(no subject)

[benlehman]

Most painful thing I've had to write in a while

Why? Because I spend a lot of time and emotionally energy in said isolated circles.

Ahw, fuck it all.

Comments

[arianhwyvar.livejournal.com]

Np, don't reply if you don't wish to. I will continue posting so long as I have things to say, unless you request otherwise.

What if 90% of the people you present your game to, regardless of gender, have a problem with the game's process? Do you say 'tell me how to do it' to them? Seems to me you'd get the same muck. My suspicion is that are ways to keep your agendas matching and still have improvements you could make to address problems people (again regardless of gender) have with your current result.

Absolutely -- don't use input by people who aren't interested in what you specifically are trying to do. But again, that's a gender-neutral thing. If you don't take input from anyone, obviously you're not being biased in what input you take. If you do make changes because of the reactions of people in one group, but regularly refuse to consider making changes because of the input of people in another group, it may be coincidence that all the input you're not taking is from people in the second group, or it may be bias.

Everyone has biases and assumptions, and those will naturally come out in their work. The more overt those are, the less likely the work is to do what you want it to do, or evoke the same kinds of things for other people that it does for you, for people who don't share your biases/assumptions. Therefore, if you want to broaden the range of people who can interact with your work in the intended fashion (which may not be what you want, since it may lessen the effect/usefulness for a narrower group), I think a certain amount of counter-bias effort is helpful, maybe even necessary. That means running your stuff by people you are aware are different from you, and possibly taking their input into consideration. Presumably these are the sort of people you still want to include in the target audience for your work, despite their differences from you.

While I'm still not convinced that men and women have truly significant mental/physiological differences as entire groups, I do believe there are differences based in culture and probable experience, and so a deliberate effort to counter-bias to some degree is probably useful. How useful or necessary any counter-bias effort is is probably related to how large a portion of the intended audience that group is. Also probably how directly the bias is related to the material -- if I'm writing something specifically relating to religions I don't follow, but I don't want people who follow that religion to reject my work because it's offensive or off base, it's more important to get input from people of that religion than people in another age bracket. But something about age issues, vice versa.

If you don't choose to change things in your work because of input, the reason you understand yourself to be rejecting the input reflects restrictions on your target audience. I'm designing this game for people who agree with theory premises X,Y,Z. I'm designing this game for women. I'm designing this game for people familiar with american culture and slang. Whatever.

I do think both accepting and rejecting input is quite different from saying 'you don't like it, ok, tell me how to do it.' That just sounds like giving up.