Are mainstream devs deliberately discouraging women from gaming?

[Moonlight Butterfly]

I killed cthun server first and downed sunwell pre patch.

What did you do in WOW?

His experience indicates you were only there for the conversation. You certainly weren't playing the game to play the game.

Clearly I only spent 6 months on Muru for the scintillating dialogue between my esteemed guild members...

My favorite game for a long time is Dark Souls.

Big Hat Logan's charisma is the only reason I put up with the huge demons....

 

[Phasmal]

I killed cthun server first and downed sunwell pre patch.

What did you do in WOW?

His experience indicates you were only there for the conversation. You certainly weren't playing the game to play the game.

Clearly I only spent 6 months on Muru for the scintillating dialogue between my esteemed guild members...

My favorite game for a long time is Dark Souls.

Clearly Big Hat Logan's charisma is the only reason I put up with the huge demons.

My main is a mage, so clearly I am only there to provide cake.
Awesome dps and downing bosses are mere side effects of providing cake with which to talk about lady stuff over.

But. Yeah. You've got no argument, really, Mr. Anecdotal.

 

[deadish]

And we're here to tell you that your view isn't reality-based, and that you should get a better view.

I also have no sympathy for people who say "well, I'm fallible, so I guess I'll just stick to my opinions instead of trying to learn about the world."

Well, the thing is, I'm unconvinced your view is better or more accurate than mine.

So far in replies to me, I haven't seen anyone link any hard data that is serves as counter-evidence to my experiences - hence the "argue from personal anecdote" claim.

http://www.skepdic.com/ignorance.html

Once again, you no evidence your view is reality-based. "Prove me wrong" is not a working defense of a view that has no evidence to back it up.

This is going to be a bit long because chances are I won't be able to reply due to captcha problems. So I'm going to cover everything I can think of.

I'm not going to argue with you on this topic anymore, but just want to point out something particular about the way you argued.

I noticed that you seem hell bend on pushing the burden of proof completely onto me and that, I sorry to say, is BS.

You seem to hold this implicit assumption that your position (that my position is wrong; yes that is a position) is somehow the "defacto truth" that needs no justification at all.

Our argument has been like arguing how much money is in a sealed coin purse, I say there is $3 dollars (valueOfPurse = 3), you say there is some other value that $3 (valueOfPurse > 3 OR valueOfPurse < 3). Both our claims are equally tenable - although yours due to it's vagueness is more likely; but that's not saying much - yet somehow I'm the only that has to provide proof.

If you claim that you are just "pointing out the flaws", then I have to say your "services" aren't needed. No one here has any hard data worth a damn, we know there are flaws. You are in a sense contributing nothing to the conversation, you are just the irritating "skeptic" who is maybe getting an ego rush beating on people - I not sure if that is what you are doing, but I kind of getting that vibe.

Secondly, I think you need to realize that the world is really full of "grey". Logic is nice and all, but it isn't very useful when there isn't sufficient data to draw any sort iron-clad conclusions. At this point, it degrades to "opinion" which are subjective personal judgements we all make to fill in the gaps.

You need to learn to accept the diversity of opinion, because there is a lot of those out there. Example? Just look into US politics. To regulate or to not regulate. The left vs right debate has been going on forever because there is no clear cut answer based on rigorous reasoning, due to lack of sufficient data and knowledge, no one has a decent "predictive theory" to work from.

I'm going to stop here because I'm getting tired - and hungry. Maybe I'm wasting my breathe, maybe you were just looking for a fight and trolling me the entire thread. But at least I got this off my chest.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

And this leads me to the Skinner Box and the concept of behavioral psychology and operant conditioning. This is something that gaming is built on, but its concepts apply equally to both men and women. The short version is this: you can program behavior through a system of positive and/or negative reinforcement. If you perform an action and get a reward every time, you get bored quickly with the predictability and eventually the reward will reach a point of satiation. If however you perform an action and infrequently get a reward, it will be more appealing to you because now the reward has become more scarce. And if the reward is given completely at random, then the action can be downright addictive.

How does this apply to online games? Log onto WoW and look at the progress bar to your next level. How many times do you think you've looked at that thing unconsciously? How many times have you decided to go for "5 more minutes" because you were so close to the next level? That's operant conditioning hard at work. Men and women are affected by this in equal measures. Mind you, Skinner first tested this idea on pigeons, so it's pretty universal.

EQ would've been a better example than WoW. Later MMOs have been leaving the game mechanics out in the open. All of the numbers are available to peruse and analyze. So you really do know that X Orcs will equal level up in Y minutes, and so forth. Everquest was aggressively opaque. You never knew when you'd get a skill up (it was completely random), you never knew when a mob dropping a special piece of loot might spawn, you never knew anything. It's probably the one game I've actually felt comfortable labeling as psychologically addictive, in the same way slot machines can be addictive.

Total derail I know. Sorry.

 

[Quillbell]

I know that I'm in the minority here and I'm probably going to get shouted down pretty badly but please think about what it's like to grow up loving a past-time that no one seems to want you to be involved in.

I know exactly what you mean and frankly I'm sick of it. Female protagonists aren't even an afterthought, they just aren't there. The three examples of realistic female protagonists people always bring up are Samus (who hasn't been relevant since Other M), Laura Croft (who is best known as a sex symbol), and Jade. And other than select-your-gender RPG protagonists who else is there? Heather from Silent hill 3? April from the Longest Journey? Even if males represent the majority of the gamer demographic, this is ridiculous. I tried doing a google search on "upcoming female video game protagonists" and I got nothing.

But it's not just the lack of representation main-character wise, it's the assumption that video games are played by men and men only. You can see it in the scantily-clad female support characters, in the Witcher's sexy postcards, and in the fact that female characters are more often used as rewards than anything else. Even in little stuff like Amalur's recycled dialogue there's the assumption that even if someone is bothering to play with a female avatar it must just be a guy who prefers staring at a woman's ass, and if that's the case then why bother doing the extra work? It's depressing and alienating. The only developers who bother thinking about the female audience is Bioware, though you wouldn't know it by the asinine way they market their games.

Also, the argument that male characters are just as sexualized as female characters is bullshit. I'd explain why, but this comic does it better than I could.

Spoiler: False Equivalence

 

[F4LL3N]

Lately I have noticed that female gamers are being discouraged for all sorts of reasons.

Assassins Creed 3 said that a female protagonist wouldn't fit into the period of the game (yet a Native American would be acceptable and wouldn't rouse suspicion wherever he went?).

The Witcher of course has Geralt whose misogyny is accepted because of the books. Meanwhile if developers made a Conan game would he be portrayed as a racist?

Kingdoms of Amalur treats the female character like she is a man (constant flirts from female characters) to the extent where she is forced to marry a women if she wants to complete a quest line, there is no option to just say 'No' and complete the quest that way.

Risen 2 has dismissed a playable female out of hand even though their protagonist is 'The nameless hero' and plenty of women were involved in piracy.

I don't mean to go into tin foil hat territory here but as someone who has been gaming for a very long time it almost feels like we are going backwards with gender acceptance in games (outside of Bioware.) and the mainstay excuse of devs seems to be that mistreatment of women is part of their universe or time period and so must be accepted out of hand. These are often in games where there are giant bug monsters or other fantastic occurrences.

Sometimes I wonder whether we will ever be accepted as part of gaming or the very excuse of 'men are our main demographic' is going to discourage women from playing games and therefore not allow the demographic to balance out.

I know that I'm in the minority here and I'm probably going to get shouted down pretty badly but please think about what it's like to grow up loving a past-time that no one seems to want you to be involved in.

Blame Western developers and the Western audience. JRPG's get poo flung at them for doing the exact opposite of what your saying.