Happy Women’s Day!
In Captain’s Gambit, our cast of characters involves aliens, but of course based on Shakespearian characters from centuries ago.
While we’ve kept the names and pronouns of the original characters, it was a conscious decision to design the female captains as such that we didn’t give them all cis-mammal-human characteristics.
The art and character designs that we went for might look inconsequential, but the design behind them is actually a little complicated. The question boils down to this: how do you make representation of women obvious, without perpetuating stereotypes about what defines womanhood?
Depending on where you come from, this may sound like a kind of random question, maybe one that doesn’t need to be asked.
However, my experience and academic research into topics of representation highlight that it’s precisely the weird, slightly-awkward nature of these questions that makes them necessary to ask. In my opinion, it’s through specifically questioning the implications of things that we normally do without a second thought that we can better recognize the social context we're embedded within.
In Favour of “Female-Looking” Aliens
There’s two sides to this question that we wrestled with when designing the captains: on one hand, having visually identifiable “human female” presenting captains means that onlookers and players can easily recognize that women exist.
This won’t be a blog post discussing the argumentation in favour of representation, but essentially that’s the upside of having ”female”-looking aliens: visual indicators of stereotypical femininity helps normalise the presence of women in the world (especially non-sexualized women) - so by doing this, we can gain at least one brick towards the deconstruction of patriarchal norms.
Conversely, if nobody ‘looks like a woman’, there’s the question of whether or not there’s female and femme representation at all in Captain’s Gambit. Would we look like we’re ashamed of normative femininity?
In Favour of Aliens Looking Like Aliens
There’s the other hand, though, particularly relating to biological essentialism: it’s the fact that there is no way aliens would share the same gendered visual stereotypes that humans do. And, even if they were all human, I have pretty strong personal reasons to represent gender as something more than what our society might regard as biological typicality.
Looking at how we easily designed men with such a variety of body types, it would be not just stifling, but also uncomfortably obsessed with linking femininity to gaze and appearance, to try and design all the women in Captain’s Gambit within a humanoid box. The implicit throughlines one could draw from comparing genders would be gross if we were to make every woman in Captains’ Gambit “look feminine”: why constrain the appearance range of one gender, while letting men like Puck just Puck around as a plantman?
The Solution Actually Was Easy
Yeah, the path is obvious in retrospect, huh? Just do both! I’ve concluded in the past that multiplicity is key, and I felt silly for taking so long to realize that multiplicity was the answer for our own game as well.
It’s also what I think other media often mess up: by having only one person representing an entire group of people, or by representing every person within a group of people in the same way, I think there’s an uncomfortable burden for those characters to embody the complex and multifaceted nature of anything falling under their identities. For example, what it means to be a woman.
So yes, some captains look cis-human-female (mostly via eyelashes) but others don’t look humanly-female but are still women. And now you know why! My hope is that it’s never even crossed your mind until now - I want to normalize this stuff, and I hope we’ve been successful.
You can learn more about Captain’s Gambit here. You can also check out the rest of our blog here.
Stay lofty!
PS: We recognize the patterns with the win conditions of most women in Captain’s Gambit… blame Shakespeare’s narrow scope of characterization. If you do have characters you’d love to see in future expansions or stretch goals, let us know!