I had picked up Scribblenauts Unlimited from the recent Steam Summer Sale, because the original game was fun, and hey, five bucks. It’s a very cute bright cartoony puzzle-solver game. If you’re unfamiliar with it: the object is to help people by creating or modifying things that will solve their problems. For example, a doctor in a hospital will need new medical equipment. One solution: create a “scalpel.” Bingo! Problem solved. Or, if you want, create a “polkadotted defibrillator.” That’ll work too.
So anyway, Scribblenauts Unlimited starts with this little opening movie narrated by a woman about this man and woman who were adventurers, and they got together and had 42 kids (just go with it; they probably made them the same way you make purple robot flying imams. Yes, you can do that.). So two of the kids, Maxwell (the protagonist of the first game) and Lily (the narrator of the movie, as it turns out), are sent out into the world to adventure on their own. Shortly in, Maxwell ticks off this guy who curses Lily (um, ok, she didn’t do anything to the guy), and Lily starts slowly turning to stone. Maxwell resolves to go around helping everyone he can so he can get these Starites that will uncurse Lily. Let the game begin!
So you get to a tutorial level that teaches you the basics of the game, what you can do, and so forth. One of the things that happens is that you help one of Maxwell’s brothers, this farmer. This unlocks the ability to play as the brother. The game then tells you to go help all 40 of Maxwell’s brothers, so you can unlock them and play as them.
And at this point, I was like, “Wait, what?”
I looked at the list of Steam achievements, and sure enough, one of the achievements is for helping all 40 brothers. But… Maxwell’s parents had 42 kids. You have Maxwell, his 40 brothers, and Lily. But you can switch characters. But there’s one (presumably playable) female character. Who’s turning to stone.
And this is when I realized the game has gone out of its way to not have you play as a female character. Which I find really strange, because from the opening movie, I got the impression you could switch to play as Lily. But Lily is the goal of the game. She’s to be rescued. What the heck? It’s such a strange place to find sexism.
I have a few thoughts on this.
- Why is Scribblenauts Unlimited presumed to be a boys-only game? The gameplay involves helping people, often nonviolently. The game is brightly coloured, cartoony, cute, involves creating things through combinations of words… there’s nothing here that presumes girls wouldn’t like this game.
- Why are there no other female playable characters? Seriously, it’s a mathematically small chance that you could get 42 kids and only have one girl if you were doing these things “the natural way.” But I don’t see why the game creators couldn’t have made some of the playable characters female. From what I’ve seen, the characters are essentially costumes and palette swaps, and the gameplay doesn’t change because you’ve decided to play as Shadow, the frowny ninja Maxwell.
I know some people would say, “Well, if it doesn’t matter, why include them?” I say, “What would it hurt?” I mean, there’s a pirate brother. Why not make that character a pirate sister? At one point I helped two identical twin brothers. Why not have two fraternal twin siblings (one boy, one girl) that look alike but aren’t? There are forty-one playable characters (maybe forty-two; I haven’t finished the game, so I don’t know if Lily is unlockable or not). I don’t think it would have been a big deal to even make, say, ten of those characters female. - Why the framing story at all? I don’t remember a bizarre framing story like this for the original Scribblenauts; Maxwell was just running around helping people and getting Starites. From the manual of Super Scribblenauts, it sounds like the same deal. Why introduce a damsel-in-distress story when the other games didn’t have them?
Seriously, I like this game. It’s fun. I dealt with toxic waste by applying the adjective “nontoxic” to it. I can make keytar-playing hipsters for monkeys wanting to start bands. And yes, if you want to mock things, you can create sparkly vampires. But it’s just so weird I can do all of that, but not play as a female character… unless I make Maxwell wear a bikini or something.
As an aside, one mission I did in the game involved freeing someone from a freezer, and that character turned out to be a woman. And there was a badger.