Ech boobs.
Same crap has been re iterated and re hashed so many times. We get it. Womens are not special, different.
I was going to submit this, but I cannot be arsed to go through the "Lol we just covered it."
De hype:
Girls of gaming :
The false problem that has been around since quake : Are we doing enough to get women interested in gaming? How can we expand our culture to fit women into it?
We're missing a point here. The point is, gaming is a niche hobby that hit it big with a certain demographic, and made people realise they can gain money from it. This led to people outside of the demographic wishing to invest into the hobby, and attempt to recreate the monetary successes of previous titles. This alone describes the endless sequalitis that has plagued the industry from the start. It's not lack of creativity or talent, it's desire to have success. So, when you try to attract female gamers, all your attempts seem shallow attempts that are trying to make a means to an end : expand the base of users.
Lets take a different hobby for instance. World war 2 plane model collectors. Is there any attempt for them to make plane models that would apply to women, or to people outside of the niche market? How about American football? Do they invent new leagues to attract the lesbian demographic? No, but XFL was set up, then failed. Why? Because they tried to fix what was broke. It actually works the other way for football, they have advertising that is used to attract the fan base to unrelated products.
If gaming really was a gender based problem, there would be no women playing games. However, people of the fairer sex do play games, as evidenced by numerous women clans, which have been around since quake and possibly earlier. There are also certain games which are disproportionaly played by women. Animal crossing is an example, as are the sims and its many, many expansions. Many casual games have found a niche with housewives and other older/mature people.
The problem that everyone seems to try to get to the heart of is "How do we get women to play the AAA titles." If you want that, than the problem isn't at the heart of the game, it's at the heart of society. Because that problem shares a root with one close to my (broken) heart : women are less interested than men in computer science.
To put it another way, every computing course is a huge sausage festival, and there are barely any women involved.
There are various explenations for this, ranging from evolutionary and mental (womens sit around home , gather berries and look after children/spatial awareness problems) to upbringing (girl toys and girl games, boy toys and boy games).
But is this a problem? Are we just clucking about like headless chickens due to the puppet master of political correctness? Have us fat dorks (of whom I am a large member of) had enough of being denied access to women for most of our lives and want to change this?
Partially, yes. People prefer to be in social groups where both genders are available. When the opposite sex seems to be denied to you for about 16 years of education, and your career prospect has none of the opposite sex either, than you need to take some drastic measures.
Partially no. As we have discovered with the honking over the Nintendo E3 event, we feel frustrated when our beloved corporations have decided not to provide us with content WE desire, instead focusing on other "less valuable" content. If we decide to make it so that there are more women oriented games (which are bound to be transparently pathetic), the gaming public will resent "Sex & the city's Date and naughty adventure" being up there at the new releases along with "Kill men 3 : Death evolved", and the women that the aforementioned advert game is targeted to will reject it outright.
If you really want to interest typical women into gaming, it's simple. Understand what they actually want. Find out what women enjoy. The secret is already on the start of the article : Animal Crossing and The Sims. These are both games that have characters juggle social interactions with various npcs to empower their character through manipulation. Just like with our Quake, where we juggle social interactions with various npcs to empower our character though rocket blasts to their face.
As it turns out, (shockingly) generic women do not enjoy violence. Games like dinner dash and bejewelled can testify for this. They are popular to women, and have no violence. Neither does peggle.
In short, a non-violent, puzzle MMO would be a hit with your typical cosmopolitan. Pink consoles, womens clans etc are only helpful for those already into games.
The death of PC gaming :
The one thing that keeps hardcore gamers crapping themselves is the death of pc gaming. "Then we can only play on consoles!". No. Pc gaming is, and always will be, here to stay. It will ooze, morph, change colour and properties, but the basic item will always be there. Because it is the only platform for which development always costs $0. And the best ideas always come from the most desperate and worthless. Because they have nowhere left to fall. You have no money, no one will employ you, what have you got to lose if you make a game where you shove boxes through holes in the level? What will you lose if you make a game about a blob of tar? Who will get mad at you for making your lead character a volleyball? Precisely nothing, and no one. If the concepts are not familiar to you, Narbacular drop/portal, Gish and Gumboy : Crazy adventures.
PC gaming will and is dying. Action games are leaving us. Gone are the days of Doom and it's many, many clones. Those have become 3rd person action games, and constantly come out for the consoles. What we have instead are the return of adventure games, which is being led by telltale games, the influx of an independent gaming explosion, and strategy games. We also get the cool fusion games, and the games Microsoft has kindly decided to throw scraps at us from their might on the Xbox 360. (if you are a mac user, please leave. If you use linux, use Wine) We also get a bajillion MMOs, but those have always been there, ready to take our monthly fees.
Is this something to be concerned about? Partially. When games are available for the PC, and people care enough about it, lots of wonderful things happen. People hack and modify the game to improve, enhance and corrupt it. Examples have been around for a while. Improve : community patches for games like Vampire : Masquerade -Bloodlines and compatibility fixes for system shock 2. Enhance : Countless mods for source, UT and doom 3. Corrupt : sex toys for the sims, nude patches for Half life 2, Sin Episodes, morrowind. Hot coffee.
With this, many of today's game developers gain the valuable skills they use in the industry. If these resources are trapped and companies like EA are more protective of their product , the desire and tools to create diminish, and less people are able to go into the industry.
What happens can be explained in an analogy. Farmer A is able to sow seeds into the land, collect fruit, and get seeds from the fruit. Instead of planting the seeds back properly, the farmer sells all his fruit, and the vegetation they came from. He also forbids anyone to plant those seeds, for they should fear a lawyer. Over time, that particular fruit dies out, because it didn't spread.
If you make games, but refuse to give to the community, and only take their money, it will only be so long before there are is no more community to make games from. In it's essence, the PC gamers are the more skilled community, because all the assets come from PCs, all the communication occurs on PCs and the communities exist for the PCs. Even if major manufacturers of games quit providing for the PC, people will find means and ways. If Direct X were to disappear, we'd still have open GL. If we had no more games for PC, we'd make the engines ourselves. Find the right coder, and many challenges are gone. Because the people are there, and they exist.
However, this makes the process very slow. Games for PC would trickle to a few a year, and there would be large overlap in communities. But it would be a niche hobby, and those truly passionate would be the ones left. And to them, polish may not be an issue.
Besides, there will still be Kill men : Hatred 4 for the PS5 anyway.
In Conclusion:
Currently, our little young culture has reached adolescence. His voice is growing, he's interested in girls and worried about his future. He has seen his brothers, in the form of film degenerate from art and culture to easy to consume horseshit, and his uncle, books both fade away from the public mass and stay true to itself, and evolve into comics to pander to those who wish to appreciate visuals and storylines.
The thing is, it is up to all of us to shape how our culture grows. We need to help him find his way around girls, but , like a parent, we can and should only go so far as to teach him what to do. We cannot force women to play games, but if we make games that interest women, that would be enough, because, surprisingly, people do things that interest them.
The main problem in these hyped issues is that we are new, and like films, comics, books, theatre and every other medium under the sun, we are having growing pains. With due justice. However, the amount of energy gone to these bombastic issues, dealt ham-handedly (need I point out Fragdolls?) could and should be better spent elsewhere.
Or every time I hear this issue brought up, I will show you fat girls cosplaying as various game characters.
