You start with your default male character, your Man or your Boy, a universal archetype made in your image. It’s something players can relate to. Then you bring in the girl for diversity. You make a female avatar to bring in those women players, or if not, to add a little spicy, probably sexy, variety. But really, she’s not too different, because at the end of the day you’re mostly just slapping a pink bow on your default’s head. Pac-Man comes first, and from him flows Ms. Pac-Man. 

It would be boring for me to parrot the fact of poor female representation in games. But you know what’s also boring? Finding the same phenomenon in those games that are supposed to watermark a change. Whatever complicity with unjust systems and social prejudices we can pin on the AAA side of the games industry, we can just as easily apply to so many indies that protest to be different. These are the games that are supposed to exist outside the box, or push boundaries, or challenge our preconceptions about the medium, or whatever other dubious platitude I could possibly repeat. Still, they have this charming habit of falling within the parameters of Aevee Bee’s bingo card of hand-picked dev excuses for failing to include any gender balance.

I don’t mean to be a hothead. I’m tired of picking fights. And I know very well that there’s no reason for indie games to be exempt from the economic and societal pressures of their traditionally-published counterparts. I know very well that what we label “indie” could very well be called Indie™, a sort of commercial repackaging of nostalgia and liberal back-patting that has very little to do with actively challenging power structures (and a lot more to do with acquiring capital via absorption by said structures.) I know that when we talk about an “indie scene,” this is a popular myth that fails to fully represent the fractured, nebulous and tenuously-connected individuals and collectives that make up independent and alternative game-crafting.

That myth is, really, just a microcosm of the ideology that dilutes people into defaults. Where a few, (predominantly white, male, cis, Computer Science-educated) people are made into figureheads for an entire subculture of game creation, we use male defaults (among others) in our games against which other characters are compared and thus modelled. It’s taking Adam’s ribs in order to make Eve in his image. Or better yet, painting Adam hot pink and slapping a bow on his head. Anita Sarkeesian broke it down in Tropes vs. Women in Video Games:

“This Adam and Eve version of the creation myth reinforces a subordinate view of women — man is cast as the original concept and source code for woman who is derived from his body. Essentially Eve is the sequel to Adam, just as Ms. Pac-Man was built from the body of Pac-Man who came before her.”

I know I could try to suppress this disappointment with quiet, exasperated resignation and maybe a bit of dry humour, the way I do with AAA games. But somehow, it hurts more. It hurts more that these are games made by people who care so much about difference and vibrancy and creativity yet won’t extend that care and energy to thinking about representation in their games. It hurts that they don’t seem to care enough, that it doesn’t register on their radar. This doesn’t make them bad people, but as Tim Chevalier recently wrote in his piece on open-source culture:

“‘Good’ people (people who think of themselves as tolerant, polite, and considerate), not just toxic ‘bad apples’, can engage in microaggressions. And even ‘good’ people often get unnecessarily defensive when called on behavior they weren’t aware was a problem.”

I love Runner 2. I love Gaijin Games’ Bit.Trip series, in fact, so much that I don’t think there’s a game in it that I’ve left unplayed. I beat Runner 2 on the hardest difficulty, replaying every level until I achieved at least a “Perfect Plus” score. I savoured that game for days and days and when it was over and the final cutscene teased another sequel, I was already anticipating it. But every time I moseyed over to the character select menu, something about Commandgirl Video just soured me. I mainly played Whetfart Cheeseborger, because he’s a disco dancer in lederhosen with a cheeseburger for a head, and I feel like that’s justification enough. But I played Commandgirl Video, for a bit. She was obviously a pink swap of Commander Video. Nothing too unique about her, but she had some nice outfits. And she was, after all, the sole modicum of female representation available to me.

I felt less comfortable as I played her. She’s the only woman in the game, and all of her animations involve prancing, checking her nails, posing suggestively and waving insouciantly. Of course, none of these are inherently negative habits. I’ve done most or all of these things at some point or another in my life and I bet most people have. I went through a similar contention when I wrote about Angry Birds’ addition of a pink, overtly feminine character in a bid to attract more young girls to the game. Of course there’s nothing wrong with being pink or being feminine, but there is something wrong with using those traits as surrogates for the sum of womanhood, and to expect that those things alone are what attract girls and women to your game (and, moreover, that they’re considered detractors for men who require only masculine manly man-heroes to empathize with and embody.) Commandgirl Video isn’t a character unto herself, with even a superficial but specific personality like the rest of my options—Whetfart, for a prime example. She doesn’t stand on her own as a character. Even her name gives away what she is: a subordinate. A derivative.

Of course she, and the pink bird, and Ms. ‘Splosion Man (clearly the most direct spiritual ancestor of Ms. Pac-Man, and part of another series I adored playing), and all the rest are the latest in a long, ancient and culturally-constructed gendered hierarchy that goes all the way back to the inception of agrarian patriarchy. The methods by which we divide people based on value is dyed completely into the tapestry of Western society. It’s one steeped in sets of binary oppositions: Man and Woman, White and Black, Straight and Queer, superior and inferior, normal and abnormal. It’s an ideology that protects a distinctive social order by erasing the undesirable and preferring archetypes to people. That’s not what I think the people at Gaijin Games or Rovio or Twisted Pixel are necessarily explicitly thinking—I doubt they are—but that gendered ordering is clearly an automatic shorthand our culture uses, and it’s one that I believe such artistic decisions are ultimately rooted in.

I got the same sinking feeling when I played Rayman Origins. Now, I know the Ubisoft-published title doesn’t count as “indie,” but as I intimated before I’m less and less certain about what we mean when we say “indie” anyway. If we’re talking about an aesthetic and an abstract set of principles, then I think Rayman Origins—the upbeat, stylistically exaggerated platformer with the not-so-subtle environmentalist overtones—qualifies for criticism here. This was another game I loved, and spent many hours invested in. This was also another game where, despite a healthy array of character selection options (to be fair, they were all palette-swaps of the same three characters) there was only one woman, and she was covered head to toe in pink just so you were really sure. This is on top of the fact that a number of the game’s objectives involve freeing scantily clad damsels in distress. (The sequel, Rayman Legends, is supposed to have corrected these problems but I have yet to play it.)

This is a game like Runner 2 or Ms. ‘Splosion Man or even Angry Birds that’s clever, designed with care and attention to detail and impressively thoughtful in its execution. It’s also a game that relies on this lazy tokenism and binarism when it doesn’t have to.

Now, no piece of media has to fully represent all permutations of humanity at all points in time simultaneously. Certainly, there are times when specificity is required over inclusivity in order to relate a particular kind of experience: look at Mattie Brice’s Mainichi, Maddox Pratt’s Anhedonia or The Gaming Pixie’s What’s in a Name? as examples of very precise focalization used to relate very particular kinds of experiences. But I feel that when you have an opportunity to drop a wide variety of avatars into the game world—that you might as well be using Monopoly tokens for all it honestly matters—then why rely on defaults when you could actually do something outside the box? Not every character selection menu has to be as fluid as Saint’s Row 2’s sliding spectrums (though wouldn’t that be splendid?). But it’s at least possible to treat, for instance, non-white, non-cismale characters with more than the merest gesture of recognition, or none at all. Worse yet, why rely on cheap tokens for some kinds of characters while bestowing a rainbow of opportunity upon the others? I think that for the most part, devs fall into the “free space” on Aevee’s bingo card of having not really considered it, only to rationalize a defence in retrospect. But why participate in the marginalization of actual people in the fantasy world you’ve spent so much time constructing?

I know, it’s a problem with a long history. I know that diversity and representation is a thorny conversation that many people aren’t sure how to approach, exactly. But I find it very hard to believe that bright, imaginative people who spent so much time perfecting other areas of their game couldn’t spare some of that fire to engage in that conversation. It tells me that they’re either scared, or they don’t care. It tells me they couldn’t be bothered and that, frankly, the identities of the people they’re (inadvertently) erasing or stereotyping aren’t worth enough to examine and change this habit. Or at least, they haven’t thought about it. Maybe this is a little over the top but I feel betrayed, not just by the utter meaninglessness of “indie” or “alternative” within certain realms of success, but by the creative risk-aversion, the lazy, reductive lip service to inclusivity that compromises these games as anything different than business as usual.