norr said:
Hey, I'm doing a bit of research for a project I am doing, If you have a few minuets please answer these questions..!
1. Do you feel that most video games are aimed towards men, And if you think so..
"Most?" On what level? Certainly I think the majority of the "AAA" console/PC games are aimed at men: the "Call of Duty"s, the "Battlefield"s, the "Grand Theft Auto"s. But RPGs like "Dragon Age" divide nearly down the middle, series like "Assassins Creed" clearly have a significant female player base, Adventure games like "The Walking Dead" seem to have a higher female market share, and the "hidden object" genre seems to have a strong female majority. Likewise, tablet and phone gaming appears to have a feminine majority.
My suspicion is that the most
money still goes into games geared towards men, but on a title-for-title basis, I'm not at all sure games aimed at men are the majority any more.
a. Why do you think this is?
Men have been both the consumers and the creators of the vast majority of video games for quite some time. At the same time, girls and women were dissuaded from computers and electronics, as well as math and the hard sciences that run parallel, as "unfeminine" pursuits. For decades, an understanding of a certain level of vaguely arcane knowledge was necessary to either get games running or play them; interest alone was often insufficient to make up for the "head start" enjoyed by boys and men who were encouraged to engage math and science and tinker with machines.
As more and more people came to understand that computers and the Internet were an important area of knowledge for both the workplace and daily life, the time and effort to understand these systems has become more available to women, often from earlier ages, and the systems themselves have to a greater degree been designed to be more accessible to a wider audience.
b. How do you think it shows through? (eg. Over sexualised female characters)
Over-sexualized female characters get way too much scrutiny, in my opinion. Women's bodies are used to attract people to a variety of products; video games are hardly unusual in this respect. "Men's" magazines get covers portraying attractive women; "women's" magazines get covers portraying attractive women. It isn't hard to get a marketing department to give the nod to a design with a sexy female character; their data suggests that's probably a safe bet.
What does show through in that regard, however, is an underportrayal of women as characters in video games, a tendency to under-develop or sideline those characters, and an under-representation of those characters as leads.
More to the point, though, it shows through in that video games have become very good at simulating violence, or at least a fantastic representation of violence (ragdolling, blood spatter, severed limbs and heads, etc.) but still struggles to convey anything resembling a believable human conversation that isn't nearly as linear as what one might read in a book. In many ways, character conversation is still barely better than what one saw in games in the 1980s; arguably, given the near-death of text adventures, it's actually gone backwards.
Violence is an easy source of conflict. Making a game centered, on some level, on success through the application of violence, is a relatively simple task. Making games centered on overcoming obstacles through human interaction that doesn't feel canned is far more of a struggle. But if video games had been seen as a pastime for both sexes from an earlier time, we'd probably have gotten a lot farther by now.
Bluntly, men tend to have greater upper-body strength and a large supply of a hormone that advocates for aggressive responses. Violence is likely always going to be a more appealing solution for men.
2. Would you say more women or more men play video games?
See question one. If it's CoD or GTA, it's probably a man. If it's Candy Crush or The Sims, it's probably a woman.
3. Do you think video games should be more geared towards men or women?
I think that with the trend towards independent game creators and low-cost, accessible systems for game creation, video game creation is becoming more open and democratic, new blood is being brought in, and new ideas are coming to market. I think as this trend continues, we will see more games geared towards women.
I also think a strident drive for some sort of artificial parity is likely to do more harm than good, hindering the market and driving an unnecessary wedge between gamers who have a lot in common. I also think some market initiatives that appear more often in "casual" games (those often played more by female gamers) are bad for games as a whole- "free to play" games designed from the outset with a goal of delivering the most in-item sales being the most obvious example. I worry that such methods are alienating audiences from games as fast or faster than new audiences are created, and that by the time new audiences brought in by "casual" accessibility are ready for a deeper and more sophisticated experience, the markets that could bring such experiences will have withered greatly.
I welcome anyone who wishes to play video games, but I worry what market feasibility does to the art form on both sides- the timid franchise exploitation of the AAA market on the male side, the over-simplification and mercenary "pay-to-play" market on the female side. And fundamentally, I think that if video games are an art form- and I believe they are- it's important that creators be able to make
any sort of experience that appeals to them without undue coercion, whether that's Anna Anthropy's attempts to make players understand the experiences of a transgender person or the over-sexed bombast of Duke Nukem.
4. What could the gaming industry change to make things better?
Value creativity more. Take risks. Make room in the budget for smaller games by less experienced designers, and use such programs in part to groom under-represented groups like women, racial minorities, and homosexuals among the employee base. Have some faith that gamers as an audience will play games that are good, whether they look like familiar experiences or not. Actively try to make new systems of conflict and crisis in games that can be resolved by means other than violence. Indulge less in empty echo chamber "discussions" that make condemnation and buck-passing the order of the day, more in quiet
action to make people understand these things can be improvements rather than threats to the status quo.