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from the the-impossible-takes-a-little-longer dept.
lhsi writes:
"The Atlantic looked at a recent update from the developers of the game Desktop Dungeons to discuss problems with gender bias in gaming, asking 'can a work be racist or sexist if its creator doesn't mean for it to be?'
The developers of the game had recently been adding female character art to their game with the intention that they would be "adventurers first and runway models second." While actively trying to avoid doing everything the 'simple' way, they came into some problems due to subconscious shorthands creeping in.
"This adjustment turned out to be startlingly non-trivial - you'd think that a bunch of supposedly conscious, mindful individuals would instantly be able to nail a 'good female look' (bonus points for having a woman on our crew, right?), but huge swathes of our artistic language tended to be informed by sexist and one-dimensional portrayals. We regularly surprised ourselves with how much we took for granted.'"
(Score: 1) by iNaya on Saturday March 15 2014, @07:31PM
What different starting point would you suggest?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by wjwlsn on Saturday March 15 2014, @07:59PM
Oh, I don't actually care what they choose as their starting point. I was merely saying they might have chosen the wrong one if they were trying to be non-sexist. However, if I had been part of that team, and if that had been my goal, I would have said "female adventurers and explorers" and sent them to this URL as a starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_advent urers [wikipedia.org].
I am a traveler of both time and space. Duh.
(Score: 1) by ZombieBait on Monday March 17 2014, @10:25PM
Interestingly, the majority of the women on that list are, at least, not unattractive. I also suspect that probably comes with the job. To be an "adventurer" you most likely need to be fit, healthy, confident and relatively wealthy (at least enough so that you could afford basic hygiene and corrective medical procedures (dentistry, optometry, etc.)). It's certainly possible for someone unattractive to have success in the field, but there seems to be at least some overlap in traits between the groups of "adventurers" and "attractive people".