Lightknight said:
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!
I'm just glad there are others
actually willing to converse and discuss the topic, rather than just argue over it.
It's like people forgot that they can disagree with one another without arguing about it.
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.
I don't disagree. But when I said "catered to" I was primarily referring to advertising campaigns and cultural stigmas. It wasn't
quite as prevalent in the very early days, but as gaming began to become a cultural (though still niche) phenomenon, publishers and system makers started gearing their ad campaigns towards what they
thought was their core demographic. I.E. Young to teen-aged boys. That marketing mantra carried on for years and is still seen today.
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.
Absolutely. And as I'd said before, the male-to-female ratio of game makers
and players is balancing out.
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.
Oh, of course there were. I remember fondly a lot of the games you're mentioning. But as I said, it wasn't necessarily the developers who were guilty (though, just as today, some were), it was the publishers and their advertising campaigns and the media coverage around the industry.
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.
I'm not entirely sure I can buy into this fully. I think it's far more complicated than we realize. Far more complicated than even the publishers realize.
(Because, let's face it, it's pretty clear even the publishers often don't know what market they're trying to appeal to.)
Besides, from my own experience
(and I fully admit mine may not be indicative of the average), many of the people I routinely play violent online games with are women. This is especially true of Left 4 Dead 2.
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?
I think the first mistake is made when a developer worries about what their protagonist looks like, based on perceived or projected demographic desires.
The design of the character should be based on the wants of the artist and the needs of the narrative.
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.
Yes, but again, having access to those kinds of budgets
should allow for some leeway in creative diversity.
As with my previous example, the film industry shows a good example of this.
They still churn out massive budget, dime-a-dozen, "dumb" spectacle films like
Transformers or
TMNT. However, they
also churn out more original, diverse, and creative works with similar budgets.
These projects, from either group, see their fair share of success or failure. Triple-A game publishers need to learn to take risks because, as we're starting to see, playing it safe for years breeds stagnation, bloated budgets, and million-unit sales being viewed as "failures".
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.
Certain members of a given demographic tend to prefer different genres, but certainly not all members do.
That's really what I was getting at. My issue wasn't really about the
creation of the games, nor really what's contained therein, it's how publishers, etc, are marketing the game.
