Home | Forums | Article Search | Subscribe & Shop | Contact Us | Log Out Forward Slash Email This Print This View My Personal Library Caught In The Web July 2003 • Vol.3 Issue 7 Page(s) 86 in print issue Add To My Personal Library Forward Slash Downloadable Dawn Starting as gopher for the Emmy-winning team that pioneered live in-car TV cameras for the Indy 500, Joan became an independent video/sound engineer, technical director, and producer. Playing with Reality Engines and motion platforms led to co-founding Xatrix Entertainment, where she produced the two Cyberia games. Before 3D acceleration was trendy, she formed Mango Grits to develop hardware-only game Barrage for Activision. Since cashing out from SharkyExtreme.com, where she was co-founder and managing editor, Joan has retired. As marketing ramped up in the weeks before E3, some very talented and hardworking people feverishly toiled to complete another round of demos featuring big monsters and scantily clad women. You might think that the gaming and enthusiast industries haven't evolved much in their treatment and portrayal of female characters over the last decade. You might think that, but I don't. The first major battle I waged as the only female on a development team was to persuade the designers that it was not OK to require the player to kill the girl if he, in the role of the main character (never mind that nobody seriously considered the possibility that the player might not actually be male), had chosen to kiss her. To explain the existing path that led to this unpalatable absolute, I used flow charts and block diagrams and a big dry erase board and the argument that we were sending the wrong message to our young male target customer: If you kiss a girl, you will someday have to kill her in order to survive and win. I can't say that it was a particularly successful effort. The end result was that, if you kissed the girl, she still died, but it was her evil jealous boyfriend doing the deed, instead of the player pulling the trigger. (And this game was a hit!) Small victories for women in games, circa 1993. The last major battle I waged as the only female on a development team was to include unobtrusive game elements that were more appealing to gamers who preferred exploration mode to blasting mode. This was a mixed success and came from watching a few hundred people play an early version of the game on a motion chair at the Game Developer Conference. Making the enemy attack reactive rather than automatic allowed two types of gamers to have completely different experiences without even knowing the other mode existed. In the most commonly accessed mode, if the player came out of the gate shooting, everything attacked in return, resulting in the usual mayhem. But if the player just flew around without being aggressive, they were left in peace to explore. In general, experienced gamers started blasting right away and never knew that there was another way to experience the level, while inexperienced gamers had a relaxing flight and noticed all the details of the environment, only starting to shoot if they watched someone else play first. So the battle to include nontraditional "female gamer" elements was only a mixed success because, although you could fly around and enjoy the sights, you couldn't actually win and go onto the next level unless you went the mayhem route. Small victories for women in games, circa 1998. In between those two experiences, I actually presided over a three-day, 14-person design debate focusing on how large the female lead character's chest should be. Hey, it's all about geometry and creative choices, and somebody has to make that call; unfortunately, it was me. But I was not willing to be dictatorial on this particular issue. It wasn't three days nonstop, of course, but significant portions of three days were taken up with the discussion before consensus could be reached, so I did have some background on the subject when a colleague recently asked for my opinion of NVIDIA's programmable shader mascot, Dawn. Now, my first reaction to delicate, feminine, barely clothed Dawn was amused surprise because, to be blunt, her chest did not look completely artificial the way almost all virtual chests do. It's actually kind of realistically shaped, and those leaf coverings are definitely not push-up or underwire. Ten years of making and writing about games have given me some insight into the rate of progress regarding blatant sexism in the industry, so to me, Dawn's chest is one more small step toward representing real women, which should be at least a component of the "progress" yardstick. Most importantly, though, she is really well rendered. Download Dawn from www.nvidia.com. Virtual joan@cpumag.com Want more information about a topic you found of interest while reading this article? Type a word or phrase that identifies the topic and click "Search" to find relevant articles from within our editorial database. Enter A Subject (key words or a phrase): ALL Words (‘digital’ AND ‘photography’) ANY Words (‘digital’ OR ‘photography’) Exact Match ('digital photography'- all words MUST appear together) Home      Copyright & Legal Information      Privacy Policy      Site Map      Contact Us Copyright © 2010 Sandhills Publishing Company U.S.A. All rights reserved.