Calico's personal blog. Writing about arts and virtual reality

March 8, 2016

Recently, I had the opportunity to stumble across an interesting site on the World Wide Web. At www.nightbomber.com I found the home-page of a non commercial combat flight simulation! In development by dedicated volunteers, working for no pay, this intrepid group intends to develop an all-new combat simulation focusing on the Allied night-bombing campaign in Europe during the latter part of World War II. I was fascinated, and contacted Eddie Walters, the project leader, for more information and a couple of screenshots for you. Eddie responded, and not only Eddie, but Rick Gall, the coding brains behind the project! Let’s head to the WG studio and take a look at this new project with our show: “Twenty Questions!”

Cat: What is Target for Tonight (TfT)?

Eddie: Target for Tonight is a new flight simulator that’s under development, based on the British Royal Air Force’s night bombing campaign of WWII.

Cat: What caused you to decide to do a combat simulation?

Eddie: The simulator project was born out of the discontent about the failure ofthe recent bomber simulator “B17 Flying Fortress – the Mighty Eighth”, whichlike many products it was pushed out the door by the publisher before it was ready, so it was always going to be something along basically similar lines to that sim.Cat: Tell us about the organization putting TfT together.

Eddie: The crew putting the sim together are all volunteers. The core of the teamwas formed in late August 2000 from a group of friends at the”Bombs-Away.net” site (www.bombs-away.net), and since then we’ve had people contacting us offering help. We have a fairly relaxed structure to the team – basically there arethe project leaders, and we ask members of the team to do parts to contribute to the whole. The majority of the team effectively work ascontractors.

Cat: Who’s involved in this effort? What are their backgrounds?

Eddie: The core members of the team are:

Richard “rickgenius” Gall. Rick is a self employed professional programmer from Scotland, and he is the lead programmer and project coordinator. He is currently working on the 3D engine and core technologies.Edward “Eddie” Walters. I’m an aerospace engineering student with a longheld interest in Bomber Command and the night war over Germany. My role in the team is as a modeller and designer. I make a lot of the decisions on what aircraft and technology we put in the sim, and how to implement them.Together we control the project overall, deciding how everything will be done. We’ve also got many researchers, artists and sound folks working awayfor when their expertise is needed.

Cat: How on Earth did you pull all those people together?

Rick: It wasn’t difficult to get volunteers to work on this project. It’s avery attractive proposition for anyone with skills that can be contributed.The hardest part was finding people willing to see it through to completionas this is a long term project. As a result of this the team has went through a number of changes but is now more stable than ever.

Cat: Your organization is a nonprofit, isn’t it? Why that, rather than selling TfT toone of the big game houses?

Eddie: We realized that virtually all the recent sims have been released unfinished due to publisher pressure, so we just sidestepped that issue by not having one! It does have disadvantages of far more limited funds, but you can’t have everything!

Rick: The primary reason why we went non commercial and didn’t approach a publisher is because with a publisher investing money, there are certain legal obligations and time frames to meet. Since T4T is made up of skilled volunteers it would be impossible to make such guarantees. Also remembering that T4T was sparked into existence at the frustration of other flight sims before rushed out the door by publishers before they were ready and in buggy unstable states for a quick profit. We want T4T to be done ‘right’ and to be a quality product. The truth is if we tried to create this product in its current sense under the wing of a large corporate publisher, that wouldn’t be possible. Money doesn’t guarantee quality.

Cat: Why night-bombing in WWII?

Eddie: The night bombing aspect of WWII has been virtually ignored in the past by developers, but it’s a fascinating part of the war. The technology used in the electrical arms race was more advanced than any other used in the war, and was amazing for the time. Another unusual aspect for WWII sims is the tactical side, straight dogfighting tactics will very rarely be used because of the low visibility. It will be far more of cat(!) and mouse game. It will also hopefully commemorate the 55,000 men of RAF Bomber Command, and the thousands of Luftwaffe crewmen who never returned from operations.

Because Women Do Play

March 8, 2016

What’s in a name? Specifically, what’s in WomenGamers’ name? A recent conversation got me to thinking about that very issue.

I was in IRC the other night and got caught up in a discussion about what constitutes an RPG with one of the people in the channel, we’ll call him TormentGuy for his liking of Planescape: Torment. This topic repeatedly resurrects itself on the ‘net, but rather than encouraging Carpal Tunnel Syndrome by typing my perspective on it over and over again, I generally just cut and paste the link to my article on the subject, and am done with it. However, this time, a far different debate ensued.

After a minute, TormentGuy responded, “Well, WomenGamers sucks, anyway.” Rather than be offended by his petulant response, I asked him what he disliked about the site. Was it the layout, or the content?

And then things got interesting.

As it turned out, TormentGuy felt that the name of the site alienated male gamers. I informed him that WomenGamers is actually very male-friendly: Not only are many of our columnists male, but one of the site’s founders is as well. “But you don’t see a malegamers.com,” he responded. “There’s certainly nothing stopping you from starting one,” I stated. (Since I don’t have the actual log, I am paraphrasing the conversation.)

As I explained to him, I didn’t choose the site’s name, but I understand the reasons behind it. There had to be several factors in the decision, and certain aspects necessarily got prioritized. Do we make a name that’s openly welcoming to female gamers and separates us from the crowded gaming site scene, or do we go with something that is more visibly inclusive of male gamers, but doesn’t communicate to women that there’s a place in the gaming scene for them? The considerations below are merely speculation on my part about the process that the site founders went through. I submit them as possible clarifications for why the site name exists in its current form, and why some outreach may be needed to compensate for casual preconceptions about the site.

Industry Culpability

Anyone who thinks the treatment of female gamers as second-class citizens who are not entitled to the same options available to male gamers is a problem of the past need only look at Sierra’s upcoming RPG title Arcanum. As of this writing, there are eight playable races in the game: dwarves, elves, half-elves, gnomes, halflings, humans, half-orcs, and half-ogres. Eight if you are interested in playing a male character, that is. If you dig a bit around the Races of Arcanum section, you’ll find that you cannot create a female dwarf, a female gnome, a female halfling, or a female half-ogre. A full 50% of the races are not available to those who wish to create a female character. According to GA-RPG’s First Look on the game, the reason some races have both options and others don’t is “mostly technical: more art, more disk space, more work.” Excuse me? Why aren’t female characters as deserving of the time to create them as male characters? Oh, Sierra and Troika try to rationalize their absence with the style of the site, which simulates the observations of a naturalist named John Beddes in a manner not unlike Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. However stylistically clever the web designers may be, it does not change the fact that at the end of the day, female gamers wanting to play a character that reflects their own gender have half the options of male gamers. The “more work” justification has little merit in the competitive world of game development – in RPGs like Baldur’s Gate, every race is playable by either gender. Why would Sierra and Troika think that any less is expected of them? Why sell female gamers short? Why discriminate, even inadvertently?

Need more examples? Corporate-sponsored sexism is not isolated. Just look at Black Isle’s Icewind Dale. On the 22nd of December 1999, Baldur’s Gate Chronicles reported these comments made by producer Chris Parker on the Icewind message boards in response to the question “Why do the female portraits have low-cut clothes?” (I wasn’t the one who asked, by the way, so obviously I’m not the only one that noticed.):

It’s the genre. Tricky question, but let me explain it fully, so that you understand the main reason we did it. First, what you need to understand is that these are strong northern women, they have been raised in the cold or have at least lived there for awhile, so they are used to it. So because of their resiliency to the cold, they tend to dress like other women of the genre. And what we have seen is that pretty much all of the women in fantasy settings are dressed like this. Because we don’t want to disappoint the gamers by stepping outside of these established expectations, we felt it necessary to portray them this way. 🙂

It’s pretty clear from that last sentence that the speaker presumes that all of “the gamers” are male. Unfortunately, it’s not just Parker, and this attitude has continued through the game’s release. As recently as June 30, 2000, the webmaster of the official site for the game publicly objectifies player portraits of female characters in comments like these, right on the front page (these statements have not been edited in any way – all grammatical errors are his):

Jason has taken some time over the past couple weeks and made a couple new character portraits for the game. The first is a hotty female Drow and the second a battle hardened Ranger.

And from June 8, 2000:

Hey IWD Maniancs,
Jason Manley has done it again with the creation of 2 new portraits for your adoring pleasure in the Downloads & Archives section. The portraits are of 2 female characters from IWD and can be best described as seductive, playful, and down right hot. But dont take my word for it check out out for your self and dont forget to download the High Resolution versions so you can check out every detail of these 2 hot babes.

The male portraits do not get comparable commentary and treatment, but even if they did, such comments would constitute unprofessional and inappropriate business conduct. Has anyone in charge asked that these comments be removed from the site? Have either of the offenders been reprimanded? Unlikely, considering the comments are still publicly available for viewing as of this writing. Additionally, we’ve seen sexist treatment of women before from Black Isle in Planescape: Torment, as many of you regular readers may recall. Considering Icewind Dale was published after Torment, one rather wonders if these comments from designer Scott Warner in our message forums on February 12th were merely “lip service:”

Definitely very interesting to read some of the feedback regarding our game, and am glad some of you found something special in it. Regarding the depiction of women in the game, I apologize for any content of which you may have found offensive. I can assure you right now that we are paying close attention to the matter for our next project, and hopefully you’ll very pleased with what we come up with in regards to the representation of women. Any comments/questions very appreciated.

With the remarkable triumph of Baldur’s Gate, which somehow managed to win numerous awards and make the bestseller lists for weeks in spite of a lack of “hotty” portraits for its female characters, I find it hard to believe that this kind of attire is necessary for a successful game. It is gratuitous, condescending to male and female gamers alike, and widens the gender gap in gaming that this site is trying to close.