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Women-0, Men-1
By Corvus | February 14, 2007
I recently learned an interesting detail about Chris Crawford’s new drama engine (I refuse to call it a Story Engine) — in order to set the gender of a character, you set a boolean called MALE to true or false. Got that? A Woman is defined in the engine as MALE=FALSE. A rather homme-centric approach, non? I know it sounds like I’m about to make much ado about nothing, but stick with me for a bit.
Yesterday I wrote that I’m not working on a game, I’m working on a Narrative Engine. Or more accurately that PJ’s Attic isn’t exactly a game design studio and that we aim, instead, to be a metaphor factory. This is the perfect opportunity to share with you a little bit about what that means with a practical, albeit rather granular, example.
The issue at hand is telling the engine whether the gender of an individual is male or female. At first blush, a boolean is perfect for this. True/False, 1/0, it’s a small value and by setting the name of this boolean to MALE, you’re making it easy for anyone using the engine to quickly assign a gender.
Well as a storyteller, the first thing I think of when faced with this choice is that allowing for only two genders is rather limiting. What if you have a desert dwelling lizard race which is bi-gendered? One option would be to add some other variable which overrides the gender boolean, but I could also simply decide to allow the gender variable to be more… well, variable.
Additionally, as someone who regularly draws on social, religious, and mythic references from outside my western Judeo-Christian upbringing, assigning gender as it relates to the male seems so… so… provincial. It’s a design decision which rings of a blinkered viewpoint, locked into a set of rigid codes beyond which believes that anything which lies outside of itself is not of interest.
So instead of a boolean, we’ll use an integer value to determine gender and instead of labeling the value MALE, we’ll more appropriately call it GENDER. The question then becomes which number to assign to which gender? And that’s where metaphoric analysis kicks in. For reference, the thought process I’m about to describe took less than 30 seconds.
Can I find an easy to remember and mythically/metaphorically appropriate example of gender symbols which can be easily translated into numbers? Yes, and here it is.
In the tarot, an excellent introduction into the use of metaphor*, the female is often represented by a circle or oval. The circle represents the egg and it is all encompassing. The circle is also the zero, the inviolate number which is the source of all numbers, which cannot be multiplied, divided, or otherwise muted or mutated. The circle is the symbol for the feminine genitalia, and for the womb itself.
So, 0 is clearly female.
So, who gets the 1? The rod? The staff? The sword? The penis? The primal prime? The linear path? Yeah, the male should be represented by the number 1.
Equally clearly, bi-gendered individuals are well represented by the number 2.
So, now we identify genders in a manner which is mythically consistent, metaphorically accurate, and socially respectful. Of course, the audience won’t always know what values we’ve used to determine what, but the care and attention we’ve paid to every detail will be reflected in their experience.
Additionally, other storytellers using the engine will have the opportunity to populate their worlds with as many genders as they care to and assign their own metaphoric significance if they like.
Then I had a bit of a reality check when I realized that in the same society which produced the decision to declare the Feminine by setting MALE to False has completely quantized both the numbers 0 and 1 to fit their world view. Losers and misfits are referred to as Zeros and winners are Number 1 thus placing, once again, the masculine in ascendancy over the feminine.
So it seems that the inherent sexism of the ‘system’ is ultimately inescapable, but at least my metaphor can be interpreted in more than one way!
*If you can find a copy, Barbara Walker’s book, Understanding the Tarot (link), is an excellent read. It takes a historic, and unabashedly feminist, look at the tarot and its symbols. I wholeheartedly recommend it to any storyteller, history buff, or spiritual academic. It’s particularly interesting when read as a companion piece to Elaine Pagels’s Gnostic Gospels (link) and Karen Armstrong’s History of God (link).
Tagged:Honeycomb Engine, storytelling. | 9 Comments »
February 14th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
I agree that its funny and possibly reads something into Crawford’s autobiography, but I take issue with this: “Of course, the audience won’t always know what values we’ve used to determine what, but the care and attention we’ve paid to every detail will be reflected in their experience.”
I think you’re drawing a correlation without any sort of argument or frame of reference to suggest there really is a causal link between formally clever design and the resultant experience, in this case at least. If you assigned female to 1, male to 2, and bi to 3, it wouldn’t make any difference for the player.
Your point is relevant, however, to the nature of the content creation process, so I can see that translation evident there.
Another interesting point, I’ve read that its difficult to get non-hetero-normative relationships to work in Storytron, through I guess I’ll have this tested soon enough.
February 14th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Yeah, I left out step B in the process, didn’t I?
My point is not that I am more clever than Crawford, or that this small detail will impact the audience’s appreciation of the HoneyComb Engine. Rather, that if we keep our eye on Story while making even the smallest of decisions, it can’t help but affect the tone and style of the entire process and that stands to make a huge difference in the audience’s experience.
Let’s hope A) that I’m right. And B) that it’ll be a difference that attracts and excites an audience rather than repels and alienates one!
February 14th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
As an added irony, from a programming perspective, your integer system and Storytron’s boolean system overlap for all situations that have only male or female genders. While the integer system is technically more flexible (negative genders!), the implementation can be neatly ignored in digital realm for male and female. In fact, in C/C++ a boolean and an integer are often even the same byte size and only differ in operation and implementation.
0 always equates to a FALSE boolean operation
1 (or any positive value) always equates to a TRUE operation.
So MALE = 1, is the same as MALE = TRUE (and vice versa).
[/geek]
February 14th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
*eltrohc*
Yeah, that hadn’t escaped me either, Duncan! In fact, it seems to me that I’ve worked with a language where the syntax stripped away the pretext and had you check for ’0′ and ’1′ rather than ‘true’ and ‘false’. But I could be crazy.
February 14th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
The tarot stuff would never have entered my mind, but I’ve enumerated constants for Female / Male before. Of course females go first: It’s alphabetical.
February 14th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
I’m glad we all appreciate the irony of taking the mythic/metaphoric route in deciding how to represent gender, only to end up right where we started. Okay, not exactly, but close enough. In python, boolean are a subtype of integer such that 1 is True and 0 is False.
An as an quick off topic aside, Judeo-Christian is one the the terms I hate most for reasons, I won’t get into now…
February 15th, 2007 at 5:36 am
Shamus: *eltrohc*
Chill: Python, right! I thought it might have been, but it’s been a while since I poked at Python. I appreciate your not derailing the comments with a rant about your dislike of the term “Judeo-Christian” but you’ve got me curious now. Feel free to express yourself here or via email!
February 15th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
On second thought, Chill, you’ll get a whole post in which to discuss it tomorrow!
February 27th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
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