Dragonbums, mine was a fairly hyper aggressive response here. Sorry. I don't mean to come off like a raving lunatic. These discussions are a little predictable, and that can obviously generate frustration. I'm not going to run through and tone everything down. I'm just going to ask your forgiveness if the following stuff is too confrontational or pissy. Wasn't intentional.
Dragonbums said:
That's putting the cart before the horse isn't it? I wasn't aware there was a "suitable" state for equal representation. Honestly though it seems that the only people worried about this are simply those who fear that they may have just as much representation as minority groups beforehand. Of course, it's not like we even made any progress to begin with so that question is null.
I'm not worried about. I'm tired of fucking hearing about it. And yeah, I could just flee every single goddamn video game forum in existence and never see it again, but I think I'm also within my rights to address the conversation head on - as pointless, useless, and intellectually infuriating.
Nobody decides this. Like, what, do you expect us to enforce this? Us whining on internet forum boards is enough to get people crying "CENSORSHIP!" When the devs are literally under no obligation to even listen to us in the first place.
I completely fucking expect "you" (if you're included) to "enforce" this if enforcing it means speaking with your wallet instead of running your mouth for the umpteenth time in the same ineffectual place and pattern. Step up and make the games you want to see made. Don't expect private investors to roll the dice with tens of millions of dollars to appease a market that might not fucking exist. At the very least, get out and stump for the games doing it right... and realize that if you and people with similar points of view can't actually make such games financially viable, there might be a real and equally viable reason for it.
What mechanism. You literally add in more minority characters, or women who aren't just meant to sexually appeal to men and actually have a fucking purpose in the game. Games in the past have done this.
Games in the past have absolutely done this. And they didn't make more money. They didn't tap into new markets. That's why it's not common practice. The publishers aren't "scared old white men afraid to make more money". It's a fucking ludicrous assumption or implication right on its face. It's no different than decrying the gender wage gap out one side of your mouth while denouncing the unfettered greed of capitalism and the free market from the other. That corporations will do anything for a buck AND fail to capitalize on new markets seem mutually exclusive to me. You'd need old school sexist/racist people at the top of those trees, and if you haven't noticed? Those folks are getting bounced hard these days by share-holders, board members, anyone who cares exclusively about the bottom line.
And the only "insisting" we do is that if the gaming medium actually wants to expand they are going to have to touch upon different demographics eventually. Or they can be like the comics industry is right now. Where the demographic they've pandered to for so long is dwindling and they can't seem to capture they new audience.
Can gaming as a whole expand? Abso-fucking-lutely. But that's not Capcom's job. Or Sony's. Or any existing dev's. If you want the industry to actually grow (rather than, you know, SHIFT), we need new developers and studios, new investors. People willing to put up their own time and capital to accomplish what they feel needs to be accomplished. Instead we have endless hand-wringing and faux-journalistic bullshit aimed at shaming or otherwise altering the behavior of current publishers and devs. And that's bullshit.
Well yeah. Something can't exist if nobody has ever tried it before. What are we supposed to do about it?
Make it yourself, create a huge uproar on those rare occasions where it does happen, or accept that it's not up to privately owned companies to risk tens of millions of dollars to maybe prove to the world that a certain market might conceivably exist. Based largely, of course, on the say so of runaway internet gender equality ideology.
I would assume the companies that make videogames and the ones who want to grab that untouched, non competitive market.
First of all, it's not a privately owned (or more accurately, any company that isn't funded with taxpayer money) company's job to do anything it doesn't decide to do. It's not up toe Jaguar to satiate the compact economy market. It's not up to McDonald's to deliver $100 steak. If a company doesn't want to make money doing something, they don't have to.
That said... you assure me this is fertile ground? That they can release a AAA game aimed at, say, women, and the rewards will be substantial as well as virtually guaranteed? Strange, though... why aren't you trying to tap that market? Why aren't the Anita Sarkeesians of the world turning their media might and considerable fund-raising ability towards correcting the perceived imbalances in representation and treatment with their own productions? Why is the only answer "complain loudly and unceasingly until maybe the thing I want to happen happens"?
Well that's not exactly our fault is it? They don't have to make games for $10 million dollars. Granted that such a budget in and of itself is already problematic for even regular AAA games. They can very easily put aside a tiny but reasonable budget to a new team to work on experimental games and see if it works. It worked swimmingly for Square Enix and Bravely Default. I'm not exactly sure why this wouldn't work for a company that has hundreds of millions of dollars.
So now we're switching the argument to a general admonishing of the AAA development strategy, which everyone already knows to be horseshit. When you step outside of AAA, guess what happens? Minority and female representation! Better writing! More attention to character and variety! It's a conflation of separate issues. I detest AAA gaming, by in large, because it is idiotic. I want smarter, more complicated fare. But you know what? I realize I'm not a big enough potential market for some company to spend ~100 million targeting. You know how I solve this problem? I buy the games that interest me and ignore the ones that don't. What I don't do is complain about a lack of representation of my personal interests in AAA gaming when I understand perfectly why it is so.
There is a market for everything. However those markets don't just come out over night. It's something that needs to be cultivated and harnessed until it becomes real money making machine.
You're talking about creating markets. Spend enough on advertising and hype, you can sell practically anything to anyone. Is that what we're really advocating here, though? That the AAA publishers should just keep throwing money at alternative markets until they eventually become profitable? When their margins are already thin and most of them are already dying or gone? Feel free to go present this idea at the next board meeting and see what happens. You'll be laughed out of the room. And not by racists or sexists, but by intelligent, reasoned business people who know what the fuck they're doing. With respect to making money, anyways. Just not with respect to your or my idea of the gaming industry.
How are we forcing game creators to make these games? They must have really weak minds if complaining on forums really has that big of an impact on them.
Pronoun confusion on this one; I was asking if it their job to force the existence of such markets. It is obviously within their power to do so, but are the markets legitimate if they must be coerced? Is there a generation of young women waiting patiently for "their games"? Or do they simply, on a large enough scale, not give a shit about games? And is that a bad thing that must be corrected or just "a thing"?
So what? That doesn't absolve our rights to complain about it.
Knowing how AAA gaming works doesn't change the fact that you're allowed to complain about it? Can't argue with that. You get mad at gravity, too?
I guess you should head on over and take a look at Jim's "Pastas not Pasta" video.
There is never one demographic. There are multiple demographics.
You have some people who like "Slice of Life games". Animal Crossing sells gangbusters with this demographic (that also has a lot of women playing it. Go figure)
Others love JRPG's- Bravely Default is selling Gangbusters with this game (also another genre that tends to have a sizeable female fanbase. Goooo figure)
I can go on honestly. That there already is two demographics. Not one. And it seems that the mentality of "maximizing profits" with only one demographic has seen companies shut down faster than it's ever been before. That "One" demographic is over saturated. With dozens more people having money in their wallets just waiting for a game to come out for them.
I very carefully said "maximizing profits". And of course it's a bad business strategy for long-term growth/success. But that doesn't make it a moral or social issue, which is what virtually all of these threads assume. People doing stupid shit with their money has always been a thing and always will be a thing. If it's a free market situation with literally no one getting legitimately hurt, you just let them piss away their money. Something else will take their place - if they should even exist in the first place. Play the other games. Play the indies. Let AAA gaming die because it's inefficient and unsustainable - NOT because it is sexists or racist. Because it isn't. It's just stupid.
Yeah, and the same crap would happen again. The thing is, videogames is an entertainment medium. Entertainment mediums get nowhere catering to one very specific group of people. That's why they are stagnating now. And regardless of if it were the opposite the same thing would happen. Why do you think the indie scene blew up like it did? There were literal millions of dollars laying on the ground for games nobody made and they were the ones that scooped it up.
EXACTLY correct. Video games is an entertainment medium. It's not the public sector. It's not government work. It's not a utility, a necessity, or a fact of life. As such, this is one arena where the free market should be allowed to do its thing. If a person believes there is room for AAA games aimed at minorities or women, that person is free to make it a reality through actual labor and risking of assets. Of course, he or she is also free to attempt to make it a reality through constant complaining and shaming of others. This does, however, make said person a giant fucking twat deserving of no one's respect.
Not all of them are aiming for the top spot. Some of them just want to make good fucking games. And honestly, that's how a lot of game studios and publishers started out as.
Dark Souls wasn't aiming for the top spot of anything. They just wanting to make 2 million dollars in sales. that's not top. That's the fucking bottom in terms of AAA releases.
What is your point here? The ones who aren't "doing it right" in terms of representation are absolutely the ones aiming for the top spot. The ones who aren't aiming for the top spot aren't handcuffed into "doing it wrong". You're talking about two different groups of publishers/developers here.
So you don't like it because it may or may not hurt business? Why don't you come over to the other side of the pond and understand how it even feels to be at the bottom of representation of practically everything around you.
I couldn't give two fucks about how the AAA industry works. And consumers shouldn't give two fucks about how the AAA industry works. The only thing I care about is me having $60.00 and not really using it because a game I really would like to happen doesn't happen.
Or you could shove your assumptions about who you think I am and realize that someone who is every bit as shafted by the AAA gaming industry as yourself (if for entirely different reasons) can still be rational about the reasons why things are the way they are. You want a certain sort of AAA game that doesn't exist, yes? Maybe, based on your stringent participation in this discussion, you want a game with more minority or female representation or higher quality representations of the same. Unfortunately, a very, very small percentage of games give you this. Me? I want games that challenge my preconceived notions about narrative and gameplay, that subvert my expectations in clever and impressive ways. Guess what? They don't make my games either. And they probably shouldn't. Because there aren't enough people who share my expectations and interests to make a $20 million gamble worthwhile.