daniel-lim.co.uk

It’s rare that I get riled up enough to do specific blog posts about things I’ve read, but this blog post by Brad Gallaway, regarding Splash Damage’s decision to not include female avatars in their upcoming game Brink, really annoyed me quite a lot.

Sometimes I wish people that wrote about games would consider the practical implications of what they’re talking about. Brad has already responded to some earlier commentators saying that you needn’t try and school him on the technicalities of games development whilst at the same time dismissing the excuse of production out of hand anyway.

Of course, the technical requirements that he knows all about seem to be limited purely to creating a new model for females. Yep, that’s it! That’s all you need to do to create a female avatar. Err… no. Far from it.

Adding an additional gender affects the entire game’s development pipeline at a fundamental level. Just thinking about it for a few minutes immediately raises a number of issues, and it becomes clear very quickly that it’s not just the customisation and clothing as Brad has suggested. What about the animation? What about the additional programming and design work? What about the new skeletons, rigs and skinning for the new avatars? The modelling of new characters and outfit pieces is actually the least impactful part of the entire pipeline!

Let’s talk about animation for a minute. The game is promoting itself as a game where free-running/free-flowing movement is a priority. The animation has to look great otherwise the illusion of this incredibly physical universe will be broken. If you add another sex into the equation that essentially doubles the amount of animation work needed (otherwise someone would no doubt be complaining that the female avatars are ‘too manly’ and ‘not representative’ enough).

“At whatever point in the development process the decision had to be made, Splash Damage decided that having female models was less important than having the other features that were included. There is no denying this — the developers have said it themselves.”

I don’t doubt that at some point the question of female avatars was raised and knocked back and I don’t doubt that other features were considered to be more important, but that is the business of game development. Not every feature that you’d love to include in your new game is equal in the land of deadlines, budgets and manpow– people-power! Adding a female avatar would have fundamentally hindered the overall vision and scope of the project or seen it released incredibly over-schedule and/or over-budget.

A number of commentators on Brad’s blog have suggested that games developers should “make the effort and [...] spend the time and [...] treat everyone with respect.” Perhaps this particular commentator thinks money, time and highly experienced staff can be grown on trees?

It’s not about sexism, it’s not about inequality, it is not about lazy developers. It would be awesome if we could have female avatars in Brink, but I bet there’s a whole bunch of other great features that exist (and a whole load of polish work that goes towards making a AAA-title) because they made the call not to include them. I’m not saying it’s an easy call but games development is a careful balancing act, and at some point you need to rein in your project otherwise you’ll go bust.

Sorry Brad, there is nothing “disturbing” about deciding to go for a male-only cast, it doesn’t say anything about the studio’s attitude towards women… It just makes sense. Common, business sense. And at the end of the day, you have to consider the business implications otherwise there’d be no games developers and you wouldn’t get to play games like Brink. Ever.