Why do people think games for boys & men

[Doom972]

That's because triple A games are openly targeted at straight males. If triple A games were about riding pink unicorns and , would you be surprised that 90% of the buyers would be males?

.

I like the sound of the pink unicorn a lot. Also what was it "saving an handsome sexy prince" yes I want to do that! I want to save save an handsome sexy prince.

To be honest I have no idea what you are trying to say. But please let me know if you or anyone else makes a game like you suggested.

Good, then you're like me, because I don't mind playing a gritty white male that shoots aliens and saves babes.

Too bad you and me are not most people, and trust me, just like most males would not play a videogame like I suggested, there's not many females who want to play the male power fantasy that 80% of the triple A titles are.

You understand the issue now.

I figured that out. So, would you say that in your area/culture gaming isn't considered a male oriented hobby?

When I was a little girl, the thought that videogames were a male hobby never crossed my mind. And my male friends felt the same, too: no one ever commented that videogames are for boys and a girl playing a videogame was normal. But in high school, I remember some male friends of mine joking about how "it's crazy that a girl is better than me at a videogame". So it's interesting to see that these cultural prejudices aren't something we are born with but something our own culture and surrounding teaches us over time.

Now I teach to kids, and I have never seen any of them thinking that videogames are a male hobby. Sure, little girls tend to prefer playing Tomodachi Life and little boys tend to prefer playing Call Of Duty, obviously. But they both love videogames.
As they grow up, perhaps those girls will realize that most videogames are of the Call Of Duty kind, and stop playing or move to simple mobile games. As they grow up, perhaps those boys will start to notice about how videogames make you be a male hero and present women as prizes, and they'll think videogames are a male hobby.

And now I see that the whole point of this conversation was so that you can say how games are sexist because most of them aren't tailored to your taste. Well done.

 

[Rozalia1]

Same reason some think anything with colour is "girly". Old outdated thinking.

 

[JediMB]

Good, then you're like me, because I don't mind playing a gritty white male that shoots aliens and saves babes.

Too bad you and me are not most people, and trust me, just like most males would not play a videogame like I suggested, there's not many females who want to play the male power fantasy that 80% of the triple A titles are.

Personally, I think having to be a man all the time in real life is more than enough, so I try to keep that out of my escapist fiction whenever possible. So, yeah, I'd love to play as more female characters (that aren't designed/directed for the male gaze, 'cuz that's pretty creepy).

...

Yeah.

 

[Zen Bard]

Because, historically, the core audience for computer and console games as been young men. This comes from the bygone days of video game arcades. You rarely saw any girls there who weren't bored girlfriends or sisters of feather haired dudes pumping quarters in to a "Street Fighter II" or "Zaxxon" machine.

So when PC and console games finally made it to the household, the core audience remained male.

Now, of course, things have changed. And the audience is wonderfully widespread and diverse.

But for some reason (as I continually rant on these threads), the gaming industry still thinks it's the 80's.

 

[hermes]

The simplest explanation is that around 1997-2002 there began a shift in the way games were marketed from general audiences (mainly children) to teenagers. This has resulted in the whole "boys toys" thing and has only gotten worse over time as more and more franchises are being created with only one target market in mind. A market that has in fact been getting smaller over time.

...

I know I'm over simplifying things here, but that should give you a small idea of how some people feel.

Pretty much this.

I only want to add a little something. As that audience grew, they became the next generation of the gaming industry (developers, designers, artists, PR, etc...), which consolidated and perpetuated the cycle of men making the games they liked to play as boys...

 

[NoX 9]

Most of what I would say to explain it has already been said by other posters -and in a far more intelligent way than I ever could-, but I would like to add that I never felt unwelcome in gaming as a young girl and now a grown woman. I've had my share of uncomfortable experiences in multiplayer games for sure, but so have my male friends -the primary difference being that they were assholes and I was going to get gangraped, but hey...- and even random people on the internet haven't made me feel like I don't have any business enjoying my chosen hobby.

Not that I didn't notice it being very male-dominated, at least when I was younger. I still only have two female friends, and a bunch of guys. Growing up the girls in my class were easily the most horrible, and if that small group of videogaming StarWars nerds I call my friends hadn't been there I don't know where I'd be today.

 

[TheGamerElite33]

Because gaming is man's hobby. plain and simple. that doesnot mean girls cant play games. they do. everyone do.
certain type of games are for girls too. majority of them are into JRPGs like tales of games.

 

[white_wolf]

Go back and look at the ads for gaming machines back in the 70's the industry early on wanted it to be about boys since mainly men and 1 woman kicked the whole thing off. With ads like this it wasn't exactly inviting for girls and women to want to join despite the fact they did by ignoring such ads and just looking at the games them http://nyssaharkness.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/image-11.jpg

It was a perception invented, cultured, framed, and nurtured over multiple years sometimes purposefully othertimes it was just going with the flow but it never was just a mans hobby to was always men, women, and children's hobby.

Game companies now also employ just ignoring women.

 

[Scarim Coral]

What's not to get? Back then only boys played it when it was first created. I talking about Pong and arcade era which kind of set in mind in future generation until a few years ago when gaming became far more mainstream for anybody to picked up and played.
It also doesn't help that back then all of the games were males character and females were damsel in distress.

 

[Doom972]

snip

And now I see that the whole point of this conversation was so that you can say how games are sexist because most of them aren't tailored to your taste. Well done.

I was of the idea to dismiss your comment, but I have to ask: how do you possibly reach that conclusion by reading my comment? I'm afraid to ask, but curiosity got the better of me.

Mostly because of this:

As they grow up, perhaps those boys will start to notice about how videogames make you be a male hero and present women as prizes

At this point, it just seems like you are making a very exaggerated generalization to make a point.

 

[Rozalia1]

Because gaming is man's hobby. plain and simple. that doesnot mean girls cant play games. they do. everyone do.
certain type of games are for girls too. majority of them are into JRPGs like tales of games.

For someone who doesn't really care for RPGs you sure are fixated on JRPGs. A JRPG kill your parents or something? Your constant shifting things to JRPGs is really telling of a couple of possible characteristics you have.
Anyway your claim is incorrect as usual, but I'll give you the opportunity regardless because I'm fair like that (and I know you're wrong). Post those demographics on gender makeup in the JRPG playerbase, or failing that the breakdown of what the female gender plays.

You know what, your colour analogy is the best analogy to explain the issue. Mind if I'll use it too in the future?

You can use it of course.

 

[Mangue Surfer]

Because Mega man go hunt while Roll stay to clean the lab.

 

[Doom972]

Mostly because of this:

As they grow up, perhaps those boys will start to notice about how videogames make you be a male hero and present women as prizes

At this point, it just seems like you are making a very exaggerated generalization to make a point.

You're right, but you didn't see that I made an *intentional* exaggerated generalization because it'd have been a whole lot longer to type "perhaps those boys will start to notice about how videogames make you be the male hero 90% of the times, and present plenty of sexualized women but hardly ever sexualized men, and female characters are often the eyecandy of the male hero or the girlfriend/wife/daughter that the hero must protect/rescue, and often they wear sexually provocative clothing or will keep sexually provocative attitudes aimed to the player".

Things are changing - Destiny has a character creation and it doesn't matter if you play as a man or a woman. And Destiny is a multiplayer FPS: the last type of game from which I'd have expected this awesomeness.

That's an innovation... That has existed since the 90s. Games like Baldur's Gate and Fallout (and probably some older ones I never played) have allowed you to play a non-sexualized female. It's not even limited to RPGs. Ever heard of Alone in the Dark (original - not remake)? Also, I don't see what the problem is with sexualized females. Having muscular guys and sexy women seems fitting for epic heroes, but that's going off topic.

 

[Rayce Archer]

Games are actually for Boys 2 Men. If you aren't a member of Boys 2 Men you shouldn't be playing video games. Sorry, everyone who wasn't in Boys 2 Men!

 

[white_wolf]

Found this interesting piece its a bit old but it does go to OPs question it looks at the gaming industry vs women gaming market

http://www.uwlax.edu/urc/jur-online/PDF/2006/herrling.pdf

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

because some games are aimed at a male demographic, some are aimed at a broader demographic

also the non-casual gamer populatio consists largely of men

 

[Ten Foot Bunny]

I'm not sure where any of you were in the early '80s, but I don't agree with those of you saying that the arcades back then were male-dominated. My mom and I hung out in arcades starting in '82 at the latest (when I was 4 and then 5 years old) and I remember plenty of girls and women hanging out in them. I recall them shifting into a predominantly "male space" in the mid-to-late '80s. And before the '82 video game crash, all the cool kids had an Atari at home whether they were male or female.


Home video games were almost exclusively sold in toy stores, and not in the boys' aisle either. All of the stores I saw kept the games in a large case behind the cash registers or hanging from pegs in the wall, also behind the cash registers. That in and of itself gave the impression of games being gender-neutral since they were one of the few "toys" that weren't in gender-specific aisles.

Also, the reason you can't find any data to support what I wrote above is because data wasn't collected at that time. The entire industry was considered to be a "Wild West" atmosphere with developers making games they wanted to make, gamers playing those games, and advertising that was focused on everyone.

Nintendo was the company that changed the gender spectrum. They didn't want a repeat of the 1982 crash, and so they approved what video games wound up on their system (controlling the risk of shitty-game bloat that preceded the crash) and realized that they needed to target their advertising. It was them who chose to market games to boys around the age of 10. Shortly thereafter, the process of demographic data collection began and, Surprise Surprise (!!!), Nintendo's marketing strategy resulted in a preponderance of male gamers over female gamers.

(Yes, that's just one of the known factors, but it's one of the biggies.)

Now the PC market was different at first. Sierra's games of the late '80s and early '90s were mostly played by women in their thirties, so said company co-founder Roberta Williams. I personally played those games as a preteen and teenager, and even today I would defend their reputation as gender-neutral. Lucasarts (then Lucasfilm Games) was also making bank with funny, gender-neutral titles like Loom, Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, Sam & Max, and Zak McKraken and the Alien Mindbenders (among others). The shift in demographics became noticeable with the rising popularity of FPS games such as Wolfenstein 3D (released in 1992) and Doom (from 1993). You wouldn't be wrong if you called them the spiritual successors of popular Nintendo games like Contra (and just look at the game's advertising). Even Lucasarts capitalized on the increasingly male demographic with X-Wing (1993) and its followup title, TIE Fighter (1994) - because let's face it: flight simulators and space battle don't have reputations as bastions of female gamers.

Consider this as well: Sierra stuck to their guns and didn't transition to the male audience, and they went under. Lucasarts thrived by moving away from adventure games (their last being 1998's Grim Fandago) and toward Star Wars fighters.

So is gaming male-dominated? Yeah, it still is after 25 years of male-focused advertising and the late-'90s shift to predominantly male protagonists. That people continue to think that games are for boys and men is simply a reflection of a truism that wasn't always so.

And sorry I didn't reference the hell out of this post, but it took me long enough to write and I'm tired of talking about it for now.

 

[clinicalPsychologist]

Mostly because of this:

As they grow up, perhaps those boys will start to notice about how videogames make you be a male hero and present women as prizes

At this point, it just seems like you are making a very exaggerated generalization to make a point.

You're right, but you didn't see that I made an *intentional* exaggerated generalization because it'd have been a whole lot longer to type "perhaps those boys will start to notice about how videogames make you be the male hero 90% of the times, and present plenty of sexualized women but hardly ever sexualized men, and female characters are often the eyecandy of the male hero or the girlfriend/wife/daughter that the hero must protect/rescue, and often they wear sexually provocative clothing or will keep sexually provocative attitudes aimed to the player".

Things are changing - Destiny has a character creation and it doesn't matter if you play as a man or a woman. And Destiny is a multiplayer FPS: the last type of game from which I'd have expected this awesomeness.

That's an innovation... That has existed since the 90s. Games like Baldur's Gate and Fallout (and probably some older ones I never played) have allowed you to play a non-sexualized female. It's not even limited to RPGs. Ever heard of Alone in the Dark (original - not remake)? Also, I don't see what the problem is with sexualized females. Having muscular guys and sexy women seems fitting for epic heroes, but that's going off topic.

Ohhh yes. I played Baldurs Gate 2 and the only romance option for female characters... Anomen... NO. NO!

Also, this is a bit unrelated but I have a general question to all native english speakers in this thread... Is it really normal for English speakers to say "male" or "female" instead of "men" and "women"? Like: A male plays this and that... A female likes this... Because I see it so often!
I'm German and if we say the equivalent of "male" and "female" (which would be Männchen and Weibchen) it would be clear that we are talking about animals. You would never use it for humans, just "men" and "women" if you talk about humans.
Thanks for your input in advance!

 

[white_wolf]

^ No its not typical for Americans to say male or female for everyday language its just us using industry talk they always say female this and female that not woman or girl this man or boy that. In spoken dialogue its usually man, men, guy, he, dude, woman, women, girl, she and sometimes lady of course there is slang but really the only time you officially use male and female terms specifically would be forums like at the doctor or on an application. To say I'm a female or I'm a male X in real life conversations sounds weird outloud its just forum and paper things.

 

[Trunkage]

Because gaming is man's hobby. plain and simple. that doesnot mean girls cant play games. they do. everyone do.
certain type of games are for girls too. majority of them are into JRPGs like tales of games.

For someone who doesn't really care for RPGs you sure are fixated on JRPGs. A JRPG kill your parents or something? Your constant shifting things to JRPGs is really telling of a couple of possible characteristics you have.
Anyway your claim is incorrect as usual, but I'll give you the opportunity regardless because I'm fair like that (and I know you're wrong). Post those demographics on gender makeup in the JRPG playerbase, or failing that the breakdown of what the female gender plays.

I can give you my own personal obs for this study. I know 27 people who have played JRPGs. 0 female and 27 male. Let me add that work in female dominated industry, and know magnitudes more female gamers than males. They just aren't interested in JRPGs. Driving Sims, FPSs, western RPG, RTSs, Tower Defense etc. But for some reason not JRPGs.

OT: society tends to see men and boys as 'immature'. Games are 'immature' mainly based around the term game. No responsible female could possibly consider playing a 'game.' Plus alot of what others said.