It was a pretty difficult set of conversations. We had done some initial mocap of, uh, one of our choreographers, I think, with Salt-n-Pepa's "Push It." And, you know, she was an awesome dancer and did this, you know, somewhat feminine take on Salt-n-Pepa's "Push It." And we had our male avatar - I think the first one that we'd built - or male character thing, sorry - uh, the first one we built. And he was going to dance "Push It." And, you know, a bunch of people walked in and saw this happening. And they were like, "That doesn't look like mo-dancing, that thing." And, you know, we started to go down this path and these conversations of like, will we mocap everything and have a man dance it and have a woman dance it? Will we say which gender a particular dance belongs to? Will there be dances that are neutral? And, to me, this is just like a, a horrible path to go down. What I want to do is let the player decide what's valid in their context. And so we made a lot of really careful decisions to make that possible. There is a slight understanding of which dances are owned by which characters. They're sort of choreographed by those characters. And so, if you understand what that character is like, you can read in elements of that performativity. At the same time, we're not saying this is a, a man's dance. This is a woman's dance. Because, you know, you could have fun performing in all sorts of different ways. It may not even be something that's resonant with your identity. That doesn't mean that it's not fun to do. Drag is incredibly fun, whether that's an important thing to your identity or just something you're doing for fun. And I think, as we went down those paths, it was just a lot of open, honest conversations about what kind of future we were kind of building if we said, "No. This is a man's dance and this is a woman's dance," or what kind of future we're building if we have to re-mocap the same thing. I was looking at, um, BioWare and, and the Mass Effect series and having Male and Female Shepard share the same mocap. I was giving a talk at, uh, Nordic Games about it. And that notion of sharing the mocap created a very particular character for, for Female Shepard. And when Female Shepard's like sitting and interrogating people in like the downloadable little black dress, like her legs are spread open wide because, you know, they didn't really expect they were going to put in that little black dress. And to a lot of people, it's like, "Oh, this is totally badass. This is exactly who Female Shepard is to me." And to other people, it's like, "Uh, no. That's like - that's not who I think Female Shepard is." And so I - I've just been really interested in the ways in which, you know, there's a potential dissonance between performativity in Dance Central. But there's also this dissonance between the player's sense of who the character is and how that character's represented onscreen. And the fact that the player can contain both of those realities - like the thing that is the definitive product, right? - the thing that, that shows Shepard in all the ways that they've ever known Shepard - and say, "No, no, no. Now it's crossed the line." I found a really great moment, um, in, I think, the beginning of Mass Effect 2 where, uh, Shepard's talking to, uh, one of the admirals or something. And the admiral makes some comment about like Shepard having put on some weight or something, and like taps Shepard on the stomach. And I found a video of Male and Female Shepard overlaid on top of one another. And they're doing exactly the same mocap up until the reaction to that one pat on the stomach. And Male Shepard's mo-capture does one hand go up and, you know, sort of touches his stomach and doesn't actually look down. And Female Shepard used both of her hands, and she looks down and then keeps walking. And, you know, in my head I'm just fascinated by this moment. I'm wondering, is Shepard pregnant? Uh, is Shepard feeling like she's being sexually harassed? Like what was the difference between the - or like when the animator was making the decision to, you know, go in and, and tweak this mocap for Female Shepard, what was their perspective? What, what were they thinking made this moment when we had to differentiate? And I think those aspects of gender that are just implicit in our investigations within games are some of the most fascinating things. It's just you're always modeling aspects of the norms of your world in, in these games. And you can choose exactly how you do that, but it's pretty unavoidable. And I think, a lot of times, we forget that that's one, one thing we're doing as designers and as developers. We're taking things that we understand and saying, "No. We're going to put these out in media and perpetuate these understandings." And when we're trying to create new and exciting and imaginative spaces, it's curious to me that we can imagine like elves and orcs and whatever else, but like men and women behave in a very particular way still. You know, like Skyrim has like all sorts of crazy races we've never even heard of or thought of and two genders. And, you know, there's little bits of, of exploration into those - into like nonbinary gender notions, uh, you know, spread across games. But I think it's a like rich source of potential new gameplay and new types of imaginary spaces you can create.
