Writing for All Audiences - Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing - page 93

First Nations and Native American youth, the girls have been more enthusiastic about
game engines that allow them to make role-playing games, so much so that they often
don't bother with the technology but instead spend most of their time writing out
the characters and story of the game. Similar points have come up in workshops by
academics such as Magy Seif El-Nasr and Mary Flanagan. This can be particularly
helpful for game writers to know, since all of that dreamy writing you do will get
read by someone out there if it's put in this audience's hands. This is not to say that
the same doesn't apply to some male audiences as well, but young girls consider it a
requirement. Writing can be cleverly embedded as optional reading on objects placed
throughout a game. The trick is to be non-invasive so that players can choose if they
want to spend the time reading all of the personal diaries of the characters.
This can also be the case for other game genres. Click! Urban Adventure is
a mixed-reality game that was developed by Carnegie Mellow University in 2005.
Betsy DiSalvo and other team members wrote a narrative that the girls would un-
cover, or not, built around a pop-star high school student who is involved in a battle-
of-the-bands mystery. When girls were brought in for playtesting and participatory
design, the game took a new direction to concern real-world issues such as water
quality and interpersonal relationships between the characters. Most notably, the
personal histories of each character were at the forefront of the story.
Certainly, most female characters in games aren't given much of a story, so much
as cleavage and tight clothing, and probably a wicked weapon or fighting move. Most
are stuck in the sidekick role, such as the eerie virtual projection of Cortana in the
Halo series. The tradition of Tomb R a i d e r 's Lara Croft has continued in games such
as Blood Rayne and Heavenly Sword . Chances are you're not going to have complete
control over the physical appearance of characters like these as a writer, but you can
at least make her sound smart. Humor is often the best medicine.
So what are females looking for in a player character anyway? When I asked a 13-
year-old girl if she always chose the girl in the pink outfit on Fusion Frenzy because
she wore pink, she practically scoffed at me. “No, I don't like pink. I play her because
she looks edgy and I like her hair cut,� which was, notably, a short punk spiked style.
So there you have it. Not all females like the color pink, and putting a game in pink
wrapping isn't going to change its inaccessibility to female players.
Furthermore, shooting isn't a no-no for girls; they just want a good enough reason
for why they're doing it. One of the members of the Terra Nova blog game researchers
guild brought up why he couldn't get his wife to play World of Warcraft ( WoW ). Her
first quest was to go kill animals and collect a body part from them, a very common
quest type in WoW , but when she killed her first one, it didn't have that body part
to loot. She didn't get why the animal wouldn't have that very necessary body part
on it and why she had to kill it if it didn't have what she needed anyway. Moments
like these are in part due to the wonderful programming that goes into random item
spawn. It's not that killing is an issue; it's that it just doesn't make sense to do it
without purpose. As a writer, you get to see to it that if the player has to kill someone
or something, there's a good story why and adequate follow-up afterwards.