struggle to make my points. Leigh Alexander has teamed up with Daniel Floyd to produce a fantastic 10-minute video that covers everything I’ve been trying to say about women and games for the past two years.

Although I do add the caveat that IMO, Ubisoft’s Imagine series does more harm to equality than good, as the choices offered to girls are Babies, Fluffies (Animal Doctor), Ponies, Fashion and Cooking. Hellooooooo life-limiting sterotypes. I suppose I should just be grateful for Imagine Figure Skating. Daniel did intend the Ubisoft reference to be tongue-in-cheek but it doesn’t come out that way at all.

Her name is Violette Summer and she is supposedly inspired by a Special Operations Executive agent named Violette Szabo. The real Violette fought and died for the liberation of France in 1944. I’m guessing that the game inspiration was so loosely-based that they felt the need to change her name. Head on over to Wikipedia and read about Violette Szabo.

Going by the promo stuff on the official Velvet Assassin website, it looks like you’ll be able to choose how to approach missions, so I’m enamoured already. I know that I blither on about choice in games. I was a huuuge fan of the old Eidos Commandos games where you would kill guards, or hide their bodies or just sneak around them. I loved working out a guard’s vice, throwing cigarette packets or wine bottles to get him and then bopping him over the head and stealing his uniform. Every mission, I left behind a little room with a pile of tied-up guards in their underwear. The thought of doing it all over again in a high-res third-person game is enough to make me go *squeeeee!*

Then again, I could be sorely disappointed. I wait eagerly for more information.

In the meantime, here are some rather brown screenshots and a teaser trailer, just for you.

I see EVA’s boobs are still proudly on display. Go to the Joystiq article if you want more MGS:OP pics.

Okay, maaaaaaybe if she was in the middle of a heated battle and her zipper burst and she had more important things on her mind like surviving to be concerned about, a la Sigourney Weaver in GalaxyQuest, then it makes sense to put her in overalls unzipped to the waist and showing off her bra.

But she’s in a freaking camp. You’d think she’d learn to zip up her damn overalls by now. I’m so bored of female character models designed as wank-fodder.

(Is she meant as satire?)

But in addition to the LucasArtsy goodness there’s an article on female characters in games. No special revelations in it really (few women in games, blah, Lara Croft, blah, publishers like Hawt Secks, etc.) but one thing caught my eye. A quote from Ragnar Tornquist. (Hey, if he can leave out the non-English character online then so can I.)

“Gender should never be simply an aesthetic choice, although for the most part, regrettably, it is,” argues Tornquist. “Men and women are different, and there’s nothing wrong or sexist about making that an integral part of gameplay and the storyline. But most developers are afraid to offend, or maybe some people are too easily offended, and so men and women have become mostly interchangable in games, a consideration like hair or costume. That needs to change.”

First up, which games is he playing that actually allow you to interchangeably pick man or woman without affecting gameplay? Not MMORPGs since they’re avatars, not characters. Everything else is pretty fixed. Perhaps he’s referring to the male and few female FPS non-characters, though I don’t think some reactions in a few cut-scenes really constitute an integral part of gameplay either.

Secondly, what I really meant to ask was this. To those guys out there who actually played Dreamfall (or part thereof): Was there ever a time where you would have done something drastically different to Zoe, if that situation had happened to you?

Seriously, you fall asleep, you wake up in some other world, you wander around and ask questions, right? I don’t see how Zoe is particularly a “woman” rather than a “man” but hey, I’m a “woman” and I spend my life wandering around asking questions, so maybe I’m just blinded to it all.
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*(sweet-talked TheFluffyFist into buying)