The interlocutors of this issue are Betty Guo and Qian Wang, two female members of Lantern Studio. Founded in Shanghai in 2015, Ran Lantern Studios is a small, independent production team of four game developers. Tower of Moon Shadow is the first game produced by Ran Lantern Studios and was released in February 2020. Tower of Moon Shadow has won the 2020 IGF Award for Best Fine Art, the 2020 AGGIE Awards for Best Animation/ Best Music Production, the 2020 JSUG Awards for Best Game, the 20th Annual NAVGTR Awards for Best Stand out (Puzzle) Game, and many other awards and nominations.
Guo Betty and Wang Qian shared their experiences and thoughts related to gender issues in game production, and also reviewed the gender biases observed and encountered in personal growth experiences and analyzed their formation mechanisms. As for whether women are also suitable for participating in the core competition of the game industry, and how to improve women's visibility in the industry, Guo Betty and Wang Qian gave their ideas.
Tower of Moon Shadow
Q: Please introduce the two professional directions first?
Betty Guo: My job is a freelance illustrator, including illustration, animation, commercials, any part of visual design is my job. Four years ago, due to a very good opportunity, I met Wang Qian and two other members of Ran Deng Studio. Because everyone loves games, this opportunity has brought everyone together to make an indie game. The project is now complete, so I'm back to my freelance illustrator career.
Qian Wang: My previous job was as a piano teacher and music producer. In 2016, he joined the team to produce music for the game. After the game was completed, I also returned to the music production profession, mainly in the film and television industry.
Tower of The Moon Shadow game scene
Q: What experiences did you have with gender issues during your work on the game?
Guo: The Tower of Moon Shadow that we made is a fantasy game, its design is relatively simple, there is only one main character, and it doesn't matter whether the gender of the character is male or female. Because he is the image of a child with a hat, some players think he is a woman, some players think he is a man, and our game has no text from beginning to end, so you can't verify his gender.
This design is not deliberately gender-oriented, and at the beginning of our story is set up as a little boy who grew up learning from his teacher, which actually received a lot of influence from fantasy literature, because most of the apprentices in fantasy literature are men. So when I grew up in this society, there was no way I wasn't immune to these settings. When it comes to adventure stories, it's natural for me to think of designing a male character, not that I meant to obscure the gender of the character in the first place.
But when it comes to promoting games, we come across a situation where there is a separate game category on Steam called "female protagonists", and players can add this label to a game when playing it. So we see that some players mistakenly think that the protagonist of our game is a woman, so they add a label of "female protagonist" to the game. I was hesitant to tell the player that the character wasn't actually female.
This label doesn't have much of an impact on the promotion of our game, but I understand why this "female protagonist" is the label that players want to see, because too many game protagonists are men these days. Although we think that the ratio of men to women in real society should be 1:1, why are all stories male reproductions? Many players want to see more female characters who tell the story of their own experiences from a female perspective, because it is easier for female players to substitute. For example, if you saw a female adventure story when you were a child, as a woman, you are more likely to believe that when you grow up, you can also be as brave as her and solve many problems like her. So the label "female protagonist" I think is absolutely positive.
"Tower of Moon Shadow" character setting
This actually makes me reflect on myself, why do I design male characters by default every time? This is problematic, even if I myself still think I am a more feminist creator, or in life. I have to admit that the influence of patriarchy on individuals is really deep. This incident made me realize with hindsight that it is important to increase the importance of whether it is female characters or female creators in various industries. This can subtly affect your consumers.
Q: Qian Wang works in music production, will gender bias have an impact on this field?
KING: There will be, and it's very obvious. When I was in college, I always wanted to go to a game company to do music production. I searched for ads in the job market, it was about ten years ago, there were not many music production positions, and it was difficult to find one that required a man, and there was an age limit of under 35 years old. I was disappointed.
The music production of the game is related to the type of composer himself, whether he is good at grand, or more delicate, more gentle, more rock heavy metal, which is related to personal preferences. What the composer is good at, what he likes to listen to, what type of genre he is suitable for, is completely personal, not gender-related. I personally prefer to be a little more atmospheric, and I have heard some very powerful Japanese composers, and the music they write is also very tearful and very powerful. You'll feel as if it was written by a man, but it's not, it's written by a female composer. So I think it has little to do with gender, but with a person's interests.
Tower of The Moon Shadow Game Soundtrack
But game companies may have their own stereotypes that it would be better to ask male composers to create some type of concert. Now even if the job advertisement does not explicitly state that it is only for men, it can be clearly seen that the composition industry is still more male, and women are basically more in the music education industry, which is a fact that cannot be denied.
Q: Have you, as a player or a producer in a related field, experienced any gender-related problems?
Guo: Yes. Let me give you an example of a question I've thought about before, which is why don't girls play games anymore? I'm not a game fanatic myself, but as a lifely entertainment, I think it's a popular way of entertainment like watching movies and listening to music, but why don't so many women around me participate? I've always wondered what the root cause of this thing is.
When I was eight or nine years old, there was a red and white machine in the house, and I invited the neighbors around me to play, both men and women, and there was no such phenomenon that only boys were playing games. At that time, a friend who fought with me in the three lives of Contra was a girl. But after junior high school, girls suddenly stopped playing games. What happened in junior high school? Why is it suddenly interrupted?
Later, I found that it was the early 1990s, when stand-alone games began to enter the market, console games are still illegal, so everyone can't buy consoles, the main way to contact games is to go to Internet cafes to play games, and most Internet cafes are not allowed teenagers to go. But the boys didn't care about it, they just sneaked in. However, for boys not to follow the rules, both schools, society, and parents are more tolerant; if a girl follows a group of boys to play games, the punishment for the girl going home is far more than a boy following his friends, brothers, and buddies to play games, and going home is much more punished. This has caused boys to not encounter much resistance in trying to find a way to play games, but girls will be disciplined.
The most paradoxical point is that men are encouraged to break the rules, which is seen as brave or with some kind of masculinity. In addition, there is pressure from peers, that is, what do the people around you do? Men would go to play games with a group of friends, one with two, two with three. If you are a man, unless you are very resistant to going to the Internet café to play games, it will more or less become the daily life of your life, and it will not be broken as entertainment in life.
Moon Shadow Tower game design manuscript
Wang: When I was in middle school, playing games was very crazy, but this time I was playing by myself or with my relatives at home, and I didn't have any friends to play with. In my early years, I did not contact the red and white machine, and the most played was the fairy game such as "The Legend of the Paladin Sword", which was relatively single, and I did not have access to other games, and I was also tired. After going to college, I was really busy with my studies, and there was no one around the female students to play, so slowly this behavior habit was replaced by other social activities or recreational activities. Later, I came into playing games because my husband worked for a game company, and he introduced me to a lot of very interesting games, so I rekindled my fond memories of games, and then I started playing games again.
Speaking of gender-related troubles that I have personally experienced. My college teacher is actually very respected, his professional ability is very strong, and he is also very good, but he just has a kind of "boy plot", that is, he has a kind of "boy plot", that is, he has a very good relationship with all students, unless they are particularly good, the only admissions requirement is male priority, which brings me a lot of trouble. My major is actually not music production, it is a music performance major, I actually like music production, but other girls may not be particularly interested in the computer aspect, but I am particularly interested. But when there are some opportunities to perform, the number of people is limited, the teacher will choose some other boys, I did not choose. My heart has been very depressed, until now. I don't understand why.
Illustration at the end of the game of Tower of Moon Shadow
Q: How do you think you can increase women's visibility in the game industry?
Guo: Although it is not related to our professions, we do have a lot of programmers in our lives and work, and most of them are men. So when I meet a female programmer and it feels like I'm seeing a panda, I ask her why she chose to be a programmer. At that time, like many people, I had a myth, like you have to be good at math or science to learn programming, but then I broke this myth and realized that programming, unless you want to enter the field of artificial intelligence, then ordinary game programming, web programming, software programming, do not need mathematics too good to be competent.
Sometimes they will emphasize that your logic is better, but in fact, language is also logic, mathematics is not the only representative of logic, and a person's ability to express desires can also reflect his logical organization. In this way, everyone says that women's language is good, so doesn't it show that women can adapt to the role of programmers as well?
Wang: I live in Canada now, and women are encouraged to learn to code. If you want to start choosing whether to study career or academic, when entering university or college, there are a variety of subjects to choose from, and you can study for two or three years and then enter other subjects without problems. They'll encourage women to choose the career path of programmers, which I think is good, which means encouraging women to participate from an early stage, so that everyone can choose this profession, men can, women can also. In society, there are such projects that support women's participation, and then form a situation, such as more and more female programmers, after opening this situation will get better and better, can eliminate some biases. UNR
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