Knights of Pen & Paper is clever and original and very fun... But it's also a very clear example of how so many games are failing so many gamers... for literally no narrative or gameplay-related purpose . Here's what I mean:

I was very excited for Behold Studios' Knights of Pen and Paper to be released on iOS earlier this month. If you've never heard of this innovative mobile game, it combines retro gaming flavor with a tabletop rpg framework: You control the make-up of your party both in terms of players and classes, as well as the complexity of their battles, the direction of the story, and even the decor of your room, while adventuring and questing across the map. It's all charming and novel, but when the game was finally released on iOS (after previously only being available on Android) my excitement to play died down at record speed. I don't think I offend very easily when it comes to games (though I do roll my eyes a lot), but Knights of Pen and Paper had managed to offend me before I'd even made my first character.

When you start Knights of Pen & Paper, you start with your Dungeon Master and two party members that you pick from a list of predetermined characters. Being the type of player I am, I wanted to make a character like myself and others like my friends to play with. Well, too bad.

The three choices for female characters in this game are a grandma, Paris Hilton (yes really), and a manic pixie dreamgirl in the form of Ramona Flowers from the Scott Pilgrim franchise. That's it. Out of about a dozen character options including the developers themselves, a pizza guy, a little brother, an office worker and so on, there are three female options (maybe 3.5 if you want to generously include the alien). There are so many male characters that could easily have had female counterparts and, if you want to say that every character is drawn from a trope, plenty more female tropes to engage. They don't even reach for low-hanging fruit like a Ren Faire girl, so it almost seems lazy.

But maybe it's not so bad. So there are only a handful of female characters, so what? Well, every character has a bonus that gives them an advantage in one area over other characters, something like increased experience gain or higher health. The bonusses for the female characters are 'Loudness', 'Shopping', and 'Luck', respectively. Yikes. There's a time and a place for stereotyping like that in games, and that's only when it adds to the story or the game itself in a meaningful way (Becky Chambers has written about this particular issue better than I ever could over at The Mary Sue). I don't see how having Paris Hilton (a reference that is painfully dated in the mid 2000's at this point) rolling for initiative adds to the complexity of the satire/homage at the heart of this game.

Naturally if you want to change your Dungeon Master you can, but if you want a female DM you're completely out of luck. You can be Yoda or Doc Brown, but you can't be a woman.

Look, I'll concede that tabletop RPGs have historically been dominated by groups of guys bro-ing out over their +2 broadswords and so on, but it's not 1980 anymore. Times have changed. Plenty of women enjoy these games as much as men-- and beyond the tabletop gaming world, RPGs in general are an incredibly popular genre among women (just look at the fandoms surrounding Bioware's Dragon Age franchise if you don't believe me). More importantly, women LOVE mobile games, and make up an estimated 60% of the mobile gaming market. Even if I was willing to admit that there weren't many female character options for Behold Games to include in a game that lampoons D&D as much as it reveres it (which I'm not) I would still say that having a lack of female faces is an incredibly bad choice for a mobile game. Maybe it seems unimportant, but it told me that I was not the player this developer had in mind-- that I quite literally didn't have a place at the table-- and that's not how any developer should want to make any player feel.

Then again, it could always be worse. So far, of of the only characters I've come across who isn't caucasian (or as caucasian as sprites can be), has been based on an incredibly racist trickster character from Brazilian folklore (the developers are Brazilian). It's just one more awkward and avoidable blemish on what could have been a classic mobile game.

Tweet

Iris Ophelia (Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.