Editorial: Omitting Women From Games Because "It's Too Hard" is Unacceptable
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Unless you count movies, TV, comics, books, and so on. Hell, using your painting comparison, painters who make commercial paintings are still beholden to the base. Not to mention even the greats had patrons they had to please. Songwriters and musicians get it on all levels.beastro said:
In fact, it's this defense of artistry that seems unique to the genre.
I think it's naive to think this came from anything other than design by committee. Hell, what's with the annual release schedule? Do you think this comes from a place of artistry?
People are still bitching about this? This seriously seems like people misunderstood something, latched onto it, and then when explained what the real deal was, they stubbornly refused to let go because they're more concerned with their issue then whether there's an actual problem in this instance.
The game has one protagonist. Multi-player has everyone being the same character. There is only one character to play as. One! It's a set protagonist. Are games not allowed to have a male set protagonist? They are? Then stop trying to run the game's reputation into the ground as an excuse to parrot an issue you care about. It makes your issue and the people who care about it look like a whiny cancer that will spread to anything it can find ANY excuse to latch onto.
If there were four, unrelated main characters like people thought there were at the beginning, the lack of diversity would definitely be odd and I could see why people would take issue. This though? This is people whining because one big budget game on a tight release schedule isn't exactly the game they want it to be.
The game has one protagonist. Multi-player has everyone being the same character. There is only one character to play as. One! It's a set protagonist. Are games not allowed to have a male set protagonist? They are? Then stop trying to run the game's reputation into the ground as an excuse to parrot an issue you care about. It makes your issue and the people who care about it look like a whiny cancer that will spread to anything it can find ANY excuse to latch onto.
If there were four, unrelated main characters like people thought there were at the beginning, the lack of diversity would definitely be odd and I could see why people would take issue. This though? This is people whining because one big budget game on a tight release schedule isn't exactly the game they want it to be.
Your initial position was that it's a 'fact' that gamers don't buy games with female protagonists (and thus claiming the original argument you quoted being supposedly undermined). When I brought up the relative lack of such female-led games, suddenly your factual numbers need multiple constraints to be viable that lowers its claims to being absolute fact.ccdohl said:
Three Ad Hominems? Please point them out for me. If you do I will apologize for them. Just for the record this is what I consider an Ad Hominem to be. Person A makes claim X. Person B makes an attack on person A. Therefore A's claim is false. They need to meet these conditions for me to consider them Ad Hominems.ccdohl said:
The "it's my opinion" defense only protects you from so much. For example, if I can point out logical flaws in your "opinion" then I'm not going to buy that defense. And my argument was never about the right to express opinions, it was about how you were throwing massive blanket statements to dismiss arguments without actually addressing them. With logical fallacies at that.
Pardon me, but it was going on in the gaming forum long before it happened here, and people cared about it then too, so I don't buy your argument that it's all artificial clickbait. And even then, people still clearly care about it, a comment section addressing it and giving them a space to allow their voice to be heard does not change that.
One problem with that though. There is evidence that the reason that games with female main characters don't sell as well as ones with male main characters is because they don't get nearly as much funding or advertising.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/games-with-female-heroes-dont-sell-because-publishers-dont-support-them
Remember Me, do you recall seeing that much advertising for it? I certainly don't. It's a self fulling prophecy. Publishers believe games with female main characters won't sell, so they don't advertise them, therefore they don't sell. It's the same thing that happened to horror games. It doesn't help that games with female characters tend to have lousy design or be shaky experiments, see Assassin's Creed Liberation. Also, like I said, the money aspect should not be the deciding factor in the creative department of gaming. That's what causes things like COD's out of control sequels and the death of creativity.
If we're going to talk about the market for games with a female lead, we need a competently designed game with a female lead that the devs actually cared about and was not the victim of corporate pandering.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/41/Transistor_art.jpg
Okay. That still doesn't answer the question of why they aren't generally part of the initial plan. I can understand that going back and adding-in female characters takes effort just as going back and adding ANY character will take effort. Part of the outrage is that the women aren't there in the first place. It's like when a company apologizes for some gross misstep they took, and the general response is "Yeah that's nice, but why did you think that was an okay thing to do in the first place?"The Plunk said:
In short, this isn't about adding new characters that would take extra effort, it's about the base characters generally always being male in the first place that adding new characters to include females is suddenly "extra effort".
Or, in shorter-short: Women shouldn't be a "feature".
Tomb Raider 2013 sold well (over 4 million copies), and its Definitive Edition actually outsold FIFA 14 in the UK. It's been profitable enough to warrant <url=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/trailers/9348-Rise-of-the-Tomb-Raider-E3-Trailer>a sequel. The only reason Square Enix was grouchy about the initial sales was that they were hemorrhaging money on the Eastern front (especially through FF XIV), and were banking on their Western titles (Tomb Raider 2013, Hitman: Absolution, Sleeping Dogs, etc) to drag them out, which was unreasonable.ccdohl said:
Remember Me didn't sell well because it was a mediocre game with average scores.
If you go back to the discussion over the Bioshock cover, you'll see that plenty of people criticized its generic cover, which is why Ken LEvine tried to defend his decision in the first place. Another example is the cover issues with The Last of Us, which was pure corporate boneheadedness. They still put Ellie on the cover, and I haven't heard of it tanking TLoU's sales.
Our market studies would agree with you on that. Generally, having a sole female playable character would appear to have a negative knock-on effect to sales. Conversely in the right-here-and-now, adding a female lead to a game is either a break-even scenario for smaller studios or even a slight loss. I am not for a minute suggesting that this is a desirable state of affairs, but that's how the accountants see it. For the larger studios this shouldn't even be a discussion - take the small hit and build up a loyal base of fans who appreciate your inclusivity. You won't see the results this year, or maybe even next year, but build it up.ccdohl said:
That is my purely commercial argument for inclusiveness, and not based on any socio-political view. The social argument is perhaps the stronger one but that one does seem to get hijacked for the sake of a good sound-bite or quote in the media these days.
What saddens me is that there are some great games out there that would have benefited from giving the player the option to have a female lead. There are so many fascinating inter-personal things that happen which would translate well to gaming, but it comes at a cost.
For example, next time you're at a bar, pub or club, restaurant, whatever, watch the interactions. Men walk differently when they perceive they're being judged by other men, their body language changes when they talk to women, or male friends. Women do exactly the same thing which is why we always have the appropriate other actor on the mo-cap stage when we run a capture sequence. Unconsciously, behaviour and motion change. When you get it right in a game, it 'clicks' with the player as being correct. When it's wrong, it jars, and breaks the immersion. This is expensive to do. The dialogue could be so much more interesting if it wasn't the same old stereotypes talking to the same old stereotypes.
At the end of the day, though, we want you to enjoy your experience. If you do, you'll buy more of our stuff, so we can make more stuff you like. Pretty simple, huh?!
If you feel uncomfortable playing generic-white-30s-male-hero you won't, which is why we should give you as many options *as we realistically can*. We can't cover all of the bases out there. Sorry. But we can give you a lead character who is male or female, of any skin colour, with identical dialogue and of any sexual orientation you like to imagine. We might not be able to script the world around your own unique preferences, but we can get a good way there. Use your imagination to get the last 5%.
In our profession we make things that are not real. There may never have been a female Apollo astronaut, but that doesn't mean we couldn't give you the opportunity to play one if we made 'Call of Duty - Moon Landing'. And we should.
Just remember that, despite what you may think of Ubi, it does cost a lot of money and that is an issue.
Rock. Hard Place.
But? you DONT get to pick your character in assassins creed. your just arno thats it? the other guys there arno too. No one would get to play as this female character anyway?
Why is everyone willingly ignoring this fact?
Why is everyone willingly ignoring this fact?
Oh no not at all.Zachary Amaranth said:
I just find it amusing that as a product people are whining about it and as a work of art they're doing the same.
It's even more amusing to think of modern consumers as on the level of patrons to artists.
I guess what ti comes down to me is people trying to tell product makers what to do instead of buying the products they want, not buying those they don't like and not looking for things to be outraged at.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. This does not make me view Ubisoft in a better light. This makes me think even lower of them. They're so lazy they can't even develop four unique characters, they're just developing the one. Lazy. Lazy. Lazy.rbstewart7263 said:
Also their reasoning for why they couldn't make a female character was asinine and further solidified my opinion that they were lazy.
While at face value the statement is stupid, "it'll cost too much" is usually short hand for "it won't bring in what it'll take to produce" which is the larger issue.
I keep going back to Remember Me. The whole process: endless complaints about lack of female leads, game comes out with female lead and makes big point about that and how they have to fight to get it out, game doesn't' sell, people wanting female leads make excuses. No I don't want to hear them again, I just want to point out that this sends a message that can be read: that all the gender politics online is just the internet being the internet, and listening to the complaints won't generate new sales, and not listening won't cost us sales. No, they won't do it because it's the right thing to do. they'll do it when it'll either cost them money to not, or make them money to do so.
Look, I get it. Interchangeable male for female characters was done on NES games, and even an Atari 2600 one (ghost manor) so I get the excuse is lame. But as a fiance guy, I can' fault a company for focusing on the features they think will make or break their sales, and in 2 years of gender topics, I've yet to see much in the way of making a game with a female lead a surprise hit (Tomb Raider is an established franchise), nor a noted boycott of a game that produced a surprise failure. We did what Ubisoft expects we'll do again, ignore the game that does what we say we want (remember me) while buy the game we're mad didn't (GTA V)because reasons.
I mean, hell, if 60$ was too much for you t spend on a game that was less than perfect, why else should you expect a company to be any less tight with their own purse?
I keep going back to Remember Me. The whole process: endless complaints about lack of female leads, game comes out with female lead and makes big point about that and how they have to fight to get it out, game doesn't' sell, people wanting female leads make excuses. No I don't want to hear them again, I just want to point out that this sends a message that can be read: that all the gender politics online is just the internet being the internet, and listening to the complaints won't generate new sales, and not listening won't cost us sales. No, they won't do it because it's the right thing to do. they'll do it when it'll either cost them money to not, or make them money to do so.
Look, I get it. Interchangeable male for female characters was done on NES games, and even an Atari 2600 one (ghost manor) so I get the excuse is lame. But as a fiance guy, I can' fault a company for focusing on the features they think will make or break their sales, and in 2 years of gender topics, I've yet to see much in the way of making a game with a female lead a surprise hit (Tomb Raider is an established franchise), nor a noted boycott of a game that produced a surprise failure. We did what Ubisoft expects we'll do again, ignore the game that does what we say we want (remember me) while buy the game we're mad didn't (GTA V)because reasons.
I mean, hell, if 60$ was too much for you t spend on a game that was less than perfect, why else should you expect a company to be any less tight with their own purse?
Most likely it was less of a case of people note spending full retail on a game that was less than perfect and more people not spending full retail on a game that they didn't know existed. The advertising on Remember Me was appealing, I'm not even sure if it existed. Publishers don't think games with female leads won't sell...so they don't give them funding...so they don't sell. In the end, publishers fuck up absolutely everything in gaming and I look forward to the day we can be rid of them.Redd the Sock said:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/games-with-female-heroes-dont-sell-because-publishers-dont-support-them
Also Transistor.
As they say on Fark, CSB time:Alterego-X said:
Mrs. Makt and I have a video game console because Mrs. Makt saw that she could play a female Shepard in Mass Effect 1 and decided to buy an X-Box 360. Until that point, I didn't care enough about console games to go out and buy one; most console games bore me. FPS/Action games like Battlefield, Call of Duty and Halo, fighting games like Mortal Combat, any Sports games and Racing games hold no interest for me and that's still a strong portion, if not an outright majority, of console games. She bought it and Mass Effect, played the hell out of it and during her second or third play through I finally decided to give it a shot. I enjoyed it, and have bought a number of games since then, most of which have one thing in common - playable female characters. The only series I have that doesn't have a playable female protagonist is the Bioshock series, and the only reason I have Bioshock is because I got Bioshock 1 and 2 with most of the extras for $20 and the first Lost Planet game, which I think I got as a gift from someone because in writing this post I went to take a peek at my games drawer and found it in there still in the plastic.
So quite literally, we would not have bought an X-Box 360 if it wasn't for playable female characters. We wouldn't be continuing to buy DLC or more games it if wasn't for playable female characters. We're a bit on the extreme end with it, as neither of us play console games where you can't play a female playable character, but we're actual real life people who are on that extreme, not hypothetical people.
Touché, that must be why KoTOR, Mass Effect, Elder Scrolls, Saints Row & those other stupid franchises with selectable-gender PCs all barely manage to squeak out a profit. By comparison AssCreed & GTA are money-printing machines because eliminating the option for a female PC lets them be produced on a shoestring budget. Yeah, sounds legit.The Plunk said:
A few points:erttheking said:
1) I'll admit the games best marketing was the controversy around it, but given what I said about sales, that makes it less acceptable that word of mouth didn't get spread. Everyone treated it as a great shaming moment for the industry, instead of buying it and getting others to buy it as well.
2) It also doesn't disprove my point that the gender of the characters is less important than something: in this case the marketing. I buy a lot of games that get no marketing, reviews, or any major press (Mugen Souls Z, Blazblue, Demon Gaze, The Witch and the Hundred Knight, just to name a few over the last few months) that I know about by simply looking at an upcoming release list online. No real hard effort, just a desire to be knowledgeable. Sometimes I even do the unthinkable and buy a game I didn't know about because it looked interesting at the store. Companies actually bank on the notion that most gamers just follow the hype instead of looking to smaller publishers or indys to get what the AAA isn't providing, and saying "it wasn't marketed properly" is just an admission that we'll all just buy what they they'll us to
I can appreciate what you're going for, but the thing is that correlation does not equal causation. Remember Me didn't sell poorly because it had a female lead. It sold poorly because it wasn't very good. Games are expensive and while I would love to see more female leads, I'm not gonna throw money at every game with a female lead to send a message, I've got college to pay for. When we have games that spread around via world of mouth, it's because they're well liked and fun to play, like FTL and Dark Souls.Redd the Sock said:
Maybe I'm projecting a bit, but I have not heard of any of those games (They any good?). Mainly because, sure it's no problem for you to look up everything that's coming out, but not everyone is as dedicated as you are and not everyone is willing to take leaps of faith, especially if money is tight.
In all honesty I can't fault your reasoning about ACU here, I'd say you're dead on. Strange then that it isn't the justification they offered for the absence of playable women. For me, that's the real affront here; they're so comfortable with this BS about "including x = political statement / prohibitive expense" that they used it as an excuse when there was a perfectly legitimate real reason. They should at least think when addressing criticism instead of just regurgitating the first unfalsifiable excuse that comes to mind.infinity_turtles said:
At least that's what bothers me about this.
Remember Me aggregated 7 to 7.5 out of 10 on metacritic. That's only poor to a crowd that thinks anything less than 8/10 is god awful, but that's another issue (though if that applies to you, then no, the games I mentioned probably aren't going to be for you).erttheking said:
As for the rest, there is quite a bit about that attitude that pisses me off, but I'll stick to one point:
If you're going to complain about there being a lack of something in a medium, you should be at least decently aware of the content of said medium, both to maintain an accurate measure of how deep the problem actually is, but to be as supportive of it as you reasonably can, especially for something that got the political treatment. It follows what I said above: if you can't part with $60 and some time for something in the name of your cause, why should a company part with at the very least a few hundred thousand dollars in development costs for your cause? I mean, if you didn't buy it because it was truly niche (I've got some gamestop never heard of) or buying it would require you to give up food for a while, that's fine. But if you just couldn't be bothered to look at the rest of the new release shelf or demand perfect scores from all your games, then you forfeit the right to complain when a company takes away the message that your cause really isn't all that important to you.
And as I said, right now, I can't blame a company for thinking that the cause really is just the stuff of internet angry, not real demand, and it's going to take more than a wagging finger to change that. They won't change until they fear some upstart indy publisher taking their place in the AAA lineup.