I honestly hate when stats are distorted. The "almost half of gamers are female" stat is true, but the majority of female gamers favor puzzles and extremely casual games. AAA title customers are still strongly dominated by male audiences and thus, the market will cater towards that demographic. There's really nothing wrong with this. It's about as sexist as the male section in my local Macy's being 1/10 the total size of the store.
I grew up playing video games. I have played, and still play, a lot of games involving shooting things, punching and kicking things, and colorful explosions. I got hooked on the medium with Williams' "Defender".
I don't play FPSs because they are, with very few exceptions, coded as Games For Guys. I've had a great time playing Portal, System Shock 2, Antichamber, and a few other first person puzzle shoot things, because they are either genderless, or are strongly feminine. (You would destroy me in a high-speed deathmatch because my 'put cursor on dude' skills are minimal - largely because almost every single 'put cursor on dude' game requires me to inhabit the grey/brown shoes of Mancho McGruntsalot, so I really don't feel like playing them.)
I avoid most AAA games for similar reasons. They are all clubhouses with a "NO GURLS ALLOUED" sign hung out front. I played the hell out of Skyrim and Saint's Row 3/4 in no small part because I could make female avatars and the game would happily let me be that. (For that matter, I basically quit buying the 3D GTA games when they stopped having any 'play as another model' codes that I could input to force the game to acknowledge my gender. Even if it did sometimes result in a cutscene where a lady model stood with her legs wide open, talking in a male voice, and dangling a gun in front of her crotch obscenely.)
I have a bunch of lady friends who have spent tons of time playing MMORPGs. I haven't, myself, because I know I'd fall into that hole and never come out - but again: easy access to female avatars right there in the stock game, no hassle, hey maybe we'll welcome women.
I don't really play a lot of videogames anymore, but I have a lot of trouble empathizing with this. When the gender roles are reversed it seems silly to me.
"most every single 'put cursor on dude' game requires me to inhabit the grey/brown shoes of Mancho McGruntsalot, so I really don't feel like playing them"
As a male, I don't think I've ever had an issue following a feminine video game character. In fact, I've never felt compelled to paused and think that role-playing a female character was weird (say in Tomb Raider, or No One Lives Forever, or any other of the relatively few female centric games). Can you elaborate on why is this a hang-up for you when it comes to playing a man?
Imagine a world where every major video game stars women. Where when there is a man in the cast, his only character trait is "he's the guy", versus an assortment of ladies who are at least two-dimensional. He is also probably going to be kidnapped, so he has no agency as a character - really, he only exists as a prize for the ladies to fight over.
This is not one game. This is pretty much any video game. This is pretty much every single video game in the world. Games where a male character has agency are rare. Really, games are all for girls, and you should go back to your little man things, like cooking and raising the baby.
Oh yeah, and any big budget movie has a similar gender distribution too. Almost every animated feature you watch growing up tells you to be a good little prince and wait for a brave princess to come save you. Same with TV. Everyone chases the disposable income of the teenage girl, and molds their product to her taste.
And of course there are big chunks of society that basically want to disempower you because of your gender, too.
Wow, it sure would be nice to be able to have a space where you could imagine being someone who can kick ass and not bother taking names now and then. Maybe to even spend some time pretending to be someone who'll inspire you to take more control of your real life. But all the games like that are for the women. And everyone says the games about guys aren't 'real' games anyway. They're "casual" games. And are all about cooking and taking care of babies anyway. Not very good for escaping from reality.
The few games that star dudes kicking ass become precious to you. Larry Croft, Bayonet, Kay Archer, Samuy, these are rare chances to pretend to be someone not too far off from your actual self who has POWER to actually change their environment. Sometimes you might even find yourself thinking "how would Bayonet handle this situation" and taking inspiration from it, because he's one of the few role models of your gender available for you to really inhabit via games. One of the few times you've been able to take the role of a supremely confident and capable guy, instead of a supremely confident and capable woman.
Then you have the temerity to speak up about how good the rare game that lets you play as a guy with guy concerns, who can also kick ass, and you immediately get a bunch of ladies piling on and insisting that this all seems really silly and that games are made for women, guys have those "casual" games about cleaning and cooking or about ungendered abstract puzzles and they sure play a lot of them, don't they!
And then you whimper softly to yourself and pick up your Vita to play TxK because Jane Minter may be a lady, but she's a lady who makes a damn fine abstract game about blasting the shit out of abstract things.
It's not pretending to be the opposite sex for one game that's the problem. It's pretending to be the opposite sex for almost EVERY game. It's pretty fucking wearying.
> (You would destroy me in a high-speed deathmatch because my 'put cursor on dude' skills are minimal - largely because almost every single 'put cursor on dude' game requires me to inhabit the grey/brown shoes of Mancho McGruntsalot, so I really don't feel like playing them.)
Excuse me, but most males would get destroyed in a deathmatch because most of us are not 14 year olds with nothing to do but play videogames 8 hours a day. That's true of any "twitch" game.
However, I get a little tried of the griping about video games being dominated by "male targeted". Let's flip the complaint around:
"I'm so tired of all the Disney singers/boy bands/American Idol targeting girls. Where are the songs written for boys?"
Now, see the problem?
These things are targeted at specific demographics. The FPS makers are targeting young males just like the singer factories are targeting young females.
What both sides of this equation have in common is: "Why don't the producers do <creative thing X> instead of just factory churning a product?" And the answer, as always, is profit.
And I'm saying that those gaming companies know the exact number that you describe as "fuckton" is. And they have decided that your "fuckton" ... well ... isn't.
I have the same issue AND I AM MALE. I like adventure games. I like RTS games that aren't clicky-twitch-fests (see Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander). I like turn-based strategy. How many like you and me are there?
Looking at that list, it looks like there are roughly about one million of us--male AND female. There is the occasional hit that crosses that (Portal, The Sims), but it looks like the best a company can count on is about a million. Okami (which is absolutely awesome), sold about 600,000 units, so that's also a good cross check.
Now compare that to even mediocre FPS that gets panned and note that their numbers break a million without working hard.
See, that's the problem. There aren't a "fuckton" of us.
You're making some broad assumptions here. The fact that 'AAA' titles are dominated males is because the 'AAA' titles are made by males for males with no compelling reason for many female gamers to play them.
Markets for stuff like video games don't just spring up out of nowhere. They have to be developed. Someone has to develop them.
Did you read that article about the making of the market for diamond solitaire engagement rings by DeBeers? That's how you make a market, you convince people to want something that they didn't before want.
Someone has to figure out how to market games for females. If you think that's easy, try doing it yourself. There aren't any formulas, nothing that works reliably.
Someone could make a good argument that games are made for guys simply because male tastes are much simpler than females'.
> Someone could make a good argument that games are made for guys simply because male tastes are much simpler than females'.
Someone could also make a good argument that games are made for guys because it's one of the few good ways to separate males from their money while there are lots of alternatives to separate women from their money.
It's not that we can't enjoy works starring a different gender. It's that in video games, we are pretty much given no other option. Look at your collection, pick up all the games that force you into a particular character's shoes. How many of them are about being a guy? How many are about being a girl? You'll probably be able to count the latter on the fingers of one hand.
Also did you know that "we wanted to make a game starring a woman and a bunch of publishers turned us down because only guys buy games and they never want to be ladies" is a common refrain from AAA-level developers who want to try to fix this imbalance?
>It's not that we can't enjoy works starring a different gender. It's that in video games, we are pretty much given no other option. Look at your collection, pick up all the games that force you into a particular character's shoes. How many of them are about being a guy? How many are about being a girl? You'll probably be able to count the latter on the fingers of one hand.
Again, how does that stop women enjoying games? Most games which force a character I don't identify with the character at all because being of the same gender is no grounds for identification.
>Also did you know that "we wanted to make a game starring a woman and a bunch of publishers turned us down because only guys buy games and they never want to be ladies" is a common refrain from AAA-level developers who want to try to fix this imbalance?
I think that comment is true for most teen males due to the kneejerk machismo that still exists at that age, but most men grow out of it.
Also, if that comment is true for men in general what compelling argument would you offer to publishers to get them to not focus on the desires of their primary customers? If the publisher can sell HyperViolent MurderSim 2014 to the men and DressUp Dollies 2014 to the women they are still maximising their market.
>It's not pretending to be the opposite sex for one game that's the problem. It's pretending to be the opposite sex for almost EVERY game. It's pretty fucking wearying.
Sorry, that seems like a personal hang-up to me.
For most games I don't pretend to be the character, I play the game. The character is usually too discordant with my own self-image for identification or is just a mute pawn (eg Gordon Freeman/Chell).
For games like decent RPGs where I can actually make the character I want I regularly play female characters.
And seeking role models in games seems just bizarre to me. Lots of game characters are "bad ass" but exceedingly few are decent role models (Lara Croft is an awful person for damaging archaeological evidence and stealing other cultures relics).
Woah! So wait. Dave Sim is a misogynist? Like, a card-carrying member of the Misogynist party?
THE Dave Sim, creator of the Cerebus comic book?
How do you kick off an article with a bold statement like that, and not include at least a link to an interview or something? Is he like, the founder of some kind of Men's Rights Advocacy group or something? Does he run a political action committee?
Is he quoted anywhere as explicitly stating anything like:
Hello, my name is Dave Sim, and I hate women. Yes, all of
them, and as a general rule. You may know me as auhor of
the independently published comic book, Cerebus. At this
time, I'd like to go on the record about my opinion of
women: I hate them. Make no mistake. Much like racists
hate other races, my hatred of women is similarly general,
and all-encompassing. To reiterate, I, Dave Sim, am a
self-proclaimed misogynist.
Like, really? He's simply a misogynist, and it's a bald fact?
Have you read his stuff on women? I like Cerebus, but he definitely has issues with women.
"Emotion, whatever the Female Void would have you believe, is not a more Exalted State than is Thought. In point of fact, I think Emotion is animalistic, serpent-brain stuff. Animals do not Think, but I am reasonably certain that they have Emotions. 'Eating this makes me Happy.' 'When my fur is all wet and I am cold, it makes me Sad." "Ooo! Puppies!' 'It makes me Excited to Chase the Ball!' Reason, as any husband can tell you, doesn't stand a chance in an argument with Emotion... this was the fundamental reason, I believe, that women were denied the vote for so long."
"Behind this...lies the Greater Void, the Omnivorous Engine which drives every... institutionalised waste of human time and energy, which drives, in point of fact, our entire degraded society. The wife and kids."
"In one of those Poor Us studies for which the Emotional Female Void is notorious, it was pointed out that after a divorce, the average male standard of living rises... the average female standard of living drops... I think the...explanation is that the excision of a five-to-six- foot leech from the surface of a human body is going to have more of its own blood in its own veins. Unless the leech finds another body, it is going to go hungry."
"In labouring to fill the insatiable Void Need for material possessions at home, his time and his energy and his spirit disappear into the Vaginal Bottom Line of the workplace."
"The Male Light and the Female Void: Seminal Energy and Omnivorous Parasite."
"If you look at her and see anything besides emptiness, fear and emotional hunger, you are looking at the parts of yourself which have been consumed to that point."
"It wouldn't be that big a stretch to categorize my writing as Hate Literature against women . . . in this Fascistic Feminist country"
Well! Those certainly are some, eh... curious... statements, aren't they?
I never read Cerebus cover-to-cover, because, well, it's freaking huge. I've only perused a couple of volumes, in particular, the first and last volumes.
I'm reading his wikipedia article now. I never realized he'd become mired in a controversy and gained such a weird reputation. He doesn't seem to self-identify as misogynistic though.
You want to get Reads, and make yourself sit back and read all the lengthy text passages.
You'll find the crazy laid out pretty plainly there.
And then you get to decide how to reconcile the facts that (a) Sim is batshit misogynistic and (b) Sim is a total master of the form of Comics, who did some amazing things in it.
(I'm a lady who makes comics and learnt a fuckton from Cerebus. I am pretty glad "Reads" was serialized while I wasn't hitting comics shops regularly, and I didn't get the collections in order, so I could see some of the amazing techniques he played with later before realizing this was not a man whose work I wanted to support any more.)
He self identifies as being a defender of The Truth against a feminist dictatorship that invents things like child poverty.
For him to identify as misogynist would require him to accept a world-view where viewing women as unthinking beasts was hateful, rather than being a divine message from the true god Elohim about that female trickster Yahweh.
Personally I just think he went crazy with hate over his ex-wife.
It's tough in a court of public opinion, though. Especially when it comes to artistic works of fiction as interpretted by adversarial critics. Some of this is just so much gossip. Such is the life of the cartoonist who courts controversial topics, I suppose.
If the guy tries to explain himself, and only comes across as even more batshit insane, then I suppose that's his own tough luck (...or grand design, if that's what suits him). At any rate, when a person winds up in a hole, it's usually best to stop digging. From the sound of things, it seems entirely possible that he probably doesn't even really care, either way, anymore.
The best video game with a strong female protagonist that I've played is NOLF. Criminally underrated and almost never noted these days, even in feminist discourse.
Anyway, this is apparently a DLC pack to a ludicrously well received game called The Last of Us, which honestly I had not heard of before. I can't help but think the reviewer is overly dramatic here, though.
Finally, I want to address this:
Although women make up nearly half of all gamers, only a fraction of videogame characters are female, and fewer still are playable.
This is a fallacy as it only takes up the raw total percentage and completely ignores some critically important details: gender distribution by genres. That makes a huge difference.
For instance, women make up very high numbers for things like casual games, World of Warcraft, The Sims and others.
On the other hand, a lot of major AAA titles like Grand Theft Auto, Devil May Cry and Mass Effect enjoy only small female audiences (14-22%).
That's why there's not much of an incentive. Don't just grab the whole percentage and throw it around like a gospel of injustice when you're going to voluntarily ignore the complexity and fragmentation of the market.
> Although women make up nearly half of all gamers, only a fraction of videogame characters are female, and fewer still are playable.
Double false claim. Women certainly don't make half of gamers (unless you consider people playing Tetris and phone games real gamers, and that's a very different subject altogether).
Fewer are playable, false claim as well. Tomb Raider, Bayonetta, Most adventure games from Roberta Williams, Lots of japanese games have female lead characters too (too many to list here), and a lot of these games were very much liked by male gamers as well. I'm personally a huge fan of Bayonetta, and the fact that the character is a female had a huge part in this preference.
Well, yeah, Tetris is a game. But it's a game in the same way that a termite is also a living species just like an elephant is another one. They just do not benchmark on the same scale.
I strongly disagree. A game should be first and foremost measured by its gameplay, and Tetris easily beats 99% of the games released each year on that department.
I wouldn't picture myself playing Tetris all my life, just like tons of games in the same time that you find nowadays on mobile phones, so I strongly disagree with your view. I wouldn't count Flappy Bird as a "game" as well - for me it all goes in the same bucket as Tetris, i.e. something to kill the time, but nothing I would consider to be a serious game in any measure.
ugh, that was a painful read. Even text adventures were more emotionally charged than most games today, and i didnt have to wait 2014 to feel like a human being. you just had to play computer games and not console games.
Painful how? It sounds like the author was genuinely moved by the game. It has to be a good thing that a AAA console title can have that effect, even if it only took 30-odd years for us to get there.
Such console games "get" this effect just because they look more and more like movies, not because they are better intrinsic games than what we had before. And the examples shown by the author show her clear ignorance of PC games in the 80-90s, so it's not surprising he didn't feel "much" in front of consoles games. We basically had to wait for late SNES games and PS1 games to see more and more games on consoles with deeper storylines and character development. But this occured on PC way before it happened on consoles, and you had actual strong female characters way before on PC too (hey, come on, the Roberta Williams games had almost always female protagonists, and were hugely popular!).
The idea that "we had to wait until 2014 to feel something when playing games" is what I considered the most painful. Because it's preposterous.
I think the author is deliberately excluding interactive fiction from the kinds of "videogames" that are criticized here.
Which is too bad; there has been great stuff in the genre for a long time. Photopia (1998) has a heartbreaking story and a strong female protagonist and is well worth playing through ( http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=ju778uv5xaswnlpl ).
"Boys got action figures, not dolls. Boys got to have watergun fights, not play dress-up. Much like their videogame counterparts, boys got to do things, and I wanted to do things too"
Find the error...
If you want to do things, don't buy stuff, do things. If you feel you need to buy stuff to do things, you have already lost.
Accidentally upvoted. So to counteract: TFA is talking about children. You know, impressionable and malleable young minds that don't yet have the benefit of wisdom and experience.
She's claiming girls can't do things because they don't get action figurines. That's "Shit Feminists Say" material...
I feel sorry for her if she really didn't get to do water battles. I wonder where she grew up, some ultraconservative Victorian household?
I sent my niece 4 water guns for her birthday and the whole family had a blast. It never occurred to me that girls wouldn't do water battles. The author is probably just extremely unlucky with her family.
OK, to go off on a tangent...here's the best example I can think of that illustrates the imbalance of gender neutral roles that men take for granted and that women basically have never had: the only time I can think of, in American entertainment history, that a woman achieved the authority and an unforgettable identity that had nothing to do with "...because she's a woman" is: Ripley in Alien and Aliens (never saw 3 and 4, and probably never will).
In fact, she was so good at being "just" Ripley that it wasn't until I saw Sigourney Weaver in other movies did I realize, "Huh, Sigourney Weaver is a woman and she is hot"...She is the only female character I can think of in which her gender has no real bearing to how she acts, what she says, or how she is presented on screen.
I challenge anyone to think of any other woman character who follows Ripley's mold:
1. Does not overtly seek a romantic relationship
2. Sexual tension is not a compelling foil or conflict for the character
3. Is not thrown into an action role purely for the spectacle of a woman kicking ass
4. Is not shouted down or treated differently specifically because she is a woman.
5. Is not shown in a gratuitously sexual light (she is in her underwear the same time everyone else is logically in their underwear).
6. Is unequivocally the hero of the movie. In fact, in both movies [spoiler alert for 20 year old movies], it's quite notable that she is literally the last human being standing, and she wins on her own terms.
No other contenders, that I can think of, meet this standard, especially in the action film role: Catwoman, Aeon Flux, Tomb Raider...nope. Clarice Starling...even if you want to argue that no sexual tension exists between her and Hannibal Lecter (even though he specifically refers to it), much of the non-gruesome psychological conflict her character faces is precisely because she is a woman in a (tall) man's world. Beatrice in Kill Bill...great role, but again, it only works because she is a woman and it is a spectacle, even if empowering (i.e. could you imagine Kill Bill being made with a man in the role?)
The only woman character who comes close to the unisex appeal of Ripley is Marge Gunderson in Fargo. Other than that, it's pretty slim pickings...whereas for males, there are too many to count.
Anyway, I sometimes wonder how much growing up with Alien/Aliens affected how I think about gender roles and imbalance. Those being among the first and the most interesting of the action movies I'd ever seen (then, and today), I kind of think that the idea of a woman action hero was completely normal to me. And yet, as far as I can see, no one like Ripley has since been written...
Excellent points. I think if we broaden our scope to television (which is arguably becoming looked upon just as highly as movies) there are better pickings. There are a lot of characters that are based on sex, but there are a few that could work either way. That's not to say that sex-specific situations don't come up. They do, but that's more because of the need for greater amounts of filler content on a TV show than because of a fundamental basis for that character. So, not as perfect as Ripley, but not bad.
(I don't watch a lot of TV, but Continuum and The Black List come to mind, though neither offers a true Ripley)
There are some great games out there with female protagonists and quality interaction (e.g. The Dreamfall series). There are also many games that bend over backwards to be gender (and sexual orientation) neutral, such as the Mass Effect series. However I have to agree with the poster that adolescent males are far more frequently targeted by any sort of game that actually has a plot. While some might argue that most female gamers simply stay away from such titles, I question this assumption and wonder if this is another instance of the girlie-beer phenomenon.
i.e. In recent years, several brewers have attempted to market beer to women with pink packaging and, in some cases, pink dye in addition to supposedly "girl friendly" qualities such as being low-calorie, not too strong tasting, etc.. The problem is, women who don't want to drink beer won't, and women who like beer want good beer, not beer made for women who don't like beer. So far these girl-branded beers have all been abject failures.
Would more female gamers play blood-and-guts action games if they were gratuitously girly, or would it barely be more than those who don't mind playing as muscle-bound brutes when they crave a bit of the ol' ultraviolence? I'm not saying that the industry shouldn't do more to marginalize misogynistic characterizations, but I do suspect that male protagonists and testosterone driven character interactions tend to give blood-and-guts games more credibility even with female audiences. That should change slowly with time, as we're seeing in cinema, but we should also recognize that this is the present we're currently dealing with. Women aren't an audience that are being ignored. It's what they want that's the problem!
It's also worth noticing that we are very selective about what we define as "guy stuff" in male dominated video games. It's definitely not "older guy" stuff. e.g. When was the last time you saw a male protagonist blow thousands of enemies to bloody giblets and, in the next scene, talk about his prostate problems, the virtues of fiber, and his receding hairline? Really, these games are about violence. If a woman does the slaying, it doesn't bother most male gamers at all. It's when they start talking about the female analogues to "old guy stuff" that everybody, males and probable females alike, start to get itchy trigger fingers.
This tendency of most video games to sate adolescent desires for violence while ignoring more mature material is, in my opinion, of equal concern to both genders. Any game that makes male-female relationships a part of core game-play instead of an optional bolt-on is instantly branded as a weird Japanese dating simulator for Otaku's who never leave their houses. Games that focus on drama or exploration without "sufficient" violence are frequently viewed as having "boring gameplay". Video games are no longer an emerging art-form. Their gross sales have surpassed that of cinema! However, video games are still stuck in the Nickelodeon era. Practically everything is gratuitous violence with a smattering of sex. However, only now are adult audiences starting to outnumber adolescent ones. The next few decades for video games may well be remembered similarly to the early twentieth century when cinema progressed from being a low-brow diversion to an art-form that fascinates all!
Sticking to the beer example, what is the possible solution? Why don't the women simply drink beer that is good? So they won't drink beer that is simply good, but they won't drink girly beer either. Yet they claim to be avid beer drinkers? Is there some magic wonder beer from fairy land that they would finally drink?
Should there be more games about prostate problems?
I think it fundamentally doesn't make sense to claim that games should be different. If anything, you could ask for more other games, where nobody seems to know what they should like.
Note the irony that the author complains about a girlish upbringing and then revels in a game that finally lets her do girlish things.
The author is saying that too many "good videogames" mistreat women.
The point is good beer doesn't have a history of marginalizing women they way popular videogames tend to.
On a more general note, videosgames aren't much different from music or movies. Just like bubble-gum pop singles & mindless action movies there are tired AAA videogame titles, all with dubious critical value, but enough appeal to sell to the global lowest common denominator. However, if you really care, there are niches out there doing some incredible stuff.
