Gender Representation in Skylanders

Skylanders, for those who don't know, is a franchise that uses wireless technology to intigrate a toy line with video games.  Disney has copied the idea with Infinity and Nintendo has with Amiibo.  The short version is that you place a figurine on a sensor and you can play as that character in the game (also the character information is stored on the figurine so if you bring yours to play at someone else's house the character will still have the same attributes and equipment as when you leveled up and customized it on your system.)

There's a lot of discussion to be had about the implications of this in terms of business models, and I personally think that the Skylanders franchise has been on both sides of the line between being reasonable and being assholes in terms of how they've handled things there, but that's not what I want to talk about.

I like dragons.  This is probably not too surprising since I make no attempt to hide the fact that dragons and unicorns are at the top of the list of mythic things that I WANT TO BE FUCKING REAL, LIKE RIGHT NOW! (Also note that real unicorns have cloven hooves.  Horses with spear-horns coming out of their heads are cool, but they're not unicorns.)

Back on track, I like dragons so I wondered if it were possible to have an all dragon team in Skylanders.  Skylanders divides things into "elements" for the first three games there were eight (Magic, Air, Water, Life, Earth, Undead, Tech, and Fire in no particular order) the most recent game added two more (Light and Dark.)  Certain things are only accessible to certain elements and, while it became more complex as the series went on and tried to drive figure sales up, I was basically thinking one of each element.

And the answer was: Yes.  In the beginning there were four characters per element and one of each was a dragon.  The new elements only have one regular character each, both dragons.  Anyway, looking at the dragons led me to notice gender.

Before we get to what about dragons brought me to gender, we need to get this out of the way: the characters in Skylanders are all in the gender binary.  This, itself, is fucked up.  The cast includes plants (trees, zucchini so forth,) fungus (probably only mushrooms, though I haven't checked) inanimate materials of various sorts given form (magma, rock, so forth) robots that don't even resemble any biological species (gender binary or not), fictional species of all sorts, and so on.

There's no reason that all of these characters should be shoved into the categories of male and female.  They are, though, so that's what I'll be talking about.

So, where was I?  Dragons.

When I initially played Skylanders the elder weasel would often inquire why I played as a female character so much (generally I played with the munchkin weasel who asked no such questions) and the answer was that, at that time, they had only two dragons and both were female.  Or maybe it was three and all three were female.

Anecdotes like that are why random samples that are as large as possible are necessary.

Of the original eight dragons six were male and two were female.

This has expanded.  Now there are eighteen and six are female.  Thus the girl dragons went from being outnumbered 3 to 1 by the boys to being outnumbered 2 to 1 by them, but it's more complicated than that because there are subcatagories and it doesn't make sense to lump all of the dragons together so it's really more reasonable to say 14 of which 5 are female, which is slightly better than being outnumbered two  to one, but still crap.

To really get a picture of what's going on we need to look at more than just dragons and we need to start breaking things into categories.

I've already talked about the eight main elements, then there are the core skylanders (most dragons are included in this), giants (introduced in Skylanders:Giants), swap force (introduced in Skylanders: Swap Force), Trap Masters (introduced in Skylanders: Trap Team), and Minis (they've always been there but weren't full characters until Trap Team.)

So, first let's look at the core Skylanders:

	Male	Female
Magic	Cobra Cadabra Double Trouble Dune Bug Pop Fizz Spyro Voodood Wrecking Ball	Déjà Vu Star Strike
Air	Blades Fling Kong Jet-Vac Lightning Rod Pop Thorn Warnado	Scratch Sonic Boom Whirlwind
Water	Flip Wreck Gill Grunt Rip Tide Slam Bam Wham-Shell Zap	Chill Echo Punk Shock
Life	Bumble Blast Camo Food Fight High Five Shroomboom Stump Smash Zoo Lou Zook	Stealth Elf
Earth	Bash Dino-Rang Fist Bump Prism Break Rocky Roll Scorp Slobber Tooth Terrafin	Flashwing
Undead	Chop Chop Fright Rider Funny Bone Ghost Roaster Grim Creeper	Bat Spin Cynder Hex Roller Brawl
Tech	Boomer Chopper Countdown Drill Sergeant Drobot Tread Head Trigger Happy Wind-Up	Sprocket
Fire	Eruptor Flameslinger Fryno Ignitor Hot Dog Sunburn Trail Blazer	Smolderdash Torch

If that chart looks somewhat lopsided to you, I'm inclined to agree.  For some reason Undead seerms to be particularly kind to female characters, but they're still slightly out numbered.

It just so happens that the distribution of male and female characters would, in a non-sexist but still binary conforming world, be in the form of an important mathematical distribution (the binomial distribution) and so, since you need the internet to be reading this, the appropriate numbers are at your fingertips.  To save you a trip in google, I'll just list it for you here.

	Expected number of groups With X Female characters if this is not sexist	Actual Number	Difference
X = Zero	0.016	0	-0.016
X = One	0.144	3	+2.856
X = Two	0.560	2	+1.440
X = Three	1.316	2	+0.684
X = Four	1.968	1	-0.968
X = Five	1.968	0	-1.968
X = Six	1.316	0	-1.316
X = Seven	0.560	0	-0.560
X = Eight	0.144	0	-0.144
X = Nine	0.016	0	-.0.016

There can never actually be the "expected number" because the probabilities never actually hit a whole number, so there should always be a non-zero value in the "Difference" column.  The thing is, in the absence of bias the difference from expectation would be distributed randomly, instead (ignoring the extreme case of no female characters at all) the places where there are more examples than expected are exclusively where female characters are outnumbered two to one or more.

It actually took until the third game before there was at least one female character in each element.

The second game introduced giants.  There was only one giant per element so there's no point in breaking things down by element

Male	Female
Bouncer Crusher Eye Brawl Hot Head Swarm Thumpback Tree Rex	Ninjini

That's pretty well balanced, I think we can agree.

Sarcasm mode off it's kind of fucked up when your male characters outnumber your female ones seven to one.  Also, as a reminder of the fact that they didn't need to have the gender binary at all: One of them is a walking tree.

The third game introduced the Swap Force which had two members per element.  If one were going for realism two elements would have only female characters, two elements would have only male characters, and four would have one of each (or thereabouts) because that's what choosing randomly would yield.  If they were going for representation, they'd just have one male and one female in each element.

Here's how it actually worked out:

	Male	Female
Magic	Hoot Loop Trap Shadow
Air	Boom Jet Free Ranger
Water	Freeze Blade Wash Buckler
Life	Grilla Drilla Stink Bomb
Earth	Doom Stone Rubble Rouser
Undead	Night Shift Rattle Shake
Tech	Magna Charge Spy Rise
Fire	Blast Zone Fire Kraken

I'm going to let you draw your own conclusions on that list.

Then came trap team which added trap masters.  The new elements (Light and Dark) have very small rosters, but manage an even split in said rosters (each element has a male and female character, between the elements they have two trap masters -one male one female- and two core skylanders -one male one female.)

As for the existing elements:

	Male	Female
Magic	Blastermind Enigma
Air	Gusto Thunderbolt
Water	Lob-Star Snap Shot
Life	Bushwack	Tuff Luck
Earth	Wallop	Head Rush
Undead	Krypt King Short Cut
Tech	Jawbreaker	Gear Shift
Fire	Ka-Boom Wildfire

It's ... um... better than they did with Swap Force.  There are female characters this time, after all.  They're outnumbered more than four to one, but at least they exist.

And having to say statements like that probably says all that needs to be said about the problem, but there's one more category.

As the name "mini" suggests, the minis are smaller versions of standard Skylanders.  The minis started out as "Sidekicks" though the term overstates their usefulness.  For three games all that a mini/sidekick could do was walk around next to a full fledged character and occasionally look at things.  They weren't characters you could play, they were more of an accessory you could put on.  Put on a hat, put on an entourage, that sort of thing.

Trap team changed that by making them playable characters in their own right and expanding their roster to two per element (but none for the new elements)

	Male	Female
Magic	Spry	Mini-Jini
Air	Pet Vac	Breeze
Water	Gill Runt Thumpling
Life	Barkley	Whisper Elf
Earth	Bop Terrabite
Undead	Eye Small	Hi-jinx
Tech	Drobit Trigger Snappy
Fire	Small Fry Weeruptor

And now we come to the thing: Skylanders makes very sure never to assume that the player is male because it is not a boys' game.  It's just a game.  Girls very definitely like it too.  But girls who want to play as girls (and others who want to play as girls as well) have much more limited options.

Want a male trap master?  You can be anything (except for the new under populated element that is Dark) Want a female trap master?  Your options are Life, Earth, and Tech (and the new under populated element that is Dark.)

Want a female Swap Force member?  You're out of luck.  Want a female giant?  Hope you like magic (and katanas.)

Want to play as a female life character?  For three games you only had one option, though you could also have a mini version of her tag along.  Now the mini has been upgraded to full character and there's a trap master, so there are three options.  Want to play as a male life character?  You have 13 choices.  That's not even the most skewed element.

It definitely doesn't have to be this way, but it is.

And Skylanders is hardly alone in being like this.