Wow, thank you for engaging me on the topic in such a level manner. I am was not wrong to suspect that there's a real conversation to be had here!
Vigormortis said:
Lightknight said:
Well then, we're mostly on the same page on a lot of desires there.
Do you think the lack of diversity in triple-A games is due to industry sexism, or do you think that it's due to significantly more males in the AAA consumer market pool?
I think it stems from both, actually. Or rather, from a certain level of sexist tendencies (which may stem from a combination of bad/lazy design and poor business models) and from an early catering to a specific male demographic.
The industry may have started out as primarily male dominated, but the perpetuation of that design and marketing philosophy has worked toward the exclusion of anyone interested in gaming but not among that demographic.
How do you think earlier games were specifically catering to male gamers? It seemed to me like programming limitations in the first several generations of video-games really limited the ability to portray much more than pixels on a screen that enabled game mechanics. I'd hardly consider the likes of pong, asteroid, galaga or various other titles to have been gender specific. Anita may exclaim about games like Pac-woman now but there was nothing inflammatory about her back in the day or really anytime until recently when we decided to project our current capabilities onto the first form of gaming we got. Narrative was minor at best for these games. We absolutely had women in the industry early on, some incredibly influential on the medium like Roberta Williams. But yes, men dominated computer science early on as with any other area of science until society figured out that girl brain jellies aren't all that different from boy brain jellies and could contribute just as fully to scientific endeavors.
But this is something that all of society is progressing in now. Women are pursuing educations in these areas and are now pursuing jobs and are getting hired. I mean, it's important to note that gaming didn't really hit the scene full swing until the 80's and it decided to have a crash there too. It wasn't even considered all that legitimate of a past-time until we started getting real stories out of them and even now it's having trouble going that route but that's quickly fading.
I think part of this, as before, stems from a sense of exclusion. Not on the part of the gaming community, mind you, but rather the industry. Namely the publishers.
I'm not really sure I catch your drift. When I look back at games in the first two decades of console/pc gaming I see an relatively decent list of games that would appeal to females if the female character is what's important.
Are you a female gamer that lived through the 80s-90s? I think there was more societal focus on male gamers there but several neutral games or games with playable female characters. The princess from super mario bros 2 (regardless of complaints about the game's origin), Jill Valentine from Resident Evil, Sonya from Mortal Combat (actually not dressed badly), Lara Croft (if not for the obscene marketing she's a legit adventuring female with graphics too poor to be particularly skimpy), Samus Aran (Metroid), Mrs. Pacman (again, not controversial at the time and still not to most people, they didn't have the means to do more than they did with her), Toby "Kissy" Masuyo (Baraduke depending on how old you are), and several legitimate characters in games or non-gender-specific characters. Several of the games with female playable characters also did well so males weren't particularly upset with playing as females.
So why do you think this atmosphere was particularly repulsive to females? I'd posit the idea that violence and action genres in particular aren't as attractive to female gamers. We see female gamers have a huge presence in casual and social gaming. We see titles like just dance absolutely blow up in the female target markets. But unless you have a God's eye view on purchasing practices by gender then we're not going to know what the publishers are seeing.
Additional attention? No, not necessarily. But almost sole attention to the exclusion of others, especially when those "others" mark a growing, lucrative market? Not unethical, but certainly not business savvy either.
It's a bit of a sliding scale. If you're going to create a stable protagonist, who do you go after? 90% or 10% or your market?
A lot of games are going with non-stable characters so everyone can be included, that's how they're casting a wider net, but with stable characters? What's the safer bet? Do you make panty-hose more ball friendly at the risk of discomfort to your main demographic or do you continue to design them for women until the male demographic is significant enough to warrant taking the risk?
These companies are more than welcome to appeal to whatever market they want, honestly. The problem arises when these same companies try, and at times succeed, in gaining massive control over a large portion of the entire industry.
You are specifying AAA games. These are huge budget games that need the largest possible consumer market to make the money back. The reason why the indie market can do what they do is because the games aren't $50 million to make so they can afford to target smaller markets or to take risks that don't really hurt their bottom line as much as a company that needs mass appeal.
When you talk in large numbers, you make decisions based off of large numbers.
I agree, to an extent. It's a great way to bring inclusion, provided it's not overly limited in it's diversity of choices.
Not that I think every character creation tool needs to include very single possible variation someone may want. Just that it shouldn't include only a handful of options.
I'm not sure a multitude of options is as relevant as sex and skin tone. I've been generally disappointed by hair styles and facial hair options but I honestly never cared beyond character creation.
I wonder if the future of gaming is going to have a wider range of games than the standard action games we see for almost all AAA titles. The issue is that gaming as a medium really lends itself to action far more than other genres. We've seen action elements thrown into what would otherwise be legitimate dramas or romance storylines because that's the easiest way to get from point a to point b whereas not using that method often leads to a boring game in most people's eyes.
This may be true, but at the same time the film industry has shown that there are plenty of consumers who love to see films like Inception or Gravity as much as they want to see Transformers or The Avengers.
The triple-A gaming industry needs to realize that, while appealing to their perceived "core" market is crucial to their financial success, there is room for expansion and diversity. And even, that that diversity can be just as lucrative.
I'm not entirely sure where I disagreed with that or how we can particularly claim that they're not currently aware of that? I mean, I don't know about you but I've noticed some fairly significant changes in the games over the past 5 years.
People really need to figure out how to cater to drama and romance and other traditionally female-preferred genres or we may never really have the critical mass needed to draw mainstream AAA attention. As more women join the games industry, I believe we're going to have more attention drawn to succeeding at that where possible. We may, admittedly, fail at this endeavor. The need for games to be interactive may significantly detract from these things and that's also something we have to be prepared for.
I'm not sure I'd argue for any specific genre being used to cater to a specific gender or demographic, but I agree that bringing more women into game design will help immensely with the issues the industry faces on sexism and exclusion. Thankfully, this is already taking place. The balancing of the ratio of men to women seen at gaming conventions or developer conventions from 2004 to today is proof of this.
It's not about specific genres being used to cater to demographics, it's that different demographics are shown to prefer different genres in all other forms of media and should logically extend as a trend to video games.
For example, women do tend to like action films far less than males and young males tend to like dramas far less than females and older males.
So figuring out a way to adequately depict these genres without having to force action mechanics into what shouldn't be action would go a long way to expanding the market overall rather wrapping everything in action content.
The whole push for absolute equality seems to forget that in a species comprised of dimorphic sexes that we actually are different from one another in several key attributes that also extend to tastes in some ways.
