Character Gender
              in Interactive Fiction, Part II

     by Doug Atkinson (datkinson@lisp.purdy.wayne.edu)

Continued from last issue

First a correction to the first part.

In "Character Gender in Interactive Fiction" we erred in saying
"In Save Princeton, your roommates are male, so you probably are
as well." As the game's prologue states, the game's opening
location is a dorm room you've just wandered into, not your own
room.

As the game's author, Jacob Weinstein, told us, "In fact, in
implementing Save Princeton, I went out of my way to avoid any
mention of the player's gender. If you hang around the jock long
enough, you'll be told:

The jock starts to hit on you, and then realizes that he doesn't
know whether or not you're female.  'Oh, well,' he says
philosophically.

Offhand, I can't remember any other reference to gender in the
game. Trying to kiss various characters usually results something
along the lines of 'But you've only just met!' Trying to kiss the
naked man in front of Tiger Inn results in something a little more
interesting, but still gender-neutral."

--------------------
I. Introduction
--------------------
In part I of this article, I discussed the role of player
character gender in IF. I covered the Infocom spectrum and several
shareware games, the fact that most of them feature non-gendered
characters, and the possible reasons for this.

In this article, I will be covering non-player characters (NPCs).
Many of the reasonings in the first article don't apply to this
one -- a game can have only one player character (usually) but
many NPCs, so the programmer can stock the game with abandon.

As before, the main focus will be on the 33-game Infocom oeuvre.
In this half I won't cover shareware; since each game has only one
main major character, but most have several NPCs, fair treatment
would take too much space (and make this article even later than
it already is!).

-------------------------------------
II. Infidelity: The Single Adventurer
-------------------------------------
I must begin by disposing of games which have no NPCs, no fleshed-
out NPCs, or only androgynous NPCs. The only Infocom game with no
NPCs at all is Infidel, the game where everyone's abandoned you,
saving the implementor the trouble of coding them. Obviously NPC
gender matters not a whit in a game with no NPCs.

A "fleshed-out" NPC is harder to define, because every IF
character is limited by their coding and none can hope to
approximate a real person. However, some NPCs are little more than
scenery, or merely so mechanical a part of a puzzle that they
never approach life.  Compare these two hypothetical game
transcripts, one based on a real game:

There is a dwarf sleeping here in the toll booth. The gate is
closed.
>E
The gate is closed.
>GIVE THE BRASS COIN TO THE DWARF
The dwarf wakes up, bites your coin, and hands it back. "Fake,"
he mutters as he nestles back into sleep.
>GIVE THE GOLD COIN TO THE DWARF
The dwarf wakes up, bites your coin, and tosses it in a basket at
his feet. "Go ahead," she mutters, pulling down the gate-opening
lever and nodding off in one smooth motion.
>E

There is an automated toll gate here; it has a basket at chest
level.
>E
The gate is closed.
>PUT THE BRASS COIN IN THE BASKET
The machine angrily spits the fake coin back at you amidst a
flurry of red flashing lights.
>PUT THE GOLD COIN IN THE BASKET
A green light comes on, and the gate opens with a cheery "ding."
>E

Functionally, the dwarf and the machine have exactly the same
role; they keep the player from passing unless they cough up the
gold coin. The fact that one is alive and one is not is a matter
of window- dressing, and making the dwarf male or female is merely
a cosmetic detail. (This is not to say that window-dressing is not
important; more on this later.)

That said, inanimate puzzles can also take on a life of their own,
even if they aren't intelligent. The Vogon Hold room in
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with its battery of
complications to keep you from the coveted Babel Fish, seems just
as malevolently self-aware as the unicorn in Zork II ("The unicorn
bounds lightly away...The unicorn bounds lightly away..." ad
nauseam).

The line between an NPC and a puzzle element is blurry, then.  My
working definition of an NPC has the following elements:

   A) mobility;
   B) a wide range of interaction with the player; and
   C) a wide range of purpose in the story.

A) and, to a lesser extent, C) can be sacrificed if B) is strong
enough.  Belboz in Spellbreaker and the Bird Lady in Trinity never
move from one place, and their role in the story is mostly to
exposit and give the player something useful, but they (the Bird
Lady especially) make up for it on strength of personality -- they
feel like people, not automata. A well-defined character doesn't
have to move.


This does eliminate characters who exist purely as the solution to
a puzzle, such as the ostrich in Stationfall. Many animals in IF
have this function; those in Enchanter hang on the edge because
you can talk to them with the NITFOL spell.

Characters who exist only as obstacles will only be considered
NPCs for the purpose of this article if they can interact with the
player enough to feel fleshed-out, and hide the mechanics of the
game behind them. Thorbast/Thorbala in Leather Goddesses of Phobos
qualifies, because s/he talks to the player and has enough
personality that his/her role (to keep the player from getting at
the lad/lady in distress) isn't blared out. The bark-skinned
horror in the same scene is only a game mechanic, not a real NPC;
it just gives a time limit to solving the Thorbast/bala puzzle.
(The Monkey Grinder in Beyond Zork has always felt real to me,
even though he has a fairly limited script and doesn't move.)

Only four games (but a wide, wide range of possible NPCs to
consider) are actually eliminated: STARCROSS, where the aliens
(or, indeed the game) never quite overcome the feel of the basic
"do- A- to-achieve-result-B-and-get-20-points" mechanics; Sorcerer
and Hollywood Hijinx, where the major NPCs don't appear until the
endgame and really don't do much; and Nord and Bert, which is
surreal enough that the player barely interacts with the
environment, let alone the other characters.

Finally, a few games have NPCs whose gender is really irrelevant,
whether they have one or not. Floyd the robot in Planetfall and
Stationfall is one of the best NPCs in IF, but he is only male by
name.  His personality is that of a child, but not a specifically
masculine or feminine child, and his role in the story doesn't
suggest a need for a gender. (His companion in the second game,
Plato, is similar, although his absent-minded nerd personality is
one that cliche would assign to a man.)

Under this criterion, Planetfall and Stationfall are eliminated,
as is Suspended, where the robots the player controls are designed
as masculine and feminine but not really male or female.


---------------------------------------
III. The Boy's Club and the Genre Piece
---------------------------------------
There are some Infocom games with a preponderance of male NPCs:
the original Zork trilogy and Zork Zero, The Lurking Horror,
Cutthroats, Border Zone, Sherlock, and Arthur.

The Zork trilogy stands apart from the others, partially because
of its age; except for the thief, the well-developed and active
NPCs (the demon and the Wizard) were added when the original MIT
mainframe game was split apart. At the time it was written, there
was no real theory of IF, and the game grew in chunks rather than
being written as a whole. It's hard to judge the series by modern
standards.

To answer the question at the end of part I of this article, there
is only one female in the original trilogy; the princess you
rescue from the dragon. Since the role of the NPCs is mostly as
puzzles, not fleshed-out characters, this is a place where gender

is only window- dressing. Would it really matter to the game if
the troll were female?  (Again, more on window-dressing later.)

Zork Zero is only included here because there is only one major
NPC, the jester, although he's ubiquitous throughout the game.

It should be noted that the rest of the games listed are genre
pieces, and so something must be said about the genre piece.

A story (or game) qualifies as a genre piece if it is written to
epitomize an entire field of writing, not merely to be set in it.
As a result, a genre piece carries with it a certain awareness of
the conventions of the genre, and they are usually closer to the
front than in other writings.

Example: Starcross and Planetfall are not science fiction genre
pieces, because neither one stands out as representative of a
particular school of SF. At no point is the reader led to think,
for example, "Floyd is here because all SF of this type has a

comic robot sidekick," especially because Planetfall isn't
primarily a comical game.

Leather Goddesses of Phobos is very much a genre piece in the
space opera genre, albeit with a sex farce laid over it. Such
elements as the world-conquering aliens, the kidnapped hero, the
jungles of Venus, and the canals of Mars are very much in the
space opera genre, and there's every sign that Meretzky was aware
of that and added them intentionally.

When writing a genre piece, the writer must know and abide by the
rules of the genre, or break them consciously. Character roles are
an important part of this. In a standard heroic fantasy genre
piece, for example, the male hero rescues the damsel-in-distress,
and to reverse this is a move whose ramifications must be
considered.  (LGOP does reverse it in female mode, with no real
effect on anything, but this is a parameter that can be changed
with relative ease. Also, LGOP is such an odd game that changing
conventions really doesn't have the impact it would in a more
conventional game.)

Changing the rules can change the whole piece, sometimes
complicating it unbearably. (Why is the detective in Witness male?
It's a 1930s Chandleresque hard-boiled detective piece, and all
the heroes of those stories were male. If you made the hero female
you'd also have to explain why there was a high-ranking female in
the L.A.  police force in those times. Since it doesn't really
matter, better to leave it alone.)

A few of the games above, Lurking Horror, Border Zone, and
Cutthroats (to an extent) are set in male-dominated genres. The
best example is Lurking Horror, which was inspired by the works of
H.P.  Lovecraft. Lovecraft's female characters are as rare as
hen's teeth, and to make matters worse, the story's set at a
technical school, a place that tends towards a masculine majority
anyway. It's harder to justify the shortage of women in Border
Zone, since women certainly have a place in espionage (even
considering that BZ is closer to the Le Carre end than to Ian
Fleming). Cutthroats' lack of females is not especially
defensible, since females can treasure-hunt as well as males.

Finally, Sherlock and Arthur are not only genre pieces, but pieces
adapted from literature and set in the past. The only females in
Sherlock are Mrs. Hudson, Queen Victoria, and a certain
guttersnipe, and the only one I can remember in Arthur is the Lady
of the Lake.  Only Mrs. Hudson really interacts with the player
much.

Despite the limitations imposed by the genres and pseudo-
historical periods involved, the authors of these two games
underused women somewhat, though the choice of storyline
constrained them. One avenue for feminine characters in the source
material, that of villainness (e.g. Irene Adler, Morgaine le Fey)
was cut off by the decision to use Moriarty and King Lot as
villains. This leaves the potential roles for women in Arthur
rather thin indeed -- the damsel-in-distress role is rather
cliched, and the inclusion of a romance would have been out of
place given Arthur's age and the author's unwillingness to change
the future of the stories. As for Sherlock, the male NPCs also

tend to be limited, so the omitted females aren't really missing
all that much, I suppose.

---------------
IV. Mixed Games
---------------
WHAT IS TERRY'S PLAN?
G. In fact, Terry never shows up at all.
H. By the way, what gender have you assumed for Terry?
             -- Invisiclues hint booklet, "The Witness" (Stu Galley)

The rest of the Infocom oeuvre contains both males and females, in
varying proportions. The next section contains a count of the
gender ratios of the remaining games, with commentary. (Note: The
NPC gender employs a subjective judgement of which characters are
significant and which aren't. In some games it's easy, in some it
isn't.)

Plundered Hearts: 6 male, 1 female (14% female)

Plundered Hearts is the only Infocom game with a fixed female
character. This, and the fact that it's a romance and a genre
piece, partially accounts for the high percentage of males. (It
would have been rather gutsy for Infocom to release a lesbian
romance, after all, and the 17th century pirate setting is
primarily a masculine one, though there are exceptions.) It's
mildly surprising to find it this low, however.

Spellbreaker: 3 male, 1 female, 1 neuter, 1 questionable (16-33%
female)
The neuter character is the green-eyed stone; the female is the
roc.  This game really has very few NPCs; you only really interact
with Bozbar and the merchant.

The questionable character is the shadow, whose gender is the same
as the main character's, which is not specified in the game.

Enchanter: 3 male, 1 female, 1 neuter (20% female) The Terror is
neuter.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: 6 male, 2 female, 2 neuter
(20% female)
The count of neuter characters is a little arbitrary. Strictly
speaking, Eddie and Marvin are masculine but not male.

Ballyhoo: 8.5 male, 2.5 female (23% female)
Yes, there is one character (Andrew-Jenny) who counts as half male
and half female.

A Mind Forever Voyaging: Outside world: 2 male, no female
Simulation: 1 male, 1 female (25% female)
This was difficult to count. I decided to count only Perelman,
Ryder, and your simulated son and wife as NPCs, though there are
any number of very minor characters.

Suspect: 9 male, 3 female (25% female) Witness: 3 male, 1 female
(25% female)
As with Deadline, I chose not to count Sergeant Duffy.


Leather Goddesses of Phobos: 7 male, 4 female (36% female)
Actually, six of the characters' genders vary depending on the
gender of the player character. There are 4 fixed males, 1 fixed
female, 3 of the same gender as the player character, and 3 of the
opposite gender. The numbers work out to be the same either way.

I had to make more subjective decisions about NPC importance here
than in any other game. I wound up counting the salesman,
scientist, harem guard, and Sultan(ess) as significant, but not
the gorillas or the Venus Flytrap.

Wishbringer: 7 male, 4 female (36% female)
Wishbringer is unique among Infocom games in having a female as
the main villain. (Note that Brian Moriarty is responsible for
many of the games with high proportions of females -- Trinity and
Beyond Zork are also his.)

Beyond Zork: 5 male, 3 female (38% female)
This counts the shop woman as one character, not three.

Seastalker: 5 male, 3 female (38% female)

Bureaucracy: 6 male, 4 female (40% female)
Note that the NPCs in Bureaucracy are basically caricatures, and
conform strictly to traditional gender roles for these caricatures
(male nerd, female stewardess and bank tellers, etc.). I counted
all the bank tellers as one character; otherwise, the percentage
would be bumped up to 53%.

Trinity: 2 male, 2 female, 1 other (40% female)
The statistics are a little misleading. The only really developed
NPCs in the game are female (the Bird Woman and the Japanese
woman), and I was tempted to count it as 0-2, but finally relented
and put in Charon and the bubble boy. The "other" is the
roadrunner, the only animal who has a significant role.

Deadline: 3 male, 3 female (50% female)
I chose not to count Sergeant Duffy, since he's really a utility,
not a person.

Moonmist: 4 male, 4 female (50% female)
The count is a little skewed here, because the number of
characters in the game depends on which of the four variations
you're playing.  There are only 2 females who appear in all
variations.

Numbers aren't all that matters, though. I tried to account for
this in part by limiting the count to the well-developed
characters only, but the way characters are used matters just as
much as how many there are. The important question is not so much,
"Are there a lot of women in this game?" as "Are the women in this
game good characters?"

In the mixed-gender games, the female characters are generally as
good (or as weak) as the males. Infocom didn't seem to be prone to
the authors who couldn't write women, but thought they could; if
there were any they stuck to writing games like Cutthroats and
Infidel.

Some games are worth a closer look:

Bureaucracy and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "Everyone always
asked me, why is Trillian such a cipher of a character. It's
because I never really knew anything about her. And I always find
women very mysterious anyway -- I never know what they want. And I
always get very nervous about writing one as I think I'll do
something terribly wrong. You read other male accounts of women
and you think, 'He's got them wrong!' and I feel very nervous
about going into that area."  -- Douglas Adams, quoted in Don't
Panic by Neil Gaiman.

Neither of Adams' games have particularly strong women. In HHGG,
Trillian is somewhat weaker than the others, partially for the
reason quoted above; the game is an adaptation, and Trillian just
doesn't do much in the original. The only strong character in the
game, really, is Ford. The section of the game from his point of
view gives a better insight into the character than Zaphod and
Trillian's sections.


In Bureaucracy, there are no strong NPCs, and that's probably a
result of the genre. Humour doesn't require its characters to be
as well-rounded as some other genres. The characters in
Bureaucracy are archetypes, and archetypes are easier to work
with.  (Consider the reaction of the woman at the travel agency if
you try to touch her:  "'You're invading my personal space!' she
shrieks. She is obviously from California." The humour of this
line requires the recognition of the character as the spaced-out
Valley girl archetype, and overlaying one's conceptions of the
archetype on the character.)

Bureaucracy is one of the games where the females are just as weak
as the males.

Leather Goddesses of Phobos: The comments about Bureaucracy apply
doubly to LGOP, because LGOP is not just humor but outright farce,
and depth of character would be detrimental to farce. Its handling
of women can be summed up by the fact that six characters can
change gender along with the player, and it matters not at all to
their characterization.

Deadline and Plundered Hearts: These two games demonstrate the
distinction between choosing a character's gender based on the
game's cultural context (where it makes a real difference to who
the character is), and choosing it as window-dressing (where it's
mainly cosmetic detail).

Plundered Hearts is a romance, and Deadline includes a romance
between two of the NPCs. Since these games are set in the real
world, the romance element puts certain limits on the programmers,
as this is an area where changing parameters leads to other
important changes.

Since the romance background of Deadline only comes out later in
the game, and I don't want to spoil it too much, I'll look at
Plundered Hearts instead. Could Nicholas have been a woman without
changing anything?

The answer is "no," of course, and this shows one of the hallmarks
of a well-developed character: connections to the world.

A lesbian pirate would not have been historically inaccurate, and
the game could have retained the romance aspect (if some changes
were made in the main character). However, she would have been
subjected to different forces in her life, and could not be
treated in the same way as the male pirate. A game in which the
characters are superficial, like Leather Goddesses, can change
this parameter easily, but if the character is well-designed, one
change will lead to other changes.

(Could the game have been written with a male main character and a
female pirate? Not convincingly; see the section on Trinity and
gender roles.)

There are some minor characters in Deadline whose gender really
didn't matter: the housekeeper and the gardener. The housekeeper
is female, the gardener male. Does it matter to the game what
gender they are? Not to speak of; it's just window-dressing.


But is this totally unimportant? I would argue that it is not,
that having a good gender mix (even in cases where it doesn't
fundamentally matter) can help the game. If a game has no females,
(if the default state for all characters the author creates is
male, say) it doesn't feel like the real world. If the writer
intends to model the real world, then having the NPCs mirror the
people in the real world is a significant element.

Seastalker: This is an artificial game background. "In Seastalker,
you are a famous young scientist and inventor" (sounds just like
my childhood :) ). Interestingly, the game's fairly equitable
gender treatment seems connected, in part, to the artificiality.
Realism doesn't play a role in determining character gender, and
the characters are left to find their own level. (There's
something to be said for this in the right setting -- but authors
shouldn't just throw out the real world if the game's set there.)

Trinity: Trinity contains one of the best examples of another role
of character gender: using the player's assumptions of gender
roles to heighten an emotional experience.

>HELP WOMAN
You begin to approach the old woman, but stop in your tracks.  Her
face is wrong. You look a little closer and shudder to yourself.
The entire left side of her head is scarred with deep red lesions,
twisting her oriental features into a hideous mask. She must have
been in an accident or something. A strong gust of wind snatches
the umbrella out of the old woman's hands and sweeps it into the
branches of the tree. The woman circles the tree a few times,
gazing helplessly upward. That umbrella obviously means a lot to
her, for a wistful tear is running down her cheek. But nobody
except you seems to notice her loss.
-- "Trinity" (Brian Moriarty)

I believe the scene above would not hold as much pathos if the
character were a man. The player (I'm speaking in generalities
here) is likelier to feel sorry for the woman, because of
subconscious conditioning on the importance of appearance for
women, and the importance of helping old women. Whether the player
consciously agrees with these ideas or not, they've been driven in
at some subconscious level, and it's on that level that the scene
becomes extra-tragic.

I don't think Moriarty intended to play to traditional gender roles
when writing this scene; if anything, the subconscious factors may
have affected his choice. Certainly there's no overriding reason in
the game why she had to be a woman. There is a lesson here, though:
using the player's preconceptions helps heighten the experience.
This is the flip side of the comment about archetypes under
Bureaucracy, above. Letting the player fill in their own
assumptions allows them to build more about a character in their
minds than space allows. Taken too far, it can lead to lazy
characterization and stereotyping, but to an extent it can be a
useful tool.

--------------
V. Conclusions
--------------
Don't forget that all NPCs are currently objects, with only the
semblance of life and constrained by their programming. The
requirements of "coming to life" are different for interactive
fiction than normal fiction, because the reader of a book never
tests the characters' limitations. The reader/playgoer can only
imagine Ophelia's answer to a question about her mother, but she
won't be confronted with the answer "I don't know anything about
that." All IF characters, male or female, are limited.

The presence and role of female characters can have an important
impact on the game, however. An all-male game, if not in an
appropriate setting, sends messages: one is that the author
doesn't care much about modeling reality, but would rather stick
with a male default. If females (or, indeed, any characters)
aren't handled well or given much depth, the illusion is broken;
and the spell of the game depends on maintaining the illusion.

Finally, showing a lack of concern for handling good females also
shows lack of concern for half the potential playing audience. If
more females wrote and played IF, wouldn't the field be larger,
more varied, and ultimately stronger?

--------
Addendum
--------
After this article was completed, I obtained a copy of Graham
Nelson's new game Jigsaw, which takes an interesting (and almost
experimental) tack with its main NPC.

Jigsaw's main character is of unspecified gender, and is quite
attracted to his/her nemesis/alter ego, the enigmatic Black...also
of unspecified gender. This obviously flies in the face of my
earlier comments about gender and NPC relations, as relations
between Black and the player character (White) become quite close
at points.

Whether this practice is successful is debatable. Some players
have complained that they dislike not knowing Black's gender, and
would prefer some specificity. On the other hand, it a) adds an
interesting air of ambiguity to the game, and b) gives the player
some freedom in picturing Black, rather than following Graham's
idea of what an attractive person looks like.

The difficulty arises because players aren't used to this sort of
ambiguity; Jigsaw may be the first game to use this technique for
a central character. An ambiguous main character is standard; an
ambiguous NPC isn't. Also, the relationship between White and
Black is one intimately connected with gender (nudge, nudge). If
Black were the implacable hunter pursuing you across time and
space, with no thought but claiming your head, the ambiguity
probably wouldn't be as glaring.

There are a few cues about player gender, which don't really prove
anything but are interesting to debate:

1) White is disguised as minor officer on a cruise ship in 1912,
and later as a British Army Captain in 1917, neither of which are
roles open to women, suggesting White is a man.

However, when White puts on the Army uniform, the game says "It
should do as long as no one looks too closely." And no one does;
or, rather, the only ones who do are a five-year-old and the owner
of the uniform, who's bound, gagged, and in no position to
comment.  Likewise, the only person who notices White in the ship
doesn't notice anything but the uniform.

All this really suggests is that, if White is a woman, she can
disguise herself as a man -- meaning that she probably doesn't
have a figure like Jayne Mansfield's.

2) Whatever gender White and Black are, they're apparently of
opposite genders. At one point Black makes a reference to being
mistaken for an English honeymooning couple -- this is in 1956, a
period when England (and the U.S., for that matter) were treating
homosexuals in a particularly repressive manner (read a biography
of Alan Turing for examples), and a same-sex couple would
therefore hardly be taken for honeymooners.

3) Incidentally, some players have noted that, using Inform's
"nouns" feature, Black is listed as male. This is not indicative
of Graham's intentions so much as the fact that, in Inform, an
animate character is male by default. (There are also two female
characters, Miss Shutes and the Stewardess, who are listed as
male, which is probably a bug or an oversight.)

--------
Appendix
--------
A few corrections to Part I of the article:

First, I must recommend Gareth Rees' recent game Christminster,
which features a female player character. It had not been released
at the time of part I, or I would have covered it then.

Second, I apologize for omitting two female authors of IF: Erica
Sadun, author of One Hand Clapping, and Carol Hovick, author of
Klaustrophobia. (I've never been able to get Klaustrophobia to
run, but I have finished OHC, and should have remembered it.)



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