Since the topic of femaleness has been popping up on the threads frequently, I thought I might pick peoples brains on the subject. Don't be shy, this is an anthropological study on my part. ...
How about a quote from the "T1 Sausage Factory" about the game development?
So our initial plans for our Caribbean dictator game, Tropico (yes, we settled on a name) didn’t give much thought to women. However, the game has a heavy political emphasis. To support the politics, we wanted every character in the game (up to 500 or so), to be a unique individual. We gave them each a history, a job, a home, and (here it comes), a spouse. Well, most of them get spouses anyways – even fictional computer characters can strike out with the opposite sex. We decided on a true 50/50 male/female ratio.
Don’t get the wrong impression, all of us at PopTop are still a bunch of chauvinist pigs. As we created different character professions (about 40 at the moment), we were happy to add ‘French Maid’ and, err, ‘Hostess of Easy Virtue’ (they help draw American tourists to your island).
While we were rolling with this ‘social realism’ concept, we added children, retirees, unemployed workers, full-time mothers and other groups seldom seen in computer games.
Unfortunately, we ran into a technical constraint. Because our characters are pre-rendered with a lot of different animations, they chew up a lot of memory. About 60% of our memory budget for a 32MB machine is spent on unit animations. With 40 professions, we didn’t have the memory to have two versions of each, one male and one female. So, in typical chauvinist pig manner, we decreed that only women could fill some positions (the aforementioned maid, ‘social hostess’, teacher, doctor, journalist), and only men could fill others (miner, banker, dock worker). Some decisions were easy – priests must be male (the Catholic church decided this one for us). Some were harder – spies, male or female? We chose female. When the cunning, attractive female spy encounters the macho, arrogant male general, don’t bet on the guy with the brass buttons.
So there you have it. The females are there in
Tropico due to PC. Not enough of the "right kind" of PC? Well, shucky dern -- the darn thing could have been all neuter. What fun, eh? Babies from the cabbage patch, I say!
