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[VanillaCakeIsBurning]

It's confusing to me because I'm trying to think of an example in a game where anything was added "for the sake of it".

 

[Steel]

It's confusing to me because I'm trying to think of an example in a game where anything was added "for the sake of it".

The context of that conversation would explain it, earlier the guy was saying how replacing Rambo with a female lead would have made Rambo worse. Of course, Rambo is not going to be replaced by a female lead, that's silly.

 

[SirCrush]

Interesting read but it seems to ignore the fact that from very early on, games appealed to males with or without marketing. From there, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. Males were the target of games BECAUSE they latched on to them more than females so developers began making and marketing games toward that desired demographic and it snowballed.

Only recently has gaming diversified more, mostly because of Facebook and Mobile gaming, in my opinion, accidentally drawing a number of females in without really trying to. The numbers are now growing but core gaming is still dominated by males and will continue to be the prime target for games. Maybe it'll change some day; there is definitely a bit of a shift going on. But long story short, the stereotype exists because it is true and there is money to be made. I certainly view games as being for both sexes, generally and moreso now than ever before.

 

[Mory Dunz]

Interesting read but it seems to ignore the fact that from very early on, games appealed to males with or without marketing. From there, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. Males were the target of games BECAUSE they latched on to them more than females so developers began making and marketing games toward that desired demographic and it snowballed.

Only recently has gaming diversified more, mostly because of Facebook and Mobile gaming, in my opinion, accidentally drawing a number of females in without really trying to. The numbers are now growing but core gaming is still dominated by males and will continue to be the prime target for games. Maybe it'll change some day; there is definitely a bit of a shift going on. But long story short, the stereotype exists because it is true and there is money to be made. I certainly view games as being for both sexes, generally and moreso now than ever before.

Hmmm...interesting.

When the first games were coming out, were they marketed towards men? Were they marketed at all? Or did men just have more interest?

Did Pong or Space Aliens or ET (dunno if these are good examples of early games...lol) target men or did more guys even play those games? If so, did the industry get it's shape from there?

 

[Steel]

Hmmm...interesting.

When the first games were coming out, were they marketed towards men? Were they marketed at all? Or did men just have more interest?

Did Pong or Space Aliens or ET (dunno if these are good examples of early games...lol) target men or did more guys even play those games? If so, did the industry get it's shape from there?

There were plenty of examples of the split being equal for particular games or even in women's favor for others(Like Myst).

 

[Zoe]

Hmmm...interesting.

When the first games were coming out, were they marketed towards men? Were they marketed at all? Or did men just have more interest?

Did Pong or Space Aliens or ET (dunno if these are good examples of early games...lol) target men or did more guys even play those games? If so, did the industry get it's shape from there?

Well supposedly Pacman in 79/80 was the first game to attempt to reach the female market:

Iwatani attempted to appeal to a wider audience—beyond the typical demographics of young boys and teenagers. His intention was to attract girls to arcades because he found there were very few games that were played by women at the time.

And then to follow up:

Shortly before release, Stan Jarocki of Midway stated that Ms. Pac-Man was conceived in response to the original Pac-Man being "the first commercial videogame to involve large numbers of women as players" and that it is "our way of thanking all those lady arcaders who have played and enjoyed Pac-Man."

 

[Deified Data]

It's confusing to me because I'm trying to think of an example in a game where anything was added "for the sake of it".

Multiplayer in most games ever.

 

[Lime]

I don't know what "adding females for the sake of it" means.

Can someone explain?

It means "let us stick with white heterosexual male characters as the implicit default for the sake of it and please don't rock the boat".

Seriously though, it's a ludicrous argument, because of course characters aren't just put into a game or a narrative without any justification or reason - and having people who aren't necessarily white, heterosexual, or male doesn't actually require any further (arbitrary) reason for being in a game, just like white, heterosexual male characters don't need any reason or justification for being in a game.

Did anyone ever think "of course, it could only be a white heterosexual guy that kills zombies in RE4!"?

 

[Messofanego]

I have an issue with this quote:

A few aisles over, in the video game section, there is a similar marketing story that Maida has yet to learn. Unlike in the toy aisles, she won't find an expansive selection of video games for boys and an equally expansive selection for girls. Most "girls' sections," if they exist, are lined with fitness titles and Ubisoft's simplified career simulation series, Imagine, which lets players pretend they're doctors, teachers, gymnasts and babysitters.

As for the boys section — there isn't one. Everything else is for boys.

Adventure games, puzzle games, RPGs, are focused more on using your brain than your twitch finger brawn. The writer mentions the birth of adventure games with Sierra. Those games appeal to women and men alike. Some of the best female characters have come from these kind of games. They might not rake in the CoD numbers, but there's loads of them on the market.

Just like for boys, we don't need games specifically made for girls because that's highly presumptuous and limiting. But then the article is aware of that later on:

"Generally speaking, it did not occur to any of the companies I worked for that they should be looking at female audiences for games," she says. "It was always, 'Oh of course girls don't play games.' I got that so many times. 'Of course girls don't play games — why are we going to waste money on this audience that doesn't exist?'

"Where in fact, the nonexistence of the audience was a self-fulfilling prophecy. When we did Purple Moon, one of the criticisms we got was 'Why do you need special games for girls?' I was like, 'Dude, everything else is for boys and you don't even know it. You're taking it for granted all this time.'"

But Romero points out that if we go back to fall 1993, two significant things happened in gaming. One is the release of Doom, which heralded the start of the male-dominated first-person shooter genre. The other, in the same year, is the launch of Myst, which had an overwhelmingly female player base. "Myst dominated the charts, and we don't say games are dominated by women," Romero says. "So I've never felt that way. The Sims has more female players than it has male players, but I don't use those statistics to paint all of games."

In fact, the 1990s is filled with exceptions. There's Tetris on the Game Boy, which was popular with both men and women. Tim Schafer's LucasArts adventure games perform well across the board, demographically. Sim City was more popular with women than it was with men. By the end of the 1990s, we already had Bejeweled.

So it sounded more like what people were thinking than actually doing. Oh wait, here comes Ian Bogost:

"Maybe our perception of the problem is the problem, rather than there actually being a problem," says Ian Bogost. "We're not looking at diversity in the marketplace. We're looking at where there isn't diversity and we're saying those games are the most valid games."

YUP!

Bogost explains that certain categories of games are more visible to the mainstream public because of these moral panics — because they're the recurring images in the news whenever the media talks about video games. The result is whenever video games come up in conversation, those are the games that people associate with the medium. People forget that other games exist.

That the concept of "girls don't play games" exists even among children in schoolyards today has less to do with the actual numbers of players as much as it has to do with an idea that was heavily circulated from the '90s through television commercials, magazine ads, video game box art and the media.

EXACTLY. And that's why there need to be more news and TV material for good stuff about gaming. We just had a 2-hour documentary here in UK on "How Videogames Changed the World". We need to reach the public consciousness outside of our box. TV people need to commission that kind of stuff, there's a clear untapped audience. Sadly, most people still rely on the box for their awareness of what's going around them so we need to target those people like that.

And we need to stop dismissing games like Angry Birds, Solitaire, Minesweeper, Candy Crush, as not games. They are games. Own that.

Overall, a great article with a more balanced outlook than most articles on gender issues in gaming.

 

[rottame]

This is all to say that drawing a direct causal relationship between biological sex and the use of an entire technological medium is incredibly simplistic in and of itself. The use or not of such a medium is overdetermined by so many different inputs (including hormones) that it is negligent to point at some correlation and immediately leap to a conclusion. There is not, by default, some supposedly natural response by such a large subset of humanity to a technological medium.

It is, of course, a simplistic categorization. Of course there are cultural factors that contribute to determine the situation. But it seems plausible to me that after a certain age girls value less violent and more social kind of games/entertainment compared to males because of the way brains of different genders tend to be when developed. Women are consistently less physically violent than men in pretty much every culture. This seems to indicate that it's not a cultural trait. Because videogames tend to be very openly competitive and very action-based, I think it's plausible to assume that videogames as well are inherently less interesting for different genders in different stages of life.

I'd also like to introduce one more complication into the mix, and I do so willingly acknowledging my own ignorance on the subject: is there, in statistically meaningful surveys, a general consensus that young women after puberty do actually stop playing video games? We can all obviously produce heaps of our own anecdotal evidence on the subject, detailing how our friends lists on XBL, PSN, Steam, etc, consist mostly of males, how none of the young women we knew in middle school and high school talked about video games at the time, etc, but these are, for very blatant reasons, irreparably biased.

I can't actually find the source of that statement. I remember reading that kids of both genders play the same games and pretty much in the same quantity, but way more female players are "lost" in the teenage years compared to male players. I'm also noticing that I made the mistake everyone makes in these discussion. I assumed that games = AAA console/PC games. In fact, as I said before, mobile is where the gender split is most balanced. And I wouldn't be surprised if more recent studies would show that in mobile, teenagers of both genders play pretty much the same things, so it's not like girls stop playing, but maybe they stop playing console games.

But this is part of the problem: it's not realistic to expect the AAA industry to invest AAA money in games targeted at women. The Wii can be seen as a huge, failed, experiment at truly expanding AAA gaming. How many of those non traditional gamers who bought the Wii went from Wii Sports to more complex and deep gaming experiences? Judging from the very low attach rate of the Wii, I'd say not many. Right now, that same audience is on mobile and tablets, spending even less. Even worse, this audience seems to be extremely unpredictable: why did Candy Crush had such a success and thousand of other similar games didn't? Why did Farmville beat all the other similar games? To make things worse, no one seems to be able to retain this audience and make them buy the next product. How can we expect traditional gaming companies to spend marketing money on such a target? The traditional male gamer spends a lot of money on gaming, has no problem buying costly new hardware and is fairly predictable when it comes to taste and preferences. Blaming marketing for not targeting women, when the female audience does not seem to be interested in or interesting for AAA developers, seems ridiculous to me.

The idea that is currently popular, that videogames are "not welcoming" to women because of bikini armors or damsels in distress, seems insanely naive, to me. Having a woman protagonist in GTA wouldn't make more women play GTA. Actually, judging from other media, it doesn't seem like gender imbalance or stereotypical gender roles bother the female public that much. Movie audience is 50% female, and I would say that the typical mainstream movie contains more gender stereotypes and a similar gender imbalance than videogames. Let's not even get into how women are represented in extremely popular media franchises loved by lots of women, like Twilight or 50 Shades.

The outcry for "objectified" female characters and the constant questioning of developers on everything even remotely "problematic" (god, I hate this word) has more to do with the pleasant feeling of some people of "fighting the good fight" than with including more actual women in videogames.

The biology argument you prefer works the exact same way. In fact, so much of the social-constructionist argumentation that proliferated through the 80s and 90s was specifically focused on opening space for human freedom or agency (however conceived) against the perceived desire of sociobiologists to naturalize the present political state of affairs and deny the possibility of alternative social formations.

Fair enough. I see it in a probabilistic way, not determinist. But regardless I don't see why a social construct would be less real, more modifiable or give more freedom than a biological one. Unless the idea is that the social rule is the product of a conscious choice from a group of cospirators, social rules express and address the wishes and needs of a society.

 

[Messofanego]

Because videogames tend to be very openly competitive and very action-based, I think it's plausible to assume that videogames as well are inherently less interesting for different genders in different stages of life.

What is that assumption based on? Clearly not on the highest selling video games in the market right now.

I assumed that games = AAA console/PC games. In fact, as I said before, mobile is where the gender split is most balanced. And I wouldn't be surprised if more recent studies would show that in mobile, teenagers of both genders play pretty much the same things, so it's not like girls stop playing, but maybe they stop playing console games.

But this is part of the problem: it's not realistic to expect the AAA industry to invest AAA money in games targeted at women. The Wii can be seen as a huge, failed, experiment at truly expanding AAA gaming. How many of those non traditional gamers who bought the Wii went from Wii Sports to more complex and deep gaming experiences? Judging from the very low attach rate of the Wii, I'd say not many. Right now, that same audience is on mobile and tablets, spending even less. Even worse, this audience seems to be extremely unpredictable: why did Candy Crush had such a success and thousand of other similar games didn't? Why did Farmville beat all the other similar games? To make things worse, no one seems to be able to retain this audience and make them buy the next product. How can we expect traditional gaming companies to spend marketing money on such a target? The traditional male gamer spends a lot of money on gaming, has no problem buying costly new hardware and is fairly predictable when it comes to taste and preferences. Blaming marketing for not targeting women, when the female audience does not seem to be interested in or interesting for AAA developers, seems ridiculous to me.

I don't seem interested in AAA games sometimes, who cares whether they transition to a certain specific type of game that you play? Men and women (of all ages) flock to adventure and puzzle games alike, they just don't have as big an advertising push. I don't play RTSs or simulators which are often the "more complex and deep gameplay experiences". Some of the highest selling games are simple. I don't think anyone should care whether people are moving from simple games to complex games.

 

[rottame]

And we need to stop dismissing games like Angry Birds, Solitaire, Minesweeper, Candy Crush, as not games. They are games. Own that.

Absolutely. But still that doesn't solve other related issues:

- These games need insane amount of people playing and very aggressive monetization strategies to make some money. If I remember correctly a couple of years ago (when it was just .99c apps) Angry Birds made 60 million dollars in a year. That's not a lot of money for the most popular gaming franchise at that moment.
- This market seems extremely volatile and unpredictable (see Zynga).
- These games tend to have the most exploitative and successful monetization strategies.
- People who play these games wouldn't identify as gamers. The probably wouldn't even say they play videogames.

Now, I am of the opinion that the mobile space is incredibly vital and interesting. Hell, I develop mobile games. But it's also a market with some of the most troublesome business practices and a place where marketing is pretty much omnipotent and not very often the best product wins. So, I'm not sure it's something we should necessarily celebrate.

 

[SolidSnakex]

What is that assumption based on? Clearly not on the highest selling video games in the market right now.

Huh? CoD has fairly consistnetly been the best selling game every year for the past few years, and the main reason for its popularity is its multiplayer. The most played game on Steam is Dota 2, which is entirely competitive based. I believe League of Legends is currently the most popular game period in terms of daily players, and it's of course competitive based. If you look at yearly charts you'll usually find two CoD games and multiple sports games. Which of course are all competitive based.

 

[rottame]

What is that assumption based on? Clearly not on the highest selling video games in the market right now.

You are right. I expressed myself poorly. I meant that there is an inherent active requirement to play a game, a certain amount of energy and patience and willingness to deal with a machine that not everyone wants or likes or is comfortable with. With TV or movies the barrier is very low. With videogames is not.

I don't seem interested in AAA games sometimes, who cares whether they transition to a certain specific type of game that you play? Men and women (of all ages) flock to adventure and puzzle games alike, they just don't have as big an advertising push. I don't play RTSs or simulators which are often the "more complex and deep gameplay experiences". Some of the highest selling games are simple. I don't think anyone should care whether people are moving from simple games to complex games.

The problem comes when people buy a console like Wii and play only Wii Sports or only f2p games on iPad. That's not something that can support an industry. And if you have people only playing Candy Crush-like games I don't see why there would be an incentive to make better games. The incentive would be only to make more clever monetization strategies. And don't think adventures are that popular: for a big chunk of the market, Candy Crush is the most complex game they want to deal with. Anything more complex or nuanced than that is too much hassle. If you care about quality in games that shouldn't sound very good.

 

[Messofanego]

Huh? CoD has fairly consistnetly been the best selling game every year for the past few years, and the main reason for its popularity is its multiplayer. The most played game on Steam is Dota 2, which is entirely competitive based. I believe League of Legends is currently the most popular game period in terms of daily players, and it's of course competitive based. If you look at yearly charts you'll usually find two CoD games and multiple sports games. Which of course are all competitive based.

What about the mobile games?

 

[rottame]

Huh? CoD has fairly consistnetly been the best selling game every year for the past few years, and the main reason for its popularity is its multiplayer. The most played game on Steam is Dota 2, which is entirely competitive based. I believe League of Legends is currently the most popular game period in terms of daily players, and it's of course competitive based. If you look at yearly charts you'll usually find two CoD games and multiple sports games. Which of course are all competitive based.

Well, these are the games that make the most money. The games that are most played in the world are probably Candy Crush Saga, Minecraft etc.

 

[SolidSnakex]

What about the mobile games?

Do we have any charts indicating how many people are playing them? It seems to be much harder to track how many people are actually playing specific mobile games.

These threads are almost always about why AAA devs/pubs aren't making certain types of games, in which case mobile really doesn't play much of a role in that.

 

[Morrigan Stark]

It means "let us stick with white heterosexual male characters as the implicit default for the sake of it and please don't rock the boat".

Seriously though, it's a ludicrous argument, because of course characters aren't just put into a game or a narrative without any justification or reason - and having people who aren't necessarily white, heterosexual, or male doesn't actually require any further (arbitrary) reason for being in a game, just like white, heterosexual male characters don't need any reason or justification for being in a game.

Did anyone ever think "of course, it could only be a white heterosexual guy that kills zombies in RE4!"?

It's funny how no one ever says "this white heterosexual male character is totally shoehorned in, must be trying to fill some quota", eh? Dat privilege, I guess.

 

[Tye The Czar]

That Coca Cola Santa thing is a myth. Retelling it doesn't present the author in a good light.

Can we get some sources for that statement?

 

[Zoe]

It's funny how no one ever says "this white heterosexual male character is totally shoehorned in, must be trying to fill some quota", eh? Dat privilege, I guess.

Maybe not in games, but token white guy is a common complaint in movies, particularly those that are remade from other countries.

 

[Goliath]

This is an interesting read but I think they might have missed the mark. It's also very interesting how people have looked at this Biologically, Socially, and through Buisness.

I feel however that people need to really realize what marketing does and stop blaming it for what it does not do.

Most marketing does not exist to change people's mind on a product or industry. In a situation like this the ads would fail because the audience wouldn't not be able to connect with the message and thefore the product. Marketing exists to make an already established group with established desires aware that there is a product that exists that they would like. So whatever the social norm is, marketing just mirrors it.

So basically when video games were first released in the arcades they were not heavily marketed and not really marketed toward one particular demographic. Then as they started to make money developers started investing in doing research as to who their demographic was and marketers found that in the arcades it seemed to be mostly a boys club. With this knowledge they built the next generations of games targeting this audience. Ads and commercials were also tailored to let this target audience know that there are games here for them.

I don't believe there was a concious effort to make video games a boys things and EXCLUDE girls. Marketing doesn't do that. Marketing just did research determined that boys play and buy their games and they decided that they were the largest and easiest demographic to appeal to and make money off of. Marketers didn't change the demographic they just cater to the majority.

 

[Steel]

It means "let us stick with white heterosexual male characters as the implicit default for the sake of it and please don't rock the boat".

Seriously though, it's a ludicrous argument, because of course characters aren't just put into a game or a narrative without any justification or reason - and having people who aren't necessarily white, heterosexual, or male doesn't actually require any further (arbitrary) reason for being in a game, just like white, heterosexual male characters don't need any reason or justification for being in a game.

Did anyone ever think "of course, it could only be a white heterosexual guy that kills zombies in RE4!"?

As I said above, the comment you're quoting came out of the context of a conversation in which the person I was arguing with had previously made the point that it would look insane to replace Rambo with a female main character and still try to pass itself off as Rambo still. It wouldn't make sense without becoming an entirely different show.

Although the point above is ridiculous, that is the fear I was trying to counter, and thus my wording. Also, the for the "sake of it" argument holds some precedence. As also mentioned above, multiplayer in a lot of games is added in for the sake of it(Read: For Sales).

In the case of women being added to media for the sake of it, that's the equivalent of a women being added simply because sex sells and the plot is bent to accommodate that after-thought. The reason this even becomes a problem is because a game is built up to appeal to a certain demographic, the plot is built with all the streotypes that the demographic in question finds most appealing, and then, after the fact, they add in a "more inclusive cast" rather than building them in from the ground up. When a game is built with a mutli-cultural multi-gender cast in mind, you can tell, and it's better for it.

Edit:

Can we get some sources for that statement?

There was an entire argument about this very near the beginning, check there for evidence. Conclusion is, that before coca-cola there were multiple accepted identities for Santa, and after Coca-Cola one particular Santa became the true image for him. Coca-cola didn't create the image they portrayed, they popularized it.

 

[H2Yo]

So with E3, I decided to follow all the major game sites twitter accounts so that I would get the best coverage. I can't watch the videos while at work but I can at least read twitter.

I swear EVERY single tweet from Polygon is about Gender/Sex. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for equality and all that but where is the actual game coverage?

And then there was this tweet:

"If you're so annoyed by Polygon's coverage of women in games that you stop reading, I'd say everything is working as intended" - Justin McElroy

Look, I'm glad that they are making an effort with this coverage but not at the expense of all other game news.

Not sure if this is the place to post this but all other Polygon threads of similar theme are closed.