A general address on Kerbal gender

[Sapphire]

OP, your original post is rather excellent. I try to use female pronouns for my Kerbonauts whenever possible, but it just doesn't work so well for most of the generated names.

Are you willing to use mods? Crew Manifest is a really nice (partless) one. It's become mostly redundant with the new crew loading feature, but you can still use it to transfer between living spaces and to create/edit Kerbals, including names.

[Zeroignite]

Are you willing to use mods? Crew Manifest is a really nice (partless) one. It's become mostly redundant with the new crew loading feature, but you can still use it to transfer between living spaces and to create/edit Kerbals, including names.

I have Crew Manifest, but I don't like the idea of manually editing in non-kerbal names. I was lucky enough to manually roll a BadS "Jennie Kerman", and she'll probably be headed to Duna or Jool soon.

EDIT: Also, related to the OP, the number of times I've seen kerbals referred to using she/her/hers in threads not regarding gender is probably small enough for me to count on one hand. So clearly people are assuming the canon-asexual kerbals are male.

Edited September 18, 2013 by Zeroignite

[Vanamonde]

I have some thoughts on this subject.

1. Assuming the Kerbals we see belong to one gender is baseless. Another culture's names are not required to follow the conventions we are familiar with, and there are many species even here on earth in which males are not dissimilar to females. Those who interpret these characters as uniformly males are imposing prejudices upon them.

2. If we assign them genders, why stop at two? They are aliens. They could have multiple sexes, or only one. Perhaps they are all worker-caste neuters and there's a queen Kerbal somewhere that births them all. But if inclusiveness with regard to the player base is an issue, there must also be gay, transgender, and other orientations/sexes/genders represented in the game. I am not putting forth those sexual identities as something to be derided, nor is this intended as a reductio ab absurdum, but I am saying it's a can of worms best left unopened. Why complicate the game with a meaningless distinction which has no effect on play?

3. I suspect that the players who want this are not stopping to think through the ramifications of implementation. To wit, how should female Kerbals be represented? If Squad makes them busty, the developers will be setting themselves up for accusations of sexism and imposing body type prejudices. (Bustiness would also imply that these little green creatures are mammals, which brings up yet more questions.) If Squad gives them long hair, might not female players with short hair feel slighted? What constitutes a female name, anyway? I work with someone named Chikezia. Without resorting to Google, how many of you can tell from that whether my co-worker is male or female?

In short, implementing Kerbal gender would be a colossal headache which would add nothing to gameplay, and personally, I would rather the people at Squad spent their time squashing bugs and giving us new planets to fly to. If it makes you happy, rename some of your crew Judy or Svetlana, or assume that on Kerbin, Jedediah is a female name, and then get on with the business of killing them in rocket crashes.

[arq]

I agree that a more gender-neutral approach to this game would be appropriate. However, I would not call Squad 'incompetent' or 'sexist' or many of the other words that have been thrown around in this thread. It is simply an oversight and I'm sure that they will address it sooner or later. As mentioned above, Kerbals have changed negligibly since 0.7 and back then the userbase was so small and the content so slim that it really wasn't worth spending time on.

I hate to use the 'in alpha' card, but I feel that some of the comments here slightly more hostile towards Squad than is warranted given the 'alpha' state of the game. At this point, anything and everything could be a placeholder, especially models and textures. They are mostly concerned with adding gameplay content and mechanics (like science). If the game hits 'release' without attention to this matter I will be disappointed in Squad. Until then, I'm very excited to see career mode, science, and many of the other features that this small team has been working very hard on. In the meantime, I believe that some new additions to the name generator would make a reasonable first step.

[NoMrBond]

Even if the Kerbals are officially asexual/genderless, the Kerbalnauts are being anthropomorphised as male because their names generally conform to those of human males

Easiest solution might be to change the pool of candidate names the game draws on to include a broad spectrum of names, it wouldn't require additional models just changing the name list and the procedural nature of the recruiting system would deal with the rest naturally

[ChrisDaBox]

Why the hell should gender matter? What you people do not get is that an alien species does not necessarily have genders. If they did it could be completely different. There could be 2, 3 or 4 genders. This is a GAME. It doesn't matter. The only thing it affects is it may come across as a boys game. BUT, Barbie comes across as a female game to us. It's completely pink and completely gender based on girls. So there is no need to say that KSP is too much of a boys club.

[FlamedSteak]

I honestly don't care either way but if they are going to do females, they need to do it properly. Simply sticking long hair, lipstick and boobs on a current model is going to look like a Kerb in drag, not the feminine variation of the species.

Edited September 18, 2013 by FlamedSteak

[Tw1]

e gay, transgender, and other orientations/sexes/genders represented in the game. I am not putting forth those sexual identities as something to be derided, nor is this intended as a reductio ab absurdum, but I am saying it's a can of worms best left unopened. Why complicate the game with a meaningless distinction which has no effect on play?

Most of the time, you can't tell someone's orientation, or if they are trans, or whatever just by looking at them. Currently, there is nothing in the game that reveals anything about kerbals' lives outside of their participation in the space program. So I don't really think it would be much of an issue. The player can use their imagination.

3. I suspect that the players who want this are not stopping to think through the ramifications of implementation. To wit, how should female Kerbals be represented? If Squad makes them busty, the developers will be setting themselves up for accusations of sexism and imposing body type prejudices. (Bustiness would also imply that these little green creatures are mammals, which brings up yet more questions.) If Squad gives them long hair, might not female players with short hair feel slighted?

I suspect kerbalizer integration (which I think I heard was planned somewhere) will solve the hair issue. Maybe a female kerbal shouldn't be made until then.

Maybe the female kerbals have the same standard crew cut. I don't think hair is that much of an issue, I'm sure people are used to the long haired girl trope, it's so common in real life.

I reckon the female kerbal model should focus on the face. It's what we see of them mostly, anyway.

The cliché game character large bust is definitely out, but I wouldn't mind the body to be subtlety more of a female figure. Some bustiness maybe, could just be a coincidence they evolved that way.

As long as it's subtle, and generic, I don't think body shape would be much of a problem. They have such differing proportions to humans already.

[sumghai]

I reckon the female kerbal model should focus on the face. It's what we see of them mostly, anyway.

The cliché game character large bust is definitely out, but I wouldn't mind the body to be subtlety more of a female figure. Some bustiness maybe, could just be a coincidence they evolved that way.

As long as it's subtle, and generic, I don't think body shape would be much of a problem. They have such differing proportions to humans already.

As suggested in Timmon's sketch and Hayoo's concept artwork, softer and rounder faces seem to be the way to go.

[Aurora-Aerospace]

Its our belief here at Aurora Aerospace that two heads are better than one, unless that second head is due to radiation exposure in space*. So it is only natural that we welcome and endorse the entrance of female kerbals into the industry. We look forward to half as many disasters, and twice as many kerbals brought home safely from space travel.

*AA offers a lifetime** guarantee on its entire line of products which are manufactured to exacting specifications***, including radiation shielding among many other standard options.

**Lifetime may be greatly altered by unusual use, excessive speeds, collisions with space debris & celestial bodies, dangerous space weather phenomenon (including but not limited to, black-holes, ion storms, explosive plasma nebulae, or temporal instabilities), improper button pushing, liquids spilled on consoles, unapproved AA mods & parts and/or alien spacecraft, artifacts, civilizations.

***WARNING:: Specs may change in use.

[BarryDennen12]

I think it's a pretty cut-and-dried thing. Chuck women-Kermans into the game if and when there's ever an update that addresses the appearance of individual Kerbinauts. I have no idea what Squad's plans are in that regard, but I've always assumed there'd come a time where the Kerbals would start to look slightly different from each other (either as a randomised thing or in a Create-A-Sim sort of environment). Even if they have no such plans to do so, I think that's the way to go.

To put it simply; there's plenty of reasons to have female Kerbals, and no good reason not to. I hope it happens soonish.

"This is a GAME. It doesn't matter. The only thing it affects is it may come across as a boys game. BUT, Barbie comes across as a female game to us. It's completely pink and completely gender based on girls. So there is no need to say that KSP is too much of a boys club"

With respect, almost none of this makes any sense. If it's just a game and doesn't matter, then you have no right to an opinion on what changes are made to the game - 'cuz 'it doesn't matter', right?

As for bringing Barbie into the discussion - completely irrelevant. Squad can (and I hope, will) serve as a more inclusive and intelligent creative force than a ridiculous company that sells silly dolls. KSP doesn't have to be a boys club, or a girls club, or any other variety of walled garden. It can be for everyone, and for what really would amount to a minimum of effort. (Not trying to oversimplify here - I recognise that even small changes in a game amount to a lot of hair-pulling, but this one's worth it I think). I currently don't have a dog in this fight per se because Kermans are not customisable in game, but if I could change mine then I'd probably want it to be like me. Or some famous person that I'd like to parody. Can you understand why maybe adding female characteristics would help facilitate that for a good sized chunk of the community?

And it comes down to this - if there's -still- any frustrated gamer boys out there that can't handle the idea, they can always jettison the female Kerbinauts into space and keep it to themselves. Like I already said, I hope females are added soon because I'd like this daft and circular discussion put to bed. It's fraught with illogic to have an attitude of 'so what, who cares'. Some people care! That should be reason enough.

PS. Love to Squad.

Edited September 18, 2013 by BarryDennen12
I found more stuff to respond to

[Accelerando]

Vanamonde, I think that you are the one who is not stopping to consider very much here. That you seem to have either completely glossed over or are simply handwaving most of my OP does not dissuade me from that opinion. Slippery-slope rationalization does not count for reason, either, and belies a rather uninformed view of egalitarian sentiment here  implementing a new character model to show that some Kerbals have female characteristics does not mean that absolutely every issue need be addressed to the finest detail to be inclusive to most players. I think I addressed that in my previous posts, but I'll repeat it: The fact that gender continues to be brought up on a regular and fairly frequent basis should indicate its importance to a large number of players. I do not see threads about the importance of representing homsexuality in KSP, which does not model relationships between Kerbals on any level higher than occasional flavor text. Speaking of which, on second thought, there is another reason â€â€*which is that relationships between Kerbals have not been implemented yet, nor have indications of complex AI or at least statistical interactions which would be necessary to speak of such.

If you truly do not believe that Kerbals need to have a gender, then it should be no issue if they have a range of different bodies to which they do not assign genders. The issue I am attempting to address is the issue of human relation  Kerbals are not only aliens, but essentially player avatars. The Kerbalizer if nothing else contributes to this notion. Whether or not you consider them to have genders does not make the fact go away that they resemble males to a considerable fraction of people, and even this would not be so important were it not for the repeated and at times rather vehement opposition to the idea of adding feminine bodies.

KSP is, as far as I am aware, a game that purports to attempt to provide an enjoyable experience to most, if not all, of its players  its very human players. Whether or not aliens would be more or less likely to share the same conception of gender as ourselves is irrelevant to the discussion of adding female bodies and opening the playing field of names and aesthetics to the feminine.

I cannot claim to have read all threads on the matter in their entirety, nor can I claim to personally know all users who wish for female features to appear in-game, but from what I have read I do not think that the majority have a coherent idea of what they want to such a low degree that any implementation of sex will spark off a forum-rending drama war on their part. Timmon's and Hayoo's art (I presume) on the subject are excellent examples of this  I hardly see any proponents of fem-Kerbals springing to the opposition of these drawings. Quite the opposite, really. Visible there is of the most obvious and probably most unanimously non-sexist ways in which humans can differentiate between sexes, that being the skeletal structure  which verifiably differs on a regular basis between women and men, especially in the face, which is extremely prominent on Kerbals. Round faces have been suggested many times as a manner in which Kerbals can be depicted as possessing feminine traits.

Edited September 18, 2013 by Accelerando

[lajoswinkler]

Why the hell should gender matter? What you people do not get is that an alien species does not necessarily have genders. If they did it could be completely different. There could be 2, 3 or 4 genders. This is a GAME. It doesn't matter. The only thing it affects is it may come across as a boys game. BUT, Barbie comes across as a female game to us. It's completely pink and completely gender based on girls. So there is no need to say that KSP is too much of a boys club.

Barbie franchise, My Little Pony and other similar stuff, that's designed to appeal to little girls. KSP is not designed to appeal to males, at least I hope that's not the authors' intention. It's designed to appeal to people who like simulations and space stuff. Those things are pretty gender neutral if you ask me.

I completely agree on the whole gender subject. Genders are not necessary. However Kerbals do look male, more or less. They're not blobs. I tend to ignore that because they remind me of genderless midgets and probably because I'm a male, but if I'd have to chose, I'd definitely say they are more male than female. I mean, come on, it's obvious. They're male. The whole game is a cartoonish (albeit with fantastic orbital mechanics) recreation of early American space program, and the trace amounts of accidentally generated female Kerbal names don't change it.

Nobody in their right mind is asking for Sims features. For all I care, Kerbals can stay dull avatars without more personality than they do have right now, but it would be fair not to ignore the fact that females are completely absent from the whole franchise. That's not very nice, you must agree on that.

[Awaras]

I always assumed that they planned to include kerbalizer into KSP at some point, either as a player-accessible editor or just as a 'random kerbal generator' and that female kerbals would be implemented at that time. I mean, we have mods now that let you have kerbals with random appearances, so it should be relatively simple to implement, it's just that they haven't gotten around to it yet.

Another thing to consider is that KSP is starting to seriously rub against the performance 'ceiling' of the unity engine, and every new feature they implement, every new texture that has to be loaded into RAM makes the problem that little bit worse. That all might change in the future with new versions of unity and the fact that SQUAD is working closely with unity devs to solve the problem...

[KerbMav]

To sum up points I agree with and my own view:

- frequency of recurring threads suggest economical reasons for implementation

- Kerbals are aliens and theiry physiology does not have to follow that of humans in regards to physique

- if they are not mammals there is no need for bustiness at all (e.g. oviparous mammals - breastfeeding animals that lay eggs - are rare)

- feminization of the model would not take much more than a face with female charactaristics (like the two concept drawings very much)

- but code for choice and persistance of gender, names, character traits - and future customization options - is not as easily/fast implemented

[Vanamonde]

and belies a rather uninformed view of egalitarian sentiment here â€â€

I believe my view is actually the more egalitarian, in that I am pointing out that inferring one or the other human sex upon a cartoonish image of an alien creature is itself an exercise in subjectively imposing pre-conceived gender expectations. What makes you so certain that a half-meter-tall green creature with an indistinct body shape can only be male? Can only males have short hair? Are no females petite-bosomed? Provide me with proof that someone one named Genevin can not be female. You are ASSUMING all Kerbals are male, and then blaming Squad for your unwarranted assumption.

Whether or not aliens would be more or less likely to share the same conception of gender as ourselves is irrelevant

Not if the thing you are asking for is to have the human (mainstream hetero) conception of genders imposed upon the Kerbals.

Slippery-slope rationalization

It's not a slope if there's one step between the beginning and the end. If you truly want egalitarianism, you'd have to represent ALL human gender identities in the game. Or, just as fairly and vastly less problematic to implement, no genders at all.

If you can answer this one question for me, I will concede the whole argument; how does one determine the gender of a Kerbal, and how do you know that half of them are not already female?

As for hand-waving away your original post, your main point seemed to be that a lot of people want it, therefore it must be implemented. But I've seen no evidence that 1) enough people want this to 2) warrant the diversion of Squad staff time for 3) something that would affect no gameplay mechanics whatsoever.

Edited September 18, 2013 by Vanamonde

[Comrade Jenkens]

If you can answer this one question for me, I will concede the whole argument; how does one determine the gender of a Kerbal, and how do you know that half of them are not already female?

-The fact that they have almost exclusively male names.

-The square face more resembles a male than a female.

-Both the haircut and the hairline is a male shape.

They do look pretty ambiguous but I do think that they look more male than female.

[ComradeGoat]

Thank you for saying this. As a woman playing this game, the "boys club" atmosphere does put me off a bit at times, especially when the response is "gender is irrelevant". If it's irrelevant, why does it always seem to default to male?

[Lar-E]

Me, I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of Sally Kerman on my crew roster.

[AntonioAJC]

Thanks for the post OP, it means a lot and I really agree on your points.

Edited September 18, 2013 by AntonioAJC

[Whackjob]

Misogyny is a mental defect. And trust me. I'm exactly the sort of person well acquainted with mental defects, if not this specific one.

[KSK]

Just dropping in to add another vote of support for the OP and also to say that it's nice to see a 5 page thread on this issue that hasn't approached mod-lock (it's like gimbal lock but worse ).

Just a quick comment on names - I find that the random generator produces names that can be read either way. My story on the fan works forum basically uses generated names either from my own games or scraped from various pictures posted on this in different threads - the 'post your fails here' threads usually offer good pickings . I've tweaked the spelling on maybe a couple to make them sound more feminine to Terran ears but mostly they're just stock names.

[Accelerando]

Whether or not it is heteronormative gender that is implemented is not the point I am addressing, Vanamonde. Female, xyquibit, whatever-in-the-world alien gender assignment or non-gender assignment you want to call them, my point is that the body type and aesthetics we generally consider "female"  whether or not that gender is actually a strict definition is not the point â€â€*are excluded from the game to the favor of the male. No matter if you consider the human picture of gender to have strict boundaries or whether you consider it all to be a crock, the fact is that differing body types  differing sexes, I suppose  exist, and no amount of ear-plugging is going to change the fact that the broad majority of each half of human beings bear a body plan that is noticeably different from the other half. In order to be representative of most of its players, KSP should at least give representation to the features generally ascribed to other half of the population, so that it covers a good portion of the spectrum. Currently KSP pays more respect to a body aesthetic most people seem to consider masculine, and they consider it as much with reason: the squareness of the jaw is generally an indicator of masculinity, the close crop worn by all Kerbals at the moment is generally worn by men on Earth, the body  though squat and not the most definite body plan ever seen, such squat, not-exactly-female body plans are usually assigned male genders. Obviously they are not man's men, manly men, but they are masculine. This in itself would not be such a problem, and this is the point I am getting at, if there were not such a negative response to the notion of implementing the "other" body type in the first place, or at the very least to make them more visibly androgynous.

If you want an indicator of the popularity of this feature, why don't you look around you? Those voicing approval in this thread may not be a terrible lot of people, but then this forum is not exactly host to a terrible lot of posting people, although they all play KSP, which is at least a start as population samples go. We have a hundred, perhaps, who post regularly, and another few hundred who post fairly infrequently, whom I expect you would see less of in threads such as these. At any rate, the fact that female Kerbals are apparently such a recurring topic that anybody feels the need to "shelve" them up there with the suggestions of implementing multiplayer should be some indication of their being a wanted feature.

[John FX]

It seems as you can get a jennie kerbal randomly that female names are already implemented so the only issue is the heteronormative "Females can`t have that haircut".

I`ll just leave this here. Imagine this woman with a green face and a short astronauts haircut...

I have decided to run a poll to objectively guage opinion on this topic then maybe we can see if this is an issue for many players or a vocal minority.

These will be the voting options

A Implement explicit females and males

B Improve androgyny

C Implement female only avatars

D I don`t care/do nothing

Edited September 18, 2013 by John FX

[Guest]

I`ll just leave this here. Imagine this woman with a green face and a short astronauts haircut...

That's not a Kerbal.