Gender-neutral stick figures

[jack]

I've been playing a lot of draw something[1] and this has led to drawing lots of stick figures.

And I realise that I fell into the traditional trap of using an unadorned stick-figure for for a generic person, but also for "man", and using a stick figure with a skirt for "woman", because those are the most recognisable.

And I really don't like doing that. What SHOULD I do?

One thing is to find some way of indicating "male stick figure", even if it's still gender-stereotypical, eg a hat. That way, at least I'm not contributing to the assumption that generic stick figures are men, even if I'm not fighting it.

Another would be always draw a stick figure with a gender marker, so at least I send a message of "stick-figure world contains people of all genders". But in some ways that makes it worse, making it look as if (a) gender were important for stick figures and (b) there were only two genders of stick-figures.

Probably the best would be to draw stick figures with a coloured rectangle instead of a line for a body, because that way you can vary the drawing a bit without being ostentatious about it. But I'm worried that it stretches my art skills too far :)

Is there a "right" way of drawing stick figures?

I also find it difficult to draw vikings without drawing helmets with horns on them, but I'm sure most people I know know the truth of the viking helmets, so I'm not perpetuating misinformation (and even if I am, it probably doesn't matter as much).

[1] As "cartesiandaemon". Anyone else want to play, tell me your username!

Comments

[ptc24]

It would be useful to know a bit more about what's going on in Draw Something.

I'm used to games like Pictionary where you're working against the clock; from what I read here, it seems like you're a bit more relaxed and can take your time over things.

In particular, I'm interested in how often it's necessary to specifically communicate gender - or whether it's merely useful to communicate gender (for example, when trying to draw some specific person, that's one fact among many you have about them, maybe you don't need to specify it in order to uniquely identify one individual). I was about to say this was a bit of information, but then I realised that if you were called upon to communicate "male" more often than "female" (I expect this would be the case if you were communicating stories from the average newspaper, for instance), then in information-theoretic terms it's less than a bit - furthermore it would probably stay less than a bit even if your set of possibilities expands beyond two, and you could even say it was less than a bit if you didn't know what the full set of possibilities was, or if the full set of possibilities was an infinite set. Anyway, how would you go about making an efficient coding scheme for that less-than-a-bit of information?

(I'm not sure whether I'm trying to justify the status quo here, or to make people think about where it might come from.)

[liv]

It does record how long it takes to guess a drawing, so in some ways there's an incentive to create something that will be guessed as speedily as possible. But since they've made the really interesting choice to make the game collaborative rather than competitive, you can easily choose to play it so that it's just an exercise in seeing how well you can communicate with a friend without using writing. Or even to try and see how artistic you can be drawing with your fingers on a touchscreen - some people aim for detailed, beautiful drawings rather than speed.

If you're drawing a specific person, I agree you don't need to show what gender they are, if your friend knows who the person is they likely also know their gender and certainly know what gender presentation markers they do or don't have. Eg I wouldn't randomly put a beard on Justin Bieber just to communicate the fact that he's male, because JB doesn't have a beard!

But sometimes you're drawing, like, a category of people where the gender is relevant information. Eg if you're drawing "mother" or "bride" you need to convey that the female parent or spouse is intended. And if you're drawing "policeman" or "man-trap" it is arguably helpful to the guesser to tell them that your stick figure is male.