Town and City sculpts

Over in the comments on Kickstarter, I asked why the prototype renders had wavy windows, and got the answer that they were supposed to   look strange and unworldly, since they are seen in the eyes of the spirits and Dahan. I love that idea, and the wavy windows do convey that.

But I do also imagine that the very straightness of the European buildings would look unnatural. One way to make straight sides look unnatural to my eyes is to make them skew, like these skew dice designed by a friend of mine, Henry Segerman:

I find it pretty uncomfortable to watch them in action:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI5njPo7zC0

Despite appearances, they are fair dice in the usual sense.

Anyone have other ideas for making the invaders look "strange and unworldly"?

(Just brainstorming for fun here, I'm sure Greater than Games has plenty of ideas on their own.)

I thought the wavy buildings just looked like poorly modeled buildings, not something done on purpose.  I like the idea of skewing the perspective of the buildings so they looked top-heavy (as if you were looking down on them in an isometric-view video game) but also ominous or predatory.  Something like that would read, to me, as a purposeful style choice.

Agreed, I prefer skewed buildings to wavy ones.

What about the explorers? The samples shown looked cartoony, but not particularly strange or unworldly.

Those looked stylized to me (and kind of Picasso Don Quixote-esque), so I'm good with the sample shown.  I'm sure there are other styles which would be good as well, though.

I don't really like the explorers, they look really spindly and fragile (I'm sure they aren't fragile, but they look it) and I don't think they match with the buildings.

I was going to say the same. They look like they'll crumble and the style is much more curvy and smooth than the buildings. I like the idea of the settlements and cities (and explorers, if that creates a stylistic link) skewing top-heavy, but that might adversely affect their stability.

I guess the explorer sculpt needs to reflect how the Dahan see the invaders, if that's the desired style. So exactly what do the Dahan look like if they see the (presumably Caucasian) settlers as spindly skinny figures with proportional massive chests?

Two other things are bothering me about the sculpt, which I've only just been able to put my finger on.

1. This is essentially a Eurogame (sure, a very thematic Eurogame with war game elements, but it's a Euro at heart). These explorers look a little too much like Ameritrash minis which kind of jars a bit. It's hard for minis to look good in a game like this.

2. The minis are incredibly masculine-looking. I know, historically explorers have mostly been men, but Spirit Island is alt-history. If we can have nature spirits, we can have female explorers - no need to perpetuate the imbalance that's already heavily present in board games in general. Two different sculpts is probably excessive, so I propose a gender-neutral sculpt.

No thoughts on gender-neutral explorer sculpts?

I'm all for it. I'm actually fine with them being pretty abstract - I'm using screws right now.

Yeah, I'm totally for it. Perpetuation of gender inequality aside, all the Dahan are seeing is scary foreign invaders; they don't give two hoots about their gender.

All I see are invaders that will become victims.

I haven't actually decided what I think about the explorers: abstract or not? How gendered? I can see a variety of things possibly working.

P.S. In terms of gender representation, I'm pretty stoked that Thunderspeaker has a female avatar. It's by far the most human of the Spirits so far.

I think the explorers, cities, and towns should have a scary edge to them.   The Dahan don't know what they are and only seem to attack as a last resort when they've been cornered.   

IMO, I think the invaders should be vaguely threatening, which tends to mean masculine (strong upper boddies, jutting jaws, large proportions), so I think worrying about gender neutrality here would be a little off the point.

See, that's the kind of stereotyping that bothers me. Something can't be threatening unless it's masculine?

A large part of this is because among themselves, the Dahan practice a much more ritualized version of warfare, and the Invaders' notions of group conflict are something they have basically no practical experience with. Some Dahan are in flat-out denial - no humans would actually wipe out an entire village over something as small as who gets to farm where, surely that's an exaggeration - while others are trying to figure out how to shift and deal with it, but don't have much guidance other than old stories and the spirits.

+1

In this case, I feel like ideally it's the flag that should parse as really threatening; after all, the Explorers aren't great at beating people up, it's what they represent - who's coming on their heels - that's threatening. But I can't offhand think of any good ways to do that. (Skull-and-crossbones is totally wrong.)

I think that if you want to quickly and cleanly portray "threatening", then masculine stereotypes are the way to go.  Why'd they go with little huts to represent the natives?  Isn't that a pretty stereotypical way to portay a native population?  Of course it is.  The huts are a shortcut to making the user quickly understand what they're supposed to represent precisely because they're stereotypical, and I think the same applies for the invader tokens.  If you try to solve too many problems at once with the design, it'll just get muddy.

What about a horseman? It’s probably easy to make a threatening rider without referring to gendered stereotypes, and horses can represent all the new things the invaders are bringing. The invaders are just funny colored people. Horses are creepy deer things that they’ve never seen before.

As far as threatening flags go, I would go with an all black or all blood red flag with a tattered edge.

I think it's interesting that we now live in a time where game develepors need to be concerned with gender stereotypes. I'm not saying they should or shouldn't be concerned, just that I'm sure the creaters of Life never worried about making the men blue and the women pink.

I totally disagree that masculine stereotypes are the way forward. It's lazy stereotyping. We can portray "threatening" without perpetuating the idea that only males are important.

And I don't think that male gamers can truly understand how it feels to be a woman gamer and be constantly surrounded by games were all the characters are male, or there are just a couple of token female options who are obviously just there as eye candy. The message is clear: games are for men. It's incredibly pervasive, but it's very hard to see the extent of the problem if you're not one if those under-represented minorities.

This is why I don't feel like I can express a strong opinion about Dahan abstracted as huts. I'm a white European from a country which once colonised more than half of the world, so it's not my place to tell anyone else how they should feel about the way the Dahan are represented. Neither is is appropriate for me to dismiss the opinions of any marginalised group that I'm not part of simply because I don't see a problem.

Other colours exist. I myself am wearing green today.

I'd like to think we've moved beyond Life.

And I'd like to see everyone concerned about gender stereotypes, not just game developers. Such stereotypes are harmful and restricting and exclude people who don't fit in those tight little boxes.

It absolutely is, yes. (And if anyone from a relevant culture calls me on it and expresses distaste / says they're offended, I will apologize to them.)

In this case, they're also are the best non-pricey representation[1] of the central-post/radial-roof construction that the Dahan use. A round hut implies one post, and thus probably an offshoot-family that isn't very large yet, but the Towns (which are the equivalent Invader pieces) seem like small single-family affairs, so they're comparable.

It also fits into the general visual paradigm of the game, which is "Invaders = straight lines/right angles; non-Invaders = curved lines/organic".

In cases like this, "recognizable" and "harmful stereotype" aren't always easy to tell apart; my research seemed to indicate that this style of construction was so common that it fell on the former side of the line rather than the latter, but I could be wrong. 

(Trivia: early prototypes all used minimeeples for the Dahan, as they were closer to Explorer-equivalent back then. But mini-meeples were weirdly expensive, so when Dahan stats shifted to full Town-equivalent I swapped components for both systems-representation and price.)

[1] = A custom sculpt could do a multi-post Dahan dwelling, but it'd have to be plastic, and it would probably have a stronger visual equivalence to City pieces, which is a false correlation.

Is it correct that the Dahan will be custom wooden pieces? How will they different from the existing pieces in the photos?

EDIT: Specifically, in the description you gave of the construction, Eric, I gathered that the roof would be conical rather than rounded?

This is essentially my mantra when dealing with things like this. I can totally see why masculine invaders would be cool from a historical-accuracy point of view, but I don't think anyone's going to be seriously disappointed if they go with a more gender-neutral sculpt; I certainly won't be. On the other hand, the effect on many, many female gamers if yet another game comes out dominated by male figures? That matters a whole bunch, in ways I cannot fully comprehend because, as a straight white cis male, I have no frame of reference for this. 

I like what games like Dead of Winter have done, lately: half-and-half. For Dead of Winter, half the zombie standies are female and half are male. I'm sure it's a little more work, as have to have to define two items instead of one, but I personally think it is worth it. So long as the two are close enough in style/appearance, it will be clear they are both explorers.

No, it's not historically accurate, but neither are islands with spirits.

If Spirit Island existed on it’s own, I would have no problem with masculine explorers. They aren’t player characters so providing player cove isn’t vital, and they have a historical basis to justify their masculinity.

But Spirit Island does not exist in a vacuum. It also has to fight against every other game which perpetuates male dominated casting. So every opportunity should be taken to balance the sexes as a way of making a statement.

AFAIK, what you see on the KS page is (more-or-less) what it's going to be.

My impression is that yes, roofs of that style are much closer to conical than rounded. But I suspect having pointy roofs would make them less visually distinct from the angular Invaders - and  custom wood bits tend to be pricey.

I just realized that I haven't thrown my support behind the 'skew dice' version of the invader cities and settlements yet.  I like the 'straight lines' vs 'curved and rounded' dichotomy which I think the wavy versions weakens slightly.

I just wanted to take a minute to say thanks for the support on this. It means a lot, and it's helping me to resist my urge to punch certain KS commenters who either don't get it, or don't care, or both.

I know, it sounds like something that's not a big deal. And in isolation, it isn't - if I bought one game where all the humanoid figures turned out to be male, I'd just be a bit disappointed and move on. But it's game after game after game after game. It's so pervasive that when a game does have positive female representation it's commented on and made a big deal of because of how novel that is. And don't get me wrong, I'm perfectly happy to play a male character, but I resent having to play one because it's the only choice there is.

And I honestly don't know how to communicate that to straight white cis men who don't understand why it's important for people who aren't all of those things to have representation and complain when characters/art/etc aren't straight and white and cis and male just like them. (Because having a character who is like you is only important if you already have a bucketload of characters out there who are like you, apparently.)

[I typed a lot of stuff about my own privilege and deleted it. The tl;dnr is that I know many people have it worse than me, but this is still important.]

I think you're right about the wavy lines. I'm not 100% sold on the skewed idea but straight lines vs curves is much stronger than wavy vs curves.

I don't know enough about how the Dahan huts are constructed to know how perfect the circles/curves are, but I could easily imagine that it would be the unnaturally straight lines and right-angled corners of invader buildings that would seem so strange and unfamiliar to them.

I have a lot of trouble knowing what to say to people being so willfully obtuse. It's hard for me to restrain from punching as well. But I also totally support you. I look forward to the cool ideas that >G comes up with.

I'm also not a huge fan of the wavy look.

As a side note to others using the PnP version, Monopoly houses and hotels work amazingly for towns and cities respectively.

I tend to prefer something simple and iconic for pieces like this. The material and color are already going to do a lot to emphasize the otherness of the invaders. I worry that by adding too much detail to the towns and settlements the e.g. waviness of the pieces will dominate the appearance and make it more difficult to distinguish from each other.

I like the idea of using flags for the explorers.

Another here in agreement over the wavy line debate. Having chunky, square, imposing pieces for the invaders makes more thematic sense, especially if they are larger than the Dahan huts so they really look like they are thoughtlessly unsympathetic to the environment. You almost want the invader pieces to crowd out the terrain when they are put down.

I don't mind so much what the explorer pieces will be as I think the gender neutrality of the card art will be more important than the sculpts, but I'm glad they are changing as I wasn't keen on the original design. I think a flag would make best sense as it de-humanises the invaders even more and makes sense as the thing that would be most noticeable to the Dahan - first come the flags, trying to claim the land, followed then by the invaders en masse with their towers of stone.

Yeah, I am very much on board with the idea of flags for explorers - that's the thing the Dahan and the spirits are worried about, so why not put that front and centre?

(Silverleaf: My favourite bit from KS is the bit where you were apparently 'playing the damsel in distress'. That was... quite some logical leap.)

Wow, that was something. I also liked the man who was quite sure he knew what all the "girls" in his group thought.

On the wavy vs skew discussion, I'd actually like to weigh in a little on the side of "wavy". The amount of waviness in those initial designs they showed off would, I think, seem quite mild at the scale of the actual pieces, and I don't think it would seem too weird. (But I still like a moderate amount of skew instead.)

silverleaf, I have been staring at the image of the figures for the invaders and having trouble seeing why people are thinking they look like men, which is why I think some people are having trouble seeing your point of view. To my eyes, they just look like oddly shaped stick figures.

Broad shoulders, bit of a barrel chest, hips narrower than the main body. There is definitely a maleness skew to the current design.

My concern is them looking spindly and fragile. My games tend to have to endure quite a few knocks. A flag rather than the current explorer would be a very neutral way and remove most of the fragile areas.

will agree they look fragile. They look like you can snap them in two easily. But honestly don't see it. Just see some messed up stick figure.

Hmm, it's obvious to me. It's also playing off the male super-heroic characters, with heavily exaggerated upper bodies (compared to the legs). Compare to Legacy's pose:  http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.com/multiverse/heroes/legacy

Obviously Legacy has vastly more detail, since he is a protagonist rather than a generic explorer. But the overall body shapes are similar, though Legacy's legs aren't as spindly.

Women in comics are not drawn that way: their boobs are exagerated, yes, but their hips are not typically drawn as narrow as that, nor are their legs drawn so spindly compared to the upper body.

But it also sounds like that figure just didn't work as a representation for you at all, which would of course be a problem in itself.

Instead of a flag, what about a compass? It's the same principle- mapping out an area and defining it- but you don't have to worry about what goes on the flag, or its fragility as a game piece. 

Similarly, you could also go with a covered wagon. 

I'd rather have little dudes than flags, but to paraphrase someone on the kickstarter, as long as the tokens\figures are durable and are immediately recognizable as explorers, I don't care too much. I think it makes perfect sense that European explorers would be men, but if that bothers enough people I would of course have no trouble changing them to something more gender neutral.

I like the flag idea, because it means that the explorers are stealing land using the [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTduy7Qkvk8]cunning use of flags[/url].

I still like my horse rider idea as a way of making non-gendered threatening figures, though.

Fragility is a danger, but considering how non-fragile I've seen the [url=http://webzoom.freewebs.com/tolkienboardgamecollecting/LOTR%20Risk%20Pieces.jpg]LotR Risk[/url] pieces to be, I think that good design and good plastic can overcome any dangers.

[quote="dpt"]

Hmm, it's obvious to me. It's also playing off the male super-heroic characters, with heavily exaggerated upper bodies (compared to the legs). Compare to Legacy's pose: http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.com/multiverse/heroes/legacyObviously Legacy has vastly more detail, since he is a protagonist rather than a generic explorer. But the overall body shapes are similar, though Legacy's legs aren't as spindly.Women in comics are not drawn that way: their boobs are exagerated, yes, but their hips are not typically drawn as narrow as that, nor are their legs drawn so spindly compared to the upper body.But it also sounds like that figure just didn't work as a representation for you at all, which would of course be a problem in itself.

[/quote] To add to this, which Incredibles character is the [url=https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/004/556/273/2d37a3013dc19e45df4c0e081b5b956b_original.png?v=1443041244&w=639&fit=max&auto=format&lossless=true&s=ab73cd52e925a5982a2f7ec7f92aac27]explorer[/url] figure most like?

[img]http://guardianlv.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/incredibles-2-with-frozone-650x320.jpg[/img]

And the fact that not everyone can recognize the upside-down triangle shape as a hypermasculine caricature only serves to emphasize our point about male-dominated media being seen as normal.

I was going to make this joke, but I was worried no one would get it. Clearly I have underestimated you all.

No flag, no country. Those are the rules that I just made up, and I'm backing it up with this gun I took from my grandfather's armory.

I want to join this conversation without adding anything constructive but still mildly relevant. So I'll leave this here.

"But historical accuracy!" is an argument I've heard before (not that I'm saying anyone here is making it, but I thought I'd talk about it anyway) and I refute it on two basic points.

1) There have been women explorers in real life, just like there were women pirates, women scientists, and women fighting in wars. While I'm sure it's correct that most of the people who actually "discovered" land were male, painting all explorer pieces as male effectively erases those women who did that job.

2) This isn't a historical simulation. It's a fantasy world where nature spirits wield awesome magical powers. Creating a world where magic and spirits exist and deliberately choosing to make all of your fictional explorers male would be really rather sexist, and I'd call that out too.

@Silverleaf

Having the evil invaders and main antagonists of the game be explicitly sensitive to gender equality amongst their exploration parties seems downright strange to me. Why must I be forced to sympathise with this group I am trying to battle against? Why can't we just say "hey, these guys..ermm...I mean, these people, are discriminatory against women and trying to take over our land. BLAST THEM WITH FIRE". To me that sounds both satisfying and rewarding in the same way that shooting/killing nazis in Wolfienstien is satisfying. 

Generally I share your sentiments but I am trying to play Devils Advocate here a little. My honest opinion is that, given the context of the game, I do not see a significant need to include 2 different gender-based invader sculpts/pieces outside of just doing it for the sheer sake of doing it. Edit: For the record, if there was a single gender-neutral piece, I see nothing wrong with that as a way to please both sides without adding extra production cost to the game.

I think the general concencus was to make the invaders gender neutral, either as sexually ambiguous people or just using a symbol like a flag. I think most people would agree that having two different invaders, one male and one female, would be needlessly expensive for the developers. Also, this doesn't even solve the problem as there are a good number of people who don't identify as either male or female.

I have been considering a thought in a similar vein, which is: How does one avoid running into “noble savage” stereotypes for the Dahan? The choice to couple them to nature spirits seems like it might be headed toward that direction. (An alternative might have been to have them re-appropriate Invader technology, something analogous to King Philip’s War in North America.)

Fundamentally, I do think this game is coming at settlement from a different a fun angle. I think it’s great to be fighting back against invading colonists, and it’s wonderful that the game’s mere existence has me thinking about these complex issues. I’m kind of curious how the game development handled this sort of thing, if at all.

So, people are really good at pattern recognition and particularly good at internalizing patterns without thinking about it. This isn't about: what sorts of folks are the invaders? are they treating each other well? should we like them for it? In my mind, it's much more visceral. It's about seeing: all of these explorers are men; therefore explorers are only men. If attention isn't drawn to it as an issue, it probably doesn't even enter the realm of critical thought for most people and so it passively perpetuates an undesirable pattern. In this case, I don't think the complaint is so much that anyone is actively saying that women can't be explorers, but that men shouldn't always be the default and women only incorporated when it serves the theme or some other purpose.

What can we do about it? Here are a few options:

1. Nothing. Leave all the explorers as men.
2. Turn it on its head: make all of the explorers women
3. Be more inclusive: make multiple explorer sculpts - some men and some women (this means more cost and lead time)
4. Remove unnecessary details: make all of the explorers gender-neutral humans; gender isn't critical to the role that explorers play
5. Get more abstract: make all of the explorers non-human symbols (just as Towns, Cities, Dahan, and Spirit Presence are)

I lean towards #5 because it feels more consistent with the other pieces in the game. Also, if there's ever an expansion where aliens are invading, you don't need a new set of explorer greys.

I said in an edit to my post that I don't see gender-neutral pieces being an issue and could be a way to please all sides easily. 

But I also quite firmly believe that if the designer wants to create a world of his own where their antagonistic invaders don't share the same gender-equality views as we expect in our own real-world society that the designer should have the right to do so without accusations of being a sexist pig. That's where my disconnect with this whole conversations lays I guess.  I'm all down with equal and positive representations of women. It's one of the reasons why I loved SotM from the very first printing. But I don't think it demands to be shoehorned in at the expense of world building (if in fact that is the world in which the designer is envisioning).

Ah, you must have been editing while I was responding. We agree on this then.

Overall, I do agree with you. However in this specific scenario, I don't think the designers are really trying to give us insight into the political/social views of the invaders. We (as the spirits) seem to just think "They are here and I want them gone." So in that sense I don't think that changing the figures from masculine explorers to either gender neutral explorers or a symbol really affects the game world that much. I also don't think anyone here was accusing the designer(s) of being sexist, but perhaps you were speaking generally or hyperbolically.

Like I said, we (and it seems most people in this thread) seem to agree with the general statement "I would either be for or indifferent to the concept of gender neutral explorer pieces." Hopefully I'm not putting words in the mouths of the designer(s) or those commenting in this thread.

EDIT: Oops, forgot to spellcheck.

I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at here because I'm very tired right now, but I'm pretty sure I didn't ask that the invaders themselves be any more sensitive to gender equality than real world explorers have been (and historically, at least some explorers were women).

It's not even about sympathising with the invaders. It's about the implied message that "explorers are male, explorers are only male, and only males can be explorers" that sqgl was talking about.

If the sculpts are neutral you can imagine them however you want personally, but the game avoids the stereotyping. Win-win.

No I was very much speaking hyperbolically.

Unless there's some special undisclosed reason why all the explorers in a fantasy world are male, I do think it's sexist to make all explorers male.

If it was a game about a men's prison, I'd be totally good with all male characters. If it was about the future society that John Wyndham set a short story in where all the men died of some disease, I'd expect to see all females characters. Unless there's some specific and relevant reason for every single character to be the same gender, I'd be complaining.

I don't see that "all explorers are male" makes the world any richer or the story any more interesting - quite the opposite, in fact.

And I'm also not buying the "designers should be able to create unequal worlds without criticism because it's their vision" argument. Sure, create what you want for your own pleasure, no-one's stopping you doing that. But as soon as you release something into the public domain you should expect criticism if what you've created perpetuates a stereotype for basically no good reason other than "this is what my world is like". If I published a novel where every thief was black and all black people were thieves I would quite rightly be called out on it, unless that was the context of the actual theme of the story and relevant to the plot.  Being an artist shouldn't excuse you from criticism.

Also my favourite ridiculous KS comment is now the one where having gender neutral sculpts equals being excited about being able to be violent to woman and eat babies.

How is that rediculous? Makes perfect sense to me (just to be safe, yes I'm being sarcastic).

Are you trying to say that calling all black people theives is equivalent to saying all explorers were male? I really can't agree with that at all.

There is no historical or societal precedent you can point to saying that all black people are theieves. That is just flat out blatent racism. However you can do that for explorers/invaders of new lands. Truth is vast majority of those kinds of people were male at a certain point and for a large portion of our history. If you wanted to base a story off of that time period or those particular societies as a storyteller or designer, then it seems both plausible and sensible that most of those explorer characters could happen to be male in that scenario. You can call that sexist if you want or you can say that the story teller in that position has some moral/societal obligation to change that narrative to include women in it, but I just don't see it in this context.

Now, I have no idea whatsoever what Eric and GTG have in mind as it pertains to Spirit Island or what kind of societies they want to portray here. And given their track record in this topic as a company, I am faily positive they will respond with an idea that addresses these concerns. This thread has come up with a ton of great ideas.

Do not mistake me here though, I do agree with what you are saying generally speaking. Again, it's a devils advocate position I'm taking. But I also think folks can be way to quick to shout "Sexism! Change it!" and it's not the first time I've felt this forum has been too quick on the proverbial draw with it (Adam's MindPyre art and that discussion comes to mind here).

There is never a good argument you can make for making all black people in a story a theif. You can have a good basis for making all of your colonial exploreres male however if you wanted to defend the position. But then again, I'm a white male so how valuable is my opinion on this anyway.

That would be 'thief', not 'theif'.  

Other than that, I have nothing to contribute.  Carry on.

That comment was, of course, ridiculous. However, it did get me thinking about how many of the things we as spirits do in the game are actually fairly horrible. We wipe out entire towns and cities at a single blow, drown people in tsunamis, etc, etc.

Ya, but they started it!

No, it was a deliberately extreme example of how if an artist chooses to create a stereotypical world for no good reason they should expect to be called on it. I wasn't equating the two.

I'm totally accepting that historically explorers were predominantly male. That's already happened and it would be foolish to deny it. The world was (and still is) a sexist place where women have fewer opportunities to do awesome/interesting things than men do.

The problem is that no-one's arguing for historical accuracy when it comes to, y'know, not having magical nature spirits that exist and can influence the environment and people, but somehow we have to reflect the real world when it comes to non-male explorers. I hear this kind of thing all the time on BGG - "Dragons, elves, goblins, wizards, ghouls? Awesome! A woman who's good with a sword? UNREALISTIC!"

I still maintain that if you've created a world where you've chosen to include spirits but kept in the "only males actually do stuff" bit, you've created something sexist even if that wasn't the intention. If I choose to make all the black people in my fantasy novel slaves, then there's a good chance that I'm being racist or at the very least culturally insensitive.

And this last bit is hard because it makes me sound like I'm being a massive dick and I'm trying really hard not to be. But honestly, if you haven't experienced the pervasive sexism in society in general and gaming in particular first-hand, I don't think you can understand how important all this imagery is. Sexism (and racism and homophobia and all the other types of discrimination) are so inherent and internalised that unless you're on the other side of it you often can't even see it. I don't want to dismiss anyone's opinions, but I do give more weight to the opinions of people who have either experienced the discrimination themselves or based their opinion on reports from discriminated people.

[quote="Silverleaf"]

The problem is that no-one's arguing for historical accuracy when it comes to, y'know, not having magical nature spirits that exist and can influence the environment and people, but somehow we have to reflect the real world when it comes to non-male explorers. I hear this kind of thing all the time on BGG - "Dragons, elves, goblins, wizards, ghouls? Awesome! A woman who's good with a sword? UNREALISTIC!"

[/quote]

Alternate history as a genre tends to assume by default that anything not pointed out as being different from our history is the same as our history.

The problem is ripple effects.  For European society to produce explorers that are significantly different from the ones we are historically familiar with, that implies that European society is significantly different from the one we understand.  That is a difference that Spirit Island cannot and should not explore, because the game is not about alternate history European culture.  This is not to say that Spirit Island's world can't have this change, just that Spirit Island itself should not address the topic, because it is not prepared to address the associated complications.

This is why, incidentally, Spirit Island's explorers should absolutely not be female.  Doing so would declare a historical change which is not explained, explored, or relevant.  The change itself is not bad, but it flunks all the criteria of good storytelling.

Male explorers are less problematic* because there is not need to explain or explore the concept.  The default assumption of alternate history explains it, and history itself explores it.  But it's still not relevant, which is why male explorers, while less problematic, are still problematic.

Androgeny or symbolic explorers are the ideal answer from a storytelling perspective, because it takes the detail that isn't relevant and doesn't include it.

This post has meandered several times while I was writing it, and it doesn't say everything I want to, but whatever - I'm tired of writing it, so it's done.

*As a storytelling device.  They're more problematic for other reasons, but those reasons have already been covered in this discussion.

I totally agree with the majority of that, AL. I'm not convinced it's the case for generic fantasy worlds, but you're right that if you're going alt-history then irrelevant alts can detract from what your game or story is actually about. I don't like it, but then I don't like that my gender has been marginalised since forever.

We can all imagine that our neutral pieces are whatever gender we want, and everyone will be happy.

Everyone except the handful of commenters on KS who will probably complain about pandering to the unreasonable wimminz who want to ruin all their toys. And that guy who's taking comments extremely personally and essentially making up what he imagines I've said...

I think they should look like dwarf bunnies.

I am totally on board with this.

Damn rabbits! Coming over here, eating our grass, stealing our jobs...

Can I say that I really admire your restraint, Silverleaf?

Yeah, other world fantasy is a different story, even if it's inspired by a real world culture.  The only real excuse to build inequality into a world where you have complete creative freedom is that you wish to address that inequality in your story.

Speaking of which, didn't you promise us bunny pictures?

I'm surprising myself, to be honest. The fact that my politeness can't possibly last is one of the reasons why I'm withdrawing from further "discussion" with Mr I'm-Being-Attacked. Fighting in KS comments doesn't help the campaign.

That bolded part says it far better than I could have done, thank you.

I did promise bunny pictures! Let me see if I can sort that out - I'm currently on Meeple supervisation duty while he exercises in the living room so I'm on my iPad, but I'll see what I can do.

Let's see, does this work?

This is Nemesis a couple of weeks ago.

Meeple's proving trickier to show you so his picture will have to wait until I get to the PC.

Awwwww!

I'm not sure I can handle that much cuteness.

Careful. That looks like one of those hypno-murder bunnies.

Too....cute.....

I bet they actually have big, nasty, pointy teeth. I mean, they can leap about, just look at the bones!

Now while I can't guarantee he won't hypno-murder you, what's more likely to happen is him jumping into your lap and proceeding to lick your arms.

What an eccentric performance.

Heh.  My mother had a rabbit that she trained to kiss.  If you held it up to your nose and said "kiss!" it would lick your nose.  Of course, if you held it up to your nose and didn't say "kiss!" it would still lick your nose, but why would you do that?

Cute.

I'm clicker-training my two! They were learning to sit up in that cute meerkat-bunny way when I cued them, but I've interrupted that to work on counter-conditioning them to tolerate and eventually enjoy being picked up and handled, which is something that rabbits rarely enjoy unless it's on their terms but is a necessity for health checks and vet visits.

And oh my goodness, they are smart if food is involved!

Ahh nooo, the picture just shows as a grey "No Entry" sign for me :(. I want to see da bunneeez :(. Also, can you move to Kent or something so I can come and give them cuddles? :D

I 100% agree with everything you said here. Thumbs Up

But what makes you so confident as to call Spirit Island a "Generic Fantasy" world? It comes off as fairly specific to me. Our one adversarys shown on the KS page is Brandenburg-Prussia, so I think there are clear signs that this is not just some generic world but by and large part of the world we are historically familiar with. 

I wasn't calling it generic fantasy. I don't think it is.

But even in real-world real history there were non-male explorers. They were in the minority, but they existed. Painting all explorers as male would be like portraying all WW2 soldiers as white.

Minority is a major understatement. I can't find a single piece of evidence about state sanctioned women explorers in the 1600s or 1700's. I'd love to learn more about them if you can point me in the right direction to read about them though. Jeanne Baré, who was born in 1740, was the first women to travel around the globe but had to do so disguised as a man. That is the earliest example I could find and she was pretty much forbiden to do her travels as a women.

Painting the vast, vast majority of exploreres in the 1600 and 1700s as male is just pointing out a historical fact.  You are tredding down a revisionist history path by trying to state otherwise.  It is in no way, shape, or form akin to painting all WW2 soliders as white. That is kind of rediculous.

I was thinking an exaggerated flag with a smaller figure holding it would work.

The aggressive posture of the invader I like, could we make the flag look aggressive and the person holding it less notable?

That would be ideal to me, and be more gender neutral as our generic image of aggressive and arogant is tied in heavily with gender.

I'm also very interested to hear more about women explorers. Reading about Jeanne Barré was awesome!

I'm not sure that you're looking at the right population, Foote. To me, the Explorers in Spirit Island feel more like frontier folk in the American West, and there were of course settler families and female gunfighters. We're not talking first contact here, the invaders have already been on the island for a few years.

The card art mostly shows male soldiers in morions (as in popular depictions of Spanish conquistadors), with swords. But the game is not necessarily set so early in the European colonial period.

I wouldn't know how to make a flag look aggressive and arrogant. I must be rubbish at the cunning use of flags.

Since there has been speculation about designer intent:

1. The alt-history does follow the general rule of "things not explicitly called out as changes are more or less the same". The societies of Europe are roughly as on-board with gender equality as they were in our history, which is to say, not very.
2. This does not mean all Explorers are male. As the rulebook says, Explorers "represent Invaders willing to travel into uncharted wilderness: mapping expeditions, the very boldest homesteaders, etc." Most[1] Explorers from (eg) formal armed-forces scouting units are apt to be male, but that is patently untrue for homesteaders, folks who like ranging out into the woods, etc.
3. The question of "how do we represent Explorers in sculpts?" is really its own, entirely different question. Even if for some good reason 100% of Explorers were male, is there a compelling reason to depict that in the sculpts? "Historical accuracy" is not sufficient; there are a zillion details about historical explorers that might not make their way into a sculpt - eg, they usually wore shoes or boots, and probably had bad teeth. In the absence of some compelling reason to explicitly make the sculpts masculine, there's certainly a compelling reason to go gender-neutral, which is "let's not put another pebble on the 'male by default' side of an already-very-unbalanced scale".

[1] = But not all; history seems pretty clear on the fact that there's frequently been some number of women involved in military action - quietly, in many circumstances, since it often wasn't condoned.

> Most[1] Explorers from (eg) formal armed-forces scouting units are apt to be male, but that is patently untrue for homesteaders, folks who like ranging out into the woods, etc.

Heh.  I'd like to see them try an set up a self sustaining homestead without women around.

As Twain once said, when asked about the subject, “What would men be without women? Scarce, sir...mighty scarce.”

No, it'd be like portraying all WW2 soldiers as male…

There's nothing much I can say about this other than thank you. Have 87 Silverleaf points!

Any chance of this making its way into the KS comments, or an update or something?

That would still be inaccurate.

And after Eric's post about the inclusion of Homesteaders in the "invaders" catagory along with state sanctioned exploratory groups, It appears that you are correct. I was missing an aspect of the invador population. Good call.

My ancestors were the Quakers who kept trying to stay away from other settlers in America, and everytime a small community they founded took off and grew big enough that non-Quakers were growing in number they would go farther West and start a new one.  Even though we got along with the natives it always strikes me that they were invaders, maybe the better of the invaders, but invaders nonetheless.

They certainly wouldn't have let some "pagan spirits" stop them from cutting down trees, plowing the earth, diverting the river and introducing foreign crops.  Had no trouble with shooting wolves or ground hogs either.

True, but I don't think your argument is "if even one woman was involved, they have to get equal representation", right?  Those 400k women U.S. soldiers made up just 2.5% of the total 16.1 million U. S. soldiers in WW2.  I'm sure their contribution was important, but 2.5% isn't a lot.  And the percentage of actual female explorers/invaders in history had to be just a tiny, tiny fraction of that.  Vanishingly small, I would imagine.

Besides, as has been said here before, it's not like the invaders are our characters.  We're not meant to empathize with them and they aren't meant to represent us.  They're the scary, faceless, invading monsters of the game.  It seems like making them inclusive in a 21st century way can only reduce their effectiveness as an icon of invading death.

If they have to be flags, that seems like a reasonable compromise, but I don't feel like a compromise is called for here.

I also had a Quaker upbringing, and got a little bit of the "good settlers" narrative. But I'm with you, however good their intentions were, they were invaders along with everyone else.

(I grew up in New Jersey, so didn't get as much of the frontier narrative that you seem to have had.)

Hmm, I don't think 2.5% is that small a percentage. The percentage of female soldiers in the time period in question is doubtless much smaller than 2.5%, but, again, the explorers are not just soldiers, and the invaders more broadly (including towns and cities) certainly had plenty of women.

EDIT: Edited, because there were some people who liked those first sculpts.

The card art is another matter, and has individualized and detailed representations. I haven't noticed any bad teeth yet, though 

2.5% seems significant to me. It's significantly more than 0%, which is what you'd be claiming if you said that all WW2 soldiers were male. At what percentage point do we draw the line and say "below this, it's okay to negate the women involved"?

And really, it's not just about the characters that we actually play. That's a separate (and also important) issue, but a lot of people aren't getting that for me at least, the representation of the background is a big deal too. It's really not just a case of appropriate diversity in player options.

Eric's explained that since the explorers aren't "first contact" (remember the game's set years after the island was first "discovered") there will definitely be women amongst them. Mechanically and thematically the explorer groups are there to find appropriate places for new settlements, and to start building them, and a lot of this would have been done in extended family groups.

I think there might be a bit of a disconnect in our understanding of how the explorers work. You seem to be imagining more of a conquering army aggressively attacking the Dahan, and I'm seeing settlers colonising a new area and threatening the Dahan by claiming their land and obtaining resources and farming unsustainably.

Even sustainable farming, they are conquering nature.

Any town, any ploughed field, any irrigation ditch, secured shoreline, dug out harbor, cut down trees, dug wells.  All of that IS the threat.

What does the forest care iF sdiers with guns march through?  But when farmers start looking for more field, or wood for homes.  Then the forest will care.

What does a river care if scouts follow its banks or trapse through, the animals do that.  But when they divert its course to where they want it to go, when they take that free spirit and force it to serve them, then it will care.

The lore of the game isn't a conquering army, it is settlers moving in.  Not explorers and soldiers, but families.  They aren't just men or women, they are children too.  The Spirits aren't fighting to protect the Dahan from an army, they are fighting the blight, the ploughed field, the river dam, the shoreline turned into a dock.

Nature is fighting for its freedom against the tyranny of everyday humans who subject nature to their aims.

This. With added emphasis. 

Phantaskippy, I think you've found your new calling as a spirit-seeker.

"And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is [insert Spirit name here] when I lay my vengeance upon thee."

Farmer's like "what?"

As this game is set over a period of years/decades, are you all OK with the idea that some of the Meeples should be smaller than the rest to represent the children you are driving off the land?

Hey, I'm gonna get some of those micro-meeples to represent the Babbas too. Then every turn, switch out every meeple for a slightly larger one? Mega Meeple die out and get replaced by micro-meeple and so the great circle of life carries on?

My explorers will all be made out of nitinol. Guess I'll need an electric board.

Incidentally, I have found the imps from Dungeon Lords to make excellent explorers.  

Necroing this thread because of the new Update.  I just want to say that I really like the new design.  I think that it hits everything we discussed here - threatening, gender non-specific, angular, and a flag.  I also like the similarities I see between the explorer's faces and Grey Aliens.  I think it's a good parallel for showing how the natives regard these invaders.

That does look pretty cool - very "unnatural" wih the pointy bits and the weird stick-arms, that will look suitably out-of-place in the Dahan-populated Island :).

Agreed! It really conveys some alien-ness. Now I'm curious about the Towns and Cities.

The new Explorer design is excellent. It looks like a character who would battle my Dragoon dragons!

(And promptly lose, of course.)

Reminds me of Don Quixote.