The Female Power Fantasy

Here's a post that's outside of my usual fare. I've had this one in reserve for awhile, and I'm no longer ahead on posts. This is not directly board game related, but here we are. 

I'm fairly sure that anyone who has seen a Marvel movie has a pretty fair idea what a male power fantasy is. The handy-dandy thing about the MCU is that we even get different flavors of male power fantasies in the same movie, cf. The Avengers. There's the super strong and indestructible version of the male power fantasy, the super smart and rich version, and the otherworldly superpowers version. Or a combination of the above, as seen in later movies. (I'm taking for granted that every version of the male power fantasy is fit and handsome.) These characters seem different on the surface, except for all being ridiculously handsome, but they largely have the same goals and ambitions. At its heart, the male power fantasy is about dominance over antagonists and achievement of ambition. You can also throw in protection of those weaker than the protagonist, but that only applies to certain heroic MPFs. Power fantasies can, after all, also take the form of villain characters. 

This makes sense, because power fantasies are about having/gaining power. But they are also about how characters use power. And often MPFs are about gender stereotypes, or at least archetypes. For the male side that means strength, charisma, and success. But what do female power fantasies look like?

I did not have a lot of success googling 'female power fantasy.' The few forums that discuss such a thing are filled with people denying that there is a difference beyond gender of the character. In other words, female power fantasies are just male power fantasies that have been gender swapped. I'd like to put forward a different idea. 

I was two years into developing Deadly Dowagers before I finally realized why women enjoyed playing it as much as they did. But looking back on all the playtests I had, I came to the conclusion that the theme of the game was appealing in a way I didn't design it to be: it was a power fantasy. And not one that relied on strength or intelligence or charisma. Instead, the female power fantasy of Deadly Dowagers is that of self-determination. Characters are given control over when to start and end relationships and how they spend their money. That doesn't sound like much, but take a look at domestic violence statistics and you start to realize that women aren't looking for dominance so much as the ability to make their own decisions free of consequence or interference. Of course, in story-telling, we often see traits taken to illogical extreme for effect. As a result, one of the most enduring FPFs is the American musical Chicago, a story of women getting away with murder. Outside of murderesses, female power fantasies tend to look more like Rey Skywalker or Carol Danvers—heroes who look like MPFs on the surface but who are driven by a desire for self-determination over the male expectations imposed on them. (Incidentally, I think that trait has made these characters misunderstood by their respective fandoms. It doesn't help that, yes, the writing involved could have been better.) 

I think it's probably an indictment of our society that when we imagine the kinds of women who achieve total self-determination that the only ones we can think of are magical, indestructible space-women and criminals. But from these existing FPFs we can glean a few lessons. One is that FPFs require resonance with the real experience of women. Not every female super hero is a female power fantasy. Some really are just gender-swapped MPFs. (And there's not really anything inherently wrong with that, except some lack of depth and resonance.) Female power fantasies must be grounded in the experience of what it means to be coded female. 

Another thing we can learn about female power fantasies is that a lot of the resonance comes from subtext. Regardless of what you think about Captain Marvel as a movie, it is undeniable that women resonated with the final confrontation in a way that men didn't, because women understood a lot of what wasn't said in that scene. This is a point in favor of diverse story-tellers, because resonant subtext all but requires lived experience. 

Lastly, in order to be a FPF, it must be important to the story that the main character is a woman. As in, if you changed her gender the story would lose resonance and not make as much sense. And here we finally can tie back into board games. There are very few board games with female playable characters that have both good representation and a story that requires female characters. Board games are still largely telling stories from the same perspective they always have, but sometimes we change the art up a little. (My joke is that everyone knows that spaceship crews are required by galactic law to have exactly one female crew member.) I have perused some lists on BGG and by my count the number of games that meet my added criteria of women being necessary to the story is in the single digits. On this blog I have alternately called for more specificity and more abstraction. To quote Jason Perez, I want more stories, not fewer. I'm not saying that gender (or any other aspect) should be integral to every future game theme, but that sometimes it should be. 

Now take everything I said and apply it to other marginalized groups. We can tell complex stories via game design. They look different from traditional narratives, but that just means they require more care. 

If we want to grow the hobby, we need more resonant stories from diverse groups of people. If we want thematic representation, we need characters that are more than just re-skins. If we want better stories, we need to be aware of resonance and subtext. 

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