Postmortem: Tale of Tales’ The Path

[Anonymous]

I was reading the postmortem for The Path over on gamasutra:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/5902/postmortem_tale_of_tales_the_path.php

It’s a very interesting read, and a very interesting game. I down loaded the prologue, which is a bit like their demo. There is almost no gameplay in it but there are some very interesting design features, most notable the elevation of the camera as your character sprints that limits your field of view.

There was one weird part of the post mortem though:
"Part of the reason, probably, was that we only got male candidates. Our experience with finding our wonderful animator Laura Raines Smith had taught us that it takes a woman to animate girls properly. Maybe it takes a woman to model girls as well. We don’t blame the men; we blame the fact that more women don’t choose 3D modeling as a career! And that we couldn’t find the right person when we needed her."

This just seems like a crazy position to take.

Here I was thinking it was an artists ability to depict that made them great. Instead you can’t possibly be as good as a man at modeling or animating males if you’re female or modelling females and animating or modelling females if you are male. Apparently ability to understand movement and anatomy is impaired by gender.
I wonder what other things our genders limit us in depicting?
Guys can only do robots really well and girls ponies?

This is a really disheartening perspective for what I thought of as a very progressive indie developer to take.

[Anonymous]

Instead you can’t possibly be as good as a man at modeling or animating males if you’re female or modelling females and animating or modelling females if you are male. Apparently ability to understand movement and anatomy is impaired by gender. [/quote:b60037f588]
That, or they just didn’t have very good male animators?

[Anonymous]

"Form and Motion affect Sex Perception"
Trinity Research: An experiment to determine factors that influence the perceived sex of virtual characters
http://isg.cs.tcd.ie/cosulliv/Pubs/APGVMcDonnellCAMReady.pdf

[Anonymous]

That’s a really interesting read. Very useful study, I’ll have to spend a bit of time going through the references.

The gender of the participants was not a factor in their determining the gender of each model/walk cycle. It would logically follow that it would be an artists ability to depict that determines their ability to represent a characters sex rather than his or her gender.

[Author]

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