Jimquisition: Diversity? LIEversity!

[IrisNetwork]

I'm not sure what you're talking about. I'm playing a game from Ubisoft with a female protagonist.
Its called Beyond Good and Evil.

 

[Fdzzaigl]

People who are clamoring that publishers are right to forget about female protagonists because of marketing results are just digging themselves into self-fulfilling prophecy loopholes.

First off, marketing departments should not be actively developing games, they should be frekking SELLING the games made by actually creative minds. Otherwise you end up with the same old regurgitated crap all over the place, because according to marketing teams, those trends are what sells a game.
Ironically this is exactly what has been happening for years with many game formulas.

When marketeers claim that having a female protagonist means that the game won't sell well, then proceed to ban all female protagonists from the big titles that receive all the advertising, instead delegating them to niche titles. Only to afterwards use the fact that those big titles, which received the entire bulk of the marketing campaign, sold more units per game to justify your own strategy. Well, that's bullshit.

If that line of thought had been followed in early game development, we wouldn't have many of the games that we have today. Heck, Westwood studios was ridiculed when they brought out the first real RTS games in the Dune series. Right now it's pretty much a national sport in South-Korea and a fully fledged genre.

Some time ago I found an article on destructoid where the faces of protagonists from a whole lot of big titles were layered on top of each other. Result? There was almost no difference whatsoever, you just ended up with the same generic white protagonist male.
I can't seem to locate the article again, but it spoke volumes about the need for more diversity. Both in male and female protagonists.

For one, I refuse to play another game with a white male protagonist (and even worse: one with a troubled dark past) in the lead. It just bores me senseless.

 

[Crazie_Guy]

Considering how many people I've seen here and elsewhere buy into Ubisoft's ridiculous excuses and even re-iterate them to defend the company, I'm afraid they were absolutely right about some of us being stupid.

 

[Abnaxis]

Genetics is a part of biology, biology is not based on chemistry, and chemistry is not based on physics. While these 3 sciences do overlap they're concerned with very different things. As a result being a physicist doesn't make you a biologist and vice versa.

Referring to the laws of physics to talk about biology just makes it should like you have no idea what you're talking about. Especially when the majority of physics isn't governed by the laws of physics.

Metabolism is nothing but the study of how an organism stores and releases energy in chemical bonds. All of material science relating to strength of materials--for instance, bones or skin tissue--relies on information about the molecular formation of covalent bonds and how molecules entangle and interact with one another. Even DNA stands for DeoxyriboNucleic Acid--a chemical. Here's an example picture of its chemical structure [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FileNA_chemical_structure.svg].

Further, the entire orbital model of the atom, as it stands today, is derived directly from quantum physics. Laws of conservation of energy and the uncertainty principle tell us the shapes atoms take and how they interact.

Of course, saying that means a physicist knows jack all about biology is like saying an electrician should be able write production code because he understands electricity (a notion anyone who knows many electricians could easily debunk). However, the person that makes semiconductors needs to understand electricity, the person that designs transistors needs to understand semiconductors, the person that designs arithmetic logic units need to understand transistors, the person who designs CPUs needs to understand ALUs, the person who designs computers needs to understand CPUs, and the person who designs software needs to understand computers.

A programmer is fundamentally limited by the laws of Electricity, and how well we understand them, even if they have no business working as an electrician or vice versa. By the same token, a biologist is fundamentally limited by the laws of physics, and how well we understand them--which was my original statement--even though they have no business working as a quantum physicist or vice versa.

Since you didn't understand this article I'll explain it to you. You genetics (DNA) is determined at conception (when the sperm and egg combine). You genetics cannot change unless you DNA mutates.

This article is saying that stem cells in a embryo become different types of cells by prevented 80-90% genes from activating, for example the cells in the eye don't need to use the bone growing genes. While each cell many only use 10% of the available genes in this cell since the DNA of these cells is unchanged the genetics have not changed.

Yes, that is one thing that epigenetics do. However, you conveniently left out the part of the cited article that is actually germane to the discussion, where they talk about how epigenetics also regulate neuron development in general, but especially also during puberty--the phase in life that represents one of the most significant change in brain structure in humans. The article talks about this about sixty percent down the page. This is important because events in our life--like childhood trauma [http://www.genome.gov/27554258], for example, modify the way these genetic markers affect brain development.

So your DNA doesn't change after birth. If your DNA did change then it would be impossible to use DNA testing to convict people because their DNA wouldn't match the DNA from the crime scene.

Firstly scientists do understand which factors can cause mutations. Radiation is one of the main causes of these mutations because it damages the DNA in cells.

Secondly cancer is caused by cells that reproduces uncontrollably. While there is a genetic reason for this genetic defect is normally only applied to conditions that don't spontaneous occur.

What does this have to do with anything you mentioned? You don't test for cancer with a blood test. You don't normally get a sample of a person's DNA from their blood as it's easier to use the cells in their saliva.

Also none of the studies you mentioned had anything to do with a person's behaviour.

The source you provided clearly stated that a person's DNA doesn't change after conception. The fact that you didn't understand what it said won't change this.

Also scientist know of many factors that can cause genetic mutations and can easily test other factors using human cells in a lab.

Okay, here's my non-biologist understanding of genetics. There are two classes of cells--germ cells, the ones that come from mom & pop and never change, and somatic cells, the ones that actually make up specific bits and pieces like brain tissue and eyeballs. The former is what you can get from a cheek swab and do genealogy tests on, the latter is the rubber-meets-the-road place that actually gets the work done of living. It's the latter that they do tests on, see sequence X is associated with brain structure Y which is associated with criminal behavior Z.

That's a *****, because those cells mutate quite a bit--somatic mutations [http://genome.cshlp.org/content/early/2014/04/02/gr.162131.113] are generally understood to be the root cause for epilepsy and autism, though no-one has quite figure out the prevailing cause for the mutations yet.

Other than that, there has been virtually no science done on healthy people, so we know jack-all about what somatic mutations do to a "normal" person, nor do we have extensive knowledge about what causes them in the real world.

What causal link are you talking about? You didn't provide any studies regarding how the pre-frontal cortex develops or what relevance this part of the brain has to what games people enjoy. Surely what people enjoy is more dependent on the pleasure center of the brain than the part associated with cognitive and social behaviour.

I showed that your claim that DNA changes throughout a person's life was wrong, so I can say that a person's DNA will influence what games they enjoy.

The causal link I am talking about, is "dopamine receptor gene presentation X, which increases pleasure while playing shooting games, is more prevalent in males than females, therefore males are genetically predisposed toward enjoying video games." You're trying to link video games enjoyment specifically, and cognitive behavior in general, to germ-cell genetics, and that's not a link we can draw yet, for all of the reasons stated above.

I'm saying that if women enjoyed shooters then they'd simply buy the shooter that from their perspective had the least worse marketing. The fact that women are buying far fewer shooters than men, regardless of how they're marketed, indicates that fewer women than men like shooters. So we can say with certainty that women do not want to play shooter as much as men.

What you're trying to do is argue that because you don't like what the evidence shows that the evidence must be wrong. Not being 100% certain about something is no reason to ignore what the evidence is currently showing.

What evidence? do you have the demographic breakdown of which genders are playing what shooter?

And even then, there's what, a whole 10 properties that have marketing open to (never targeted at) females, all released with different marketing and development budgets, on different platforms, at different times, in different markets?

There's no "evidence," because there are so many factors OTHER than marketing, which also matter. We can do statistics and account for all those other factors, but in order to do that you need a large sample size (like, on the order of 20-30 games minimum for each confounding variable you want to try and control for, preferably a lot more since we're talking about time-series data). There's a difference between "ignoring the evidence" and saying "this evidence holds about as much predictive power as anecdotal stories and online surveys--in other words, zero to none."

 

[Abnaxis]

It's difficult for me to understand how you could get this so wrong.

Firstly it's the publisher who gets to decide which games get approved, not the artists.

Secondly it's the developer who decides which character are in the game, not the artists.

Thirdly it's the writer(s) who create these characters, not the artists.


All the artists do is make concept art, they have little control of which characters are chosen. Perhaps you were thinking of modellers who make the in game units or the animators who create the animations, as you'd need hundreds of them to make most games. Though modellers and animators also have little control over what is included in these games.

I might be swing dangerously close to "are video games art?" debate, but I would count every single one of those groups you listed as "artists."

So what I'm saying, is that a set of requirements--either set A or set B--is being passed down to the artists--including writing, modelling, texturing, animating, concept art, etc., etc. they're all frakking "artists"--and that gigantic group of people need to makes something cohesive and appealing for the consumers. That's why I said "multiple teams."

Thus if the publisher wants a male protagonist because they believe the game will sell better with one or the developer wants a male protagonist because they're easier to write then it doesn't matter what the rest of the team feel about this because they can't change these decisions.

Erm....yeah, that's kind of my point. You have hundreds to thousands of people who have no say in what they have to create. They are going to have to make thousands of compromises and work outside their comfort zone no matter what option is picked for them.

Your opinion on this is irrelevant. As long as developers find B to be harder than A they're going to almost always pick A because it will reduce the number of problems they'll have to deal with. The default will always be what is easiest.

You know what's hard, and really, really expensive? Physics simulation. Low-latency mutliplayer. Displacement mapping. Complex lighting, with reflections, subsurface scatter, transparency, and bloom effects. A large selections of weapons, which will need to be balanced in multiplayer.

Compared with these sorts of features, making the writers write for a female instead of a male costs nothing. Ubisoft loses more money every time their CEO is late for an executive meeting because he had to drop a deuce.

Go ahead, show me the conclusive evidence that can prove every single graphical feature--which represents the vast majority of the development budget, by orders of magnitude--included in Assassin's Creed justified its cost, and I'll concede that making the protagonist female would represent some sort of monumental risk in comparison. I'll wait.

 

[Abnaxis]

It is interesting to me that the majority of people making this argument are the ones who are part of the demographic already catered to, players who are not part of the demographic seems to be curiously quiet on the subject, and when they speak up it's usually to point out that they don't really care very much.

I wonder if this has anything to do with it. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messiah_complex]

Excellent, excellent use of passive voice and hyperlinking to avoid direct name calling, so you can passive-aggressively throw personal insults without fear of being reported. Hats off to you sir!.

 

[Abnaxis]

I know this isn't an argument, but it's the first thing you've said to me that wasn't "feelings" so I feel inclined to reward good behaviour.

There's nothing personal about it, and the only reason it could be called an insult at all is the fact that the entire concept is immediately and obviously detestable, to be associated with it should be an insult.

Except...I have given the justification, for why companies will make more money if they can attract a more diverse workforce (a workforce they draw from the gaming populace) and why our community would be stronger if we could include a more diverse crowd. Like, with actual numbers and peer-reviewed articles from credible sources.

You keep writing off my arguments as "because feelings," but I, myself, have a shown vested interest in seeing this thing happen. I am not stepping in to save someone else to make myself feel better. "Messiah complex" doesn't remotely characterize my argument, it is a caricature meant to trivialize the attitudes of people who disagree with you, by demeaning any points not made in your favor as invalid through a passive aggressive ad hominem attack. "Messiah complex" being somehow inherently "detestable" has nothing to do with it.

Because it is overwhelmingly white men who are complaining about this, actual women seem mostly unconcerned, and other minority groups seem unconcerned too, I can see how this would be a bitter pill though, as it sort of collapses your whole argument by showing that we know the alleged legions of women/minority groups out there waiting to play games if only the main characters resemble them are either thoroughly disinterested or somewhat less than legion.

Do we know? How? What piece of evidence can you show that backs your claims?

I have asked, multiple times, for you to show actual, conclusive evidence that the current white-male majority audience is the optimum, largest audience possible for that market, but you haven't. Because you can't.

I'm not going to bother to address your reams of "I can read Wikipedia's article on genetics and then do a hilarious amount of wishful thinking" or your conflating development costs with loss of sales, because it's all circling back to your original argument of "feelings" anyway.

You mean my reams of "I understand how statistics works, plus the actual scientists doing the studies--you know, the people most qualified to talk about these things--EXPLICITLY SAY you can't use genetics the way you're trying to apply them"?

But no, let's stick with the "men are predestined to enjoy shooters" schlock that everyone seems to find comforting. We'll just use genetics instead of the Hand of Jim or astrology to justify our "nature of man" arguments now. I guess drawing false conclusions from scientific evidence that doesn't support them is...kinda better than attributing it to magic, right?

I'll quote myself here, because this is still the fatal blow to the entire argument:

You're arguing that we must have diversity and then failing to make a case for diversity.
So long as the majority of gamers are white males, you are going to have to deal with a market catered towards that demographic, if your argument against this is that minority demographics will be put off by a lack of representation, you will have to deal with the fact that this argument works against you, because you're arguing for games to stop representing their main audience.
Either your argument isn't a valid one because players will play the game anyway and thus the requirement to change does not exist, or that argument is valid but cannot be applied because it would alienate the core demographic with no guarantee of recovering the losses with newly catered-to players.

And I'll repeat, once again, that you are comparing apples to oranges. Your argument is pointless, because there are no guarantees either way. Human beings are not finite state machines, that will always react to the same input with the same output.

The point you want to lean on repeatedly--that somehow the market has conclusively proven that men inherently enjoy shooters more than women--relies on the fact that men look at things different than women do, but you completely abandon the notion when you reach this point in your argument where you say "either it doesn't matter, or changing things will have the exact same effect on men as it does on women."

My only point is "there is evidence that the market is narrower than it could be, and both developers and customers are better off if it isn't, and the actual, measurable costs (i.e., not "I'm scared men won't like it, with no evidence beyond 'this is the way we usually do things'") of being more inclusive are rather miniscule, so let's try to counteract the trend."

 

[Something Amyss]

Is it because of the increasing anti-war sentiment in the states that they view them as not deserving anything anymore? Or are they just that cheap and greedy? Like you said, the least they could do is cover the damage done to them. Lying to them about it just scummy.

These sentiments are coming from the conservative groups, the "Republican" party as it were, so I doubt it's that they're anti-war. I think it's more they're anti-entitlement, and entitlement in any form. Remember, entitlement in itself isn't a bad word, and vets should feel entitled to the care they are supposed to get.

 

[Abnaxis]

Your vested interest in seeing it happen in no way distracts from the fact that you are, to use the terminology of the day "white knighting". You are swooping in to save all those poor oppressed minorities from the evil white male gaming monsters, and are seemingly unconcerned by the fact that they neither want nor need your help. If they wanted the things you are demanding then we'd hear them asking for them. You presuming to speak for them to tell them that they are oppressed and want to play games but cannot because they're too weak to speak up for themselves is frankly insulting.

Who the hell are you to tell me what my motivations are for being here?

See, this right here is indicative of the problem I have with you in this discussion. I have said--EXPLICITLY--that I am not "white knighting," multiple times. To whit:

Justice? It's bloody video games, for fucks sake. No woman is going to waste away in despair because she never got to play Halo

However, you would rather argue with what you assume my position is, rather than actually reading and evaluating what I am actually saying.

The first question is self-evident.

The second is your attempt to shift the burden of proof again (and after I rumbled you once before, too!) and demand that I disprove your baseless hypothesis. You are asserting that people are being kept out of gaming by the race/gender of the protagonists. Prove it.

I'm not trying to shift the burden of proof, I am trying to figure out why you think the question itself is justified. Your position is that I have to prove that changing the protagonist will result in more sales, otherwise the only reasonable course of action is to continue doing things the way they've been done. Why? What is so onerous about changing protagonist demographics, that makes the status quo default?

No, nobody is trying to use them that way, men seem to prefer shooters at a rate women do not, certainly. Women themselves enjoy some activities at a rate that men do not, and this phenomenon is irrelevant. It is certainly not to be "corrected" by social justioce warriors.

YOU might not be, but I was replying to uanime, who was saying we could test genetics and attach electrodes to brains and determine scientifically that men are born biologically more inclined toward shooters than women. We can't actually do that, the geneticists specifically say the science doesn't support it.

And again, "justice" doesn't enter into it. I am trying to improve the hobby, not win any battles for justice.

Once again, I have no idea and no interest in whether men inherently enjoy shooters or not, what I am concerned with is the fact that you can offer no proof that changing the gender of the protagonist will suddenly make women enjoy them, and that as a result any course of action based on this faulty logic must be resisted because it is clearly wrong.

The second part is funny because you're trying to handwave away the fatal flaw in your argument and it isn't working.
If the gender of the protagonist is enough to dissuade women from playing, then it must be enough to dissuade men from playing as well, and that means that you are arguing that developers risk millions of dollars purely on your feelings crusade.
If the gender isn't enough to dissuade women from playing then your argument fails at the starting block because it's based on a false premise.
Either way it most assuredly fails, and I think that at this stage you're only repeating it because you genuinely can't think of a better argument and don't want to drop the crusade because fighting for it makes you feel like one of the enlightened and allows you to justify the beliefe that you're not like other men, or other white people.

Alright, I've been arguing with you on the grounds that the logic you are trying to apply does not work, ever. But let me put this in more concrete terms.

I have been part of a team that designs mechanical products, including the paint job. At the company I used to work at, they've been making these things for literally more than a century. Every ten years or so, they change the color on them.

You know how much they worry about their current customers, when they make these changes? Not at all. Because they're already customers--they don't give a shit whether their widget is slate gray or granite gray, they've already committed decades to learning how it works and how to install it. As long as it still works the same, they couldn't care.

The company has never lost a customer when they change the color of their product, but they have seen sales increase every time. Because when they change the color, the product stands out more on the shelf, and ignorant customers--the ones who know nothing about the quality of the product or how it works--notice it on the shelf and pick it up. And, over time, a proportion of those new customers learn the ins and outs and become old customers with brand loyalty, who don't give a fuck what color they make it.

What we're talking about here is the same thing. Putting a chick on the front cover is not going to make men run for the hills. They've already committed hundreds to thousands of hours to mastering shooter mechanics, as long as the gameplay is fun and the story is passable, they couldn't give less of a fuck about what paint job we put on it. Pretty much everyone but apparently publishers has known this for years, that's why you hear things like "graphics don't mater as much as gameplay".

However, to the people that don't play shooters already, that haven't committed any time on mastery or built any brand loyalty, that box art could make all the difference in the world. I can't tell you how many games I haven't picked up until years after it came out--at which point I thoroughly enjoyed it at a deep discount/cost to the publisher--because I don't spend all my free time watching let's plays, reviews are useless, and the cover didn't match the contents. That's why changing protagonists can bring non-whites, non-males in without alienating white males--because the two groups are, in fact, different, and approach the hobby from different perspectives.

It leads me to ask this question:
Does it ever work? I mean, does it really get you what you're looking for?

It seems I've been dragged into responding to an argument that can be summed up as "feelings" again. Although I shouldn't be surprised really as it's the same bad argument you've been making for pages now.

I feel like Winston Smith thinking about the war with Eurasia Eastasia Eurasia you get the idea.

I dunno if it gets me what I'm looking for. In fact, I can go farther, and say that even if every publisher threw their weight behind diverse protagonists today, we won't know if it makes any difference for a very long time because of market momentum and intransigent public perception. By the same token, I couldn't have told you whether or not the Curiosity was going to land on Mars before it did so, and there's nobody alive who could tell tell you for certain what alternative rover design could have landed on Mars better (though there undoubtedly is one).

That's the way problem solving works. You observe something that could be improved, you hypothesize possible methods of improvement, and you (ideally) pick the one with the lowest costs and highest likelihood of success, with no absolute guarantee that it will work. In fact, if you're smart, you should expect that it won't work exactly as you intend.

Increasing protagonist diversity is one of many possible actions which may or may not result in a more diverse gaming audience. From what I know about marketing, it seems plausible, and at the same time the switch itself carries virtually zero cost. It's not the only possible way to increase diversity, it's not guaranteed to increase diversity, but if it does we're all better off.

 

[Abnaxis]

Once agin, you've provided no evidence whatsoever that changing the race/gender of the protagonist will attract more players, and you have no argument against the possibility of it pushing away existing players either which it would have to if it was enough of a factor to attract new ones.
It's still the same bad argument over and over again.
Your analogy is poor and irrelevant because, as you put it "they don't give a shit whether their widget is slate gray or granite gray".
You have stated that the paint job makes no difference to the product, it is an irrelevant part of the design.
The protagonist is not a irrelevant part of the design of the game, therefore your anology does not hold water.

Of course the protagonist isn't irrelevant, I never said it was. However, as far as people who are already dedicated to gaming are concerned, the demographics of the protagonist is of minimal concern, with compared to the quality of the gameplay or the narrative. As long as the protagonists has character, we generally don't care whether it's a man, a woman, or an alien.

This relates to my analogy, as the loyal customers care whether we make the case out of aluminum or steel, regardless of whether it's blue or green. In both cases, we're talking about the case the product is made in, just different aspects of it.

You, yourself, have shown support for this idea. You said you don't care whether the protagonists are British are not, even though you yourself are British. Correct me if I'm characterizing you wrong, but I take that to mean you care more about the quality of the writing and the enjoyability of the gameplay mechanics, right?

People who are not already shooting enthusiasts--i.e., the people I want to attract, and the people marketers are paid to care about and focus on--don't know the first thing about what makes a good shooter and what makes a bad one, because they don't have the experience. Superficial considerations--like what gender the protagonist is--are going to have a much bigger effect on those people, because they aren't as well equipped to to make in-depth judgements.

We're still at "I know this is a problem because feelings, and I know this is the solution because feelings".
That's fine for you to hold as a personal opinion, but you don't have anything to back it up whatsoever, and as a result you have no right to insist that other people gamble their own money on the back of your feelings.

Once again, if this were a request rather than a demand, I'd happily agree with it as being something that'd be nice to see (like TIE Figher HD).
Where you fail is in making it a demand when you can't back it up.

Once again, you are projecting what you think my argument is, rather than actually reading what I am saying. I have never demanded anything. All I have done, is make a case for why it would be better to have more diverse protagonists, as it relates to the original topic. Additionally, in no way have I advocated spending more money than is already being spent--in fact, I called Jim out for BS because he was trivializing the cost of adding a whole new protagonist to Assassin's Creed.

What I have said is that, given the fact that publishers are already going to dump hundreds of millions of dollars into yearly releases, it is in my best interest and their best interest to widen their sights a bit, rather than maintaining the laser-like focus on the 18-35 white male demographic as they've done. Releasing a lineup with more diverse protagonists is one of many, many possible ways to do that.

 

[Abnaxis]

So what. I didn't say that there wasn't any overlap between biology, chemistry, and physics; just that they weren't the same thing. For example evolution isn't covered in chemistry or physics because neither deal with living things.

What exactly are these "Laws of electricity" and how do they limit programmers? Once you've created a programmer that can be used to write code then any further understanding of electricity isn't going to have any effect on the programmer.

The problem with your analogy is that the laws of physics are wholly inadequate to explain almost everything that occurs in biology. Just because physicists don't understand everything about thermodynamics doesn't mean that biologists can't figure out how animals cool themselves down.

So your claim that describing all science as the laws of physics is still incorrect.

As a for instance, Ohm's law (in a very rough sense) determines how much heat is generated by a CPU that runs at X volts and draws Y current whenever a bit is flipped, which determines how much energy is required to run Z operations under expected cooling conditions, which determines how many calculations can be run in each second on each core of a multiprocessor video card, which determines how much a graphics programmer can simulate advanced lighting effects.

More broadly, the ultimate limit on processing speed, which fundamentally limits what any programmer can do with software, is limited by the laws of electrical power and the propagation speed of electromagnetic waves in semiconductors. Programmers rely on engineers to work within these constraints to give them the fastest processing hardware allowed by our understanding of electricity.

Well there was a German study in which people were categories into ?non-players?, ?action-and-simulation game players? and ?logic-and-skill-training game players?. Men made up 81.7% of the ?action-and-simulation game players", while women were the majority in the other two groups.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886905002813

That looks like an interesting study. I wish I had access to the full work so I could investigate their methodology more.

This result has been replicates in other studies, though it's no surprise that men and women like different games when they have differently structured brains.

This, right here, is where you start to go off the rails of what science supports. You are drawing lines of causation, implying that men are inclined toward action games because they are men. You don't know why men are more inclined toward action games, nor do you even know definitively why mens' brains are structured differently (that's not to say we don't know the mechanisms by which brain structure is formed, but rather that there are multiple possible mechanisms that form brain structure and we can't say which one is the dominant determinant for every variation in the brain). You only know that men categorically tend toward liking action games, there's no evidence showing why that happens.

So what. As I stated if women wanted to play these games they would buy the one they disliked the least. The fact that they're not buying any of these games indicates that they don't like these games.

A few years ago, I learned something about myself. I learned that I like wine. I had only tried a couple of cheap, boxed wines before, and had come to the conclusion that it tasted like kerosene and never wanted to do it again. Then I got a free complementary wine tasting with some tour, figured "what the hell," and really liked it. Now I keep on the lookout for new and interesting wines to try.

By your logic, the fact that I wasn't buying wine before the tour constituted conclusive proof that I don't like wine. That conclusion would have been wrong, for the exact same reason that assuming women don't like shooters because they aren't buying the least odious shooters is wrong--it assumes that consumers have full knowledge of the merits of a product, regardless of whether they've actually had a chance to fully experience that product.

Also, more generally, the idea you put forward is a textbook case of incorrectly drawing conclusions about causation based on correlations. Just because women don't buy shooters, does not mean you have adequate evidence to show that their purchasing behavior is guided by them not liking shooter mechanics.

So you're now saying that women may buy games even if they're not marketed to them.

First, I never said that there aren't some women buy and play games, regardless of marketing. I said that marketing has a tendency to discourage women more than men.

Second, the point that I was making is that marketing is not the only thing that matters to the final sales numbers for games. Time of year also matters--the sales numbers in December are not the same as in July, plus the effect of how long it's been since the current generation of consoles was released. Cultural context matters--in aggregate, people in Germany have a different cultural conception of violence than people in Japan do. Recent events matter--for good or for ill, Doom got a lot more attention after the Columbine shooting, and that affected sales volumes. And all of that is before you even consider the qualities of the game itself, like how fun it is to play, what sort of visual design its graphics employ, how much hype it received among reviewers, etc. etc.

All of these things introduce error into your data. They are what is refereed to as Confounding Variables [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding], and they each multiply the amount of data you need to find a statistically significant conclusion about the variable--for instance, protagonist gender--you actually care about.

Actually it's easier to determine what men and women like that you claim. All you need to do is create a game with several different protagonists and have people rate how much they like each protagonist. In this test all the variables exception the protagonist are the same, so it's easy to determine what effect the protagonist has on this game's popularity.

This would actually cost a prohibitively large amount of money to do correctly. First, you need an unbiased sample of adequate size and representation so you could generalize it to the population at large, otherwise your results won't answer the question you're seeking to determine. That means gathering thousands of people from different geographic locations, different socio-economic statuses, different races, and different nationalities. Further, you also need a wide, varied selection of games that is representative of what is available in the market of study, each with a "male" and "female" version. In many cases, this cannot be accomplished by simply switching out the main character model--there are a LOT of scenes in Tomb Raider, for example, that just would not work if you put no more effort into it than making Lara's model a male.

Once you're done, having spent hundreds of millions to billions of dollars on your study, you might be able to make the claim that women are less inclined toward AAA games than men are, though you still haven't done anything to figure out whether that's just because women naturally don't like AAA game design, or whether there was a pre-existing notion in their heads that they wouldn't like it because of the current state of AAA marketing, which could be changed if publishers switched gears.

Just because you consider everyone working on a video game to be an artist doesn't make them an artist. Especially not the writers.

Also these people still don't have any control over anything that will be decided by the publisher or the developer.

What is your point? As long as the publishers and developers find male protagonists easier to make games about than female protagonists it doesn't matter what all the other want to do.

So...I guess you don't consider a novel as a work of art? As in, a thing created as an artist, which is defined as "a person who creates art"? Whatever, semantics.

My point is that, no matter what you do, there is financial cost incurred by the way game developing is structured. Publishers hand down their requirements to teams of people who implement them regardless of whether they are comfortable or familiar with the context they are creating for. It doesn't matter if you writer is atheist, they have to write a theist character if the publisher decrees that the main character must be theist. That incurs extra cost, which is unavoidable given the size of the teams.

Therefore, arguing that publishers incur extra cost if they hand down the requirement that the protagonist must be female, doesn't hold a lot of water. No matter what, publishers will have to pay a price for coordinating the various creative teams no matter what mandate they set. There will be a slight difference in cost, especially among the writers, because by and large those teams are made up of men that will be less comfortable creating women characters, but the actual marginal cost of one option versus the other is someone on the order of the margin of error in the accounts payable department.

Again what is your point? The fact that there's other things that are more expensive that a female protagonist doesn't change the fact that a female protagonist will still be more difficult to write than a male one. Why would anyone spend any extra money on female protagonist when it won't result in them getting more money?

Why would I provide you with any other this information when it has nothing to do with my argument? Perhaps you should provide evidence of your claim that a female protagonist will cost the same to create than a male one and be just as easy to create a game for.

My point is that changing the protagonist, from a risk/reward standpoint, is not a big deal when compared to the dozens of other risks that are involved every time a publisher commits to make a game. Publishers are all too happy to dunk tens of millions of dollars worth of investment into advanced lighting and texturing technology, with no guarantee of attracting more customers, so by what justification can you make the argument that the thousands of dollars in extra cost it would take to create a female protagonist is somehow prohibitively expensive?

Just one problem, I never claimed this. I said that we could test what men and women liked by asking men and women what they liked, not using DNA testing or scanning their brains.

Though I did say that as men preferred hunting and shooters it was likely that men had a genetic disposition to these games.

You also failed to provide any evidence regarding what the geneticists said on this issue.

You, earlier:

You could also test this by asking men and women about the games they enjoy, examining male and female brains to see what they enjoy, or even see what people enjoy in a non-game environment (such as how many hunter are male).

You seem to have no understanding of science. Scientific investigation has found that people with low levels of dopamine are more prone to being thrill seekers because it's they only way they can stimulate dopamine production. It's entirely possible that men enjoy playing shooters or hunting for a similar reason.

You ignored that people who enjoy shooters could have their DNA tested to see if there's a genetic reason why some people prefer shooters to RPGs.

You also ignored that more men enjoy hunting that women because it doesn't fit with your argument that marketing is the sole reason why women don't buy as many shooters as men.

The way scientists "examine male and female brains to see what they enjoy," is they scan them, and watch how the brain reacts when the people play games.

Here's a paper by a geneticist that explains why you'll never find a "video game playing" gene sequence. [http://musicoflife.co.uk/pdfs/GenesandCausation.pdf] Also, it goes into great detail as to why the environment plays a significant role in genetics.

As far as hunting goes, there's a far, far cry difference between hunting and playing a shooting game. I'm sure you can run statistics and find a correlation between the two behaviors, but--once again--that is not evidence for any particular root cause between the two of them, biological or otherwise, it only says that there IS a shared factor.

 

[danon]

Very rarely checking in on this site anymore. Good to see that Jim is doing the same old though.