Meeples and Gender

This post is a continuation of my last post where I wrote about how much I love the world building in A Fistful of Meeples. Before getting into today's topic, a few notes: First, I am mostly writing this to share an interesting (to me) insight into world building and psychology that happens to be about gender. Second, any criticism I have of A Fistful of Meeples does not detract from the fact that I love this game. 

Let me begin with an assertion I hope is not controversial: meeples are inherently genderless. Even in games where gender might make sense. Reproduction in Agricola works the same way it does in Minecraft: any two adults can make a baby. Of course, not all meeples present as genderless, in spite of  the fact that they are abstracted pieces of wood. And that's what I want to explore. 

I argued in the last post that the world of A Fistful of Meeples is a meeple world in the same way that The Lego Movie depicts a lego world. Because I view the world as an animated playset and because meeples are genderless, I see the main worker roles—deputy, robber, miner, and builder— as genderless, something any person could pretend to be. At least, I begin to, until the madame enters the world. (I don't want to sit here and argue that women could be robbers in the Old West. Meeple Old West can be egalitarian if it wants to.) The point is, I don't think those jobs are inherently gendered, even in the context of the genre setting, but the job of a madame is inherently gendered. The word indicates a woman and the job requires a woman. (I consider a madame and a pimp to be fundamentally different jobs.) So what happens when a female character enters a genderless cast?

All the other characters become male. This is a purely psychological effect that manifests from a culture that views male as default. Once any non-male gender is defined, the remaining characters shift from genderless to "default gender" unless specified otherwise. I think the case for this is strongest in A Fistful of Meeples because of the context of soiled doves and who they serviced. The publisher doubled down by making the madame sculpt the only unique sculpt in the game. (She's wearing a skirt.) However, we can also see this dynamic at play in The Table is Lava and its expansion: the meeples were genderless until the expansion added pink meeples that were specifically coded as women. (The expansion is called Coconuts Edition.) I should note that The Table is Lava is also set in a world where the characters are meeples. Both of these games mix actual meeples and gender in a way I find jarring. 

Why does this matter? It matters because as designers we have to be intentional about our world building. We need to understand what the ramifications of specifically gendering one character are. In A Fistful of Meeples, by calling the character a madame rather than a bartender we end up with a cast of thirty male characters and one female. (There are more female meeples in the box cover art than in the game.) I know I have argued for specificity in world building in the past, but this is tokenization. Yes, the madame action is thematic to that role, but it could work just as well as a bartender or a card sharp. By coding every other character as a man the game creates a world where the only other implied females are whores. ("Is it family friendly?" "Yes—well, except for the whores.") Not only are they whores, but they are offscreen whores with no power or voice in the game. The only woman character in the game profits from implied female characters that have no purpose other than to rationalize what the builders are paying for at the saloon. Regardless of what you think about sex work in real life, this isn't what I would call good representation. 

I don't think there is any way to know if the gender breakdown in A Fistful of Meeples was intentional without asking the designers. It seems like the designers just pulled from famous archetypes that meshed with the mechanisms. But that's my point. World building should be intentional. Not all board games need the same levels of world building. I'm fairly neutral on surface level representation. Yes, it can be valuable, but I also see arguments for abstraction, such as the argument I make here. I want the level of world building to be motivated by the theme and mechanics. I want representation to be motivated by the story told in the game. And in the case of A Fistful of Meeples, I find the representation to be unnecessary to the point of slightly detracting from my enjoyment of the game. 

This psychological effect of assuming a gender binary is cultural and may fade over time. But there will always be choices in world building that we make or don't make that will change how our game is perceived. Sometimes abstraction might feel like silencing character stories and sometimes it might feel like opening them up to many interpretations. We have to know what kind of stories we are trying to tell. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.