An Anecdote from Gaider

Today David Gaider, Lead Writer on the Dragon Age series at BioWare posted an insight anecdote into how mixed-gender teams see things differently. You may remember Gaider from such discussions as the Straight Male Gamer.

Here’s are some extracts from his post today:

We were sitting down to peer review a plot…

As it happened, most of the guys went first. Typical stuff— some stuff was good, some stuff needed work, etc. etc. Then one of the female writers went, and she brought up an issue. A big issue. It had to do with a sexual situation in the plot, which she explained could easily be interpreted as a form of rape.

It wasn’t intended that way. In fact, the writer of the plot was mortified. The intention was that it come across as creepy and subverting… but authorial intention is often irrelevant, and we must always consider how what we write will be interpreted….

…after the meeting was over, it struck me how sharply divided the reviewers were on gender lines. The guys involved, all reasonable and liberal-minded fellows I assure you (including me!) all automatically took the intended viewpoint of the author and didn’t see the issue. The girls had all taken the other side of the encounter, and saw it completely differently— all of them. As soon as it was pointed out, it was obvious… but why hadn’t we seen it?

The full post is very enlightening and Gaider goes on to analyse ow things might have turned out differently.. Read it over on his Tumblr: The Female Perspective in Game Development.

(via Holly Pickering)

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