Hmm I think get where those Gamergate-Freaks come from. I grew up in the 80s and 90s with PC/Videogames in the Age of the C64, Amiga and 286 PCs. It was a time when you were a freak or nerd (nerd has positive connotations now, not so much then) for playing video games and not being into sports. I got ridiculed for being a gamer, often by girls of my age group. I had to fight for my place in/with video games.
So I can understand the anger someone could possibly feel when years later demographics make gaming their own that you had to fight previously.
So Iâd love to see some sort of statistic about the age of those Gamergaters. Iâll bet most are 25+ years and older.
I have to say I donât really get it. She seems to be saying, âI wish they made games for girls, like all those games for girls that girls love.â Her sister laments seeing nothing but macho game commercials because âshe doesnât have Steam.â Isnât that a really really easy problem to solve? Games that are designed to appeal to boys suck, because they appeal to boys. Itâs like a shower of tautologies.
I guess Iâm not a real gamer.
Sturgeonâs Law more than anything else.
Okay, sure, but I was back there too along with my (older) sister, as was my housemate and her sister, plus all my other female friends. We also had to go through that âTrial of Nerd Fireâ to claim our space and the ânerd boysâ wouldnât sit with us because we had girl cooties. The problem is all you guys grew up and it became cool to be a gamer nerd, but us girls grew up and weâre still fighting for our place because we have âgirl cootiesâ.
Thatâs what pisses off female gamers, just like every other time we try and do something that men view as us muscling in on their turf we have to do it twice as better and work twice as hard at it just to break even.
I get it easy because Iâm a âweird girlâ (though I donât think I can really be a girl anymore when Iâm in my mid 30s) and I like guts and gore, robots and shooting things in the face so all the masculine marketing doesnât phase me so much. However if I wasnât a girl or women who was in to that what would be my options? Cooking Mama (she of the fiery doom eyes)? Nintendogs? Animal Crossing? 3 games and assorted sequels to hold up to the hundreds of alternatives just one Game store holds is rather poor showing. How would men react if all gaming stores stocked nothing but Beauty Parlour 4 and Cuddling Kittens and had just a few games like Stealth Murder Spree and Ultimate Death Racing tucked in a corner hidden behind a giant unicorn plushy? Because thatâs what a lot of women feel like when they go game shopping these days.
I donât think she was really saying that games are for one gender or the other, I think she was saying that AAA games donât tend to cater to anyone who doesnât happen to like punching werewolves in the face, murdering innocents whilst pretending to be a mafia goon, or being in a stealth tactical unit. Girls are taught from a young age that itâs not âappropriateâ to like that stuff, so they feel gradually pushed out of an activity they like because the big publishers donât tend to put out and/ or market games for people who like other types of games.
I can understand because I have a love of 4X games on the PC, but buggered if I can remember the last huge marketing campaign I saw for one that involved TV commercials every ad break, full page spreads in well known magazines, as well as internet ads all over. Yet everyone knows Call of Duty even if they hate playing first person shooters.
My daughter is 10 and totally addicted to Minecraft. She plays socially with her friends over Skype. Sheâs a bit more introverted than the subject of this post appears to be so i wonder if this will her affect her at 17?
PS. I was going to defend Dragonâs Crown because the male characters are also grossly out of proportion. I was going to post an image as an example but Google Image found so many pictures from the game with scantily clad women in provocative positions that i decided to stand down.
This comes up a lot. Itâs not just that the bodies are unrealistic. Itâs how theyâre unrealistic. The distortions of male characters usually emphasize physical power. It may make a boy feel inadequate, but it doesnât give him the impression that men in the game world are powerless and exist only to be looked at or be possessed.
That Kate Upton ad campaign. Ugh. So tired of seeing those, whether on TV or twitter (less so on the latter of late, thank the dogs).
Pushed by whom? I donât think the publishers are solely to blame. The problem is a bit larger than that and not confined to gaming.
No, itâs definitely not a problem that rests solely on the shoulders of publishers or confined to gaming. However it is a rather blatant rehashing of the same sort of sexist attitudes that crop up time and again. Usually that involves women trying to break in to activities men see as âtraditionallyâ theirs, mostly because for much of history women have been forced in to and defined by quite narrow roles and associated activities, but I am equally outraged when it comes to men being ridiculed and denied access to âfemaleâ activities and roles. I want equality for all and I feel itâs a damn shame that âeveryoneâ pressures, and feels the pressure, to box people in and stick labels on them to the point where very few of us are entirely happy, or at least comfortable, in every facet of our lives.
Gaming marketing is about equivalent to movie marketing. Blockbusters are all marketed to men with little to no interest in diversifying an audience, attempts to change that get squashed by the producers, and the main consumers are juvenile in personality. That doesnât stop a woman from acceptably being a movie fan or a movie person.
I mean the example 17 year old is basically a product of modern marketing; she buys and consumes products that she is told are for here and any resistance or interest outside that product line means she is not interested. Thatâs a fairly stereotypical teenage reaction to the world that has very little to do with the group of people she refers to âgamersâ, and a lot more to do with the social pressure of her group and the marketing that draws her away from other interests into âgirl stuffâ.
I like this piece, but I think thereâs an argument to be made that the opposite is true: the problem is that the vast majority of GAMES donât grow up: they settle at early male adolescence and never mature from there.
Yeah this. So much this. Though my game experience has been atypical and things like atari 2600 though loderunner and infocom on the apple ii are my teenage game funtime. then i was out of the loop till Doom and that was fun for a bit. I didnât play much till after I got married and that ended up being basically Pokemon a lot of Pokemon and some specific RTS games after picking up a used game of Warcraft. Most advertising I saw was pretty much aimed all the teen to early 20s male which as a married 30s male probably turned me away from a lot of things like Tomb Raider at the time and a lot of games which could be fun like say Serious Sam just look meh to me as it just seems to be not aimed at an adolescent boy which make me go, ehn whatever.
Stuff is getting a lot better now. I love the fact that a lot of small independent studios and individuals can put out interesting and polished work so easily even it all of it isnât my cup of gaming tea. I personally think it is awesome that girls and women are playing now cause god the brogamers are annoying and make me ashamed to be male too often. It is also awesome that this is happening in the tabletop world as well.
ETA I almost bought Cooking Mama as it looked like a fun game and a neat use of the stylus for gameplay on the DS.
[quote=âlittlemouse, post:6, topic:63333â]How would men react if all gaming stores stocked nothing but Beauty Parlour 4 and Cuddling Kittens and had just a few games like Stealth Murder Spree and Ultimate Death Racing tucked in a corner hidden behind a giant unicorn plushy?[/quote]If Beauty Parlour 4 and Cuddling Kittens were particularly deep and complex, theyâd probably still buy it. (Enough people bought into My Little Pony, didnât they?) I associate such games with cheap, badly-programmed cash-ins, mostly because of what Iâve picked up from game review sites over the years.
And even then, that variety of gameâMario Kart, Angry Birds, Bejeweledâare roundly derided as barely being games at all.
Mario Kart, roundly derided? Really?
Cause it wasnât âa true racing gameâ or whatever. I love Mario Kart and it is more a party game to be played for fun with your friends and to laugh at the crazy of it. Yes you can get good at it but all it takes is one red shell and oops last place, which for me is part of the fun of it.
Why do you associate such games with cheap, badly-programmed cash-ins? Perhaps thatâs telling in itself, that just from a title theyâre already seen as âlesserâ games that arenât going to make much money and so the publisher/ designer doesnât spend the time and money on them that they would something else. Bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy really.
For the record. Iâd imagine Beauty Parlour 4 would be a rather complex business/ management sim full of behind the scenes number crunching, which tends to be seen as a rather niche market in the current climate. Cuddling Kittens on the other hand, well, that could be anything. Though I secretly hope itâs action-rpg involving a team of upgradable, personalised, heroes sent to rescue a bunch of extremely valuable, genetically engineered super cats from the clutches of a Villain Cliche, like Baron DarkChuckles or something. They probably âshootâ enemies with tranq-rainbow-beams and have a stun grenade thatâs a mesmerizing disco ball to avoid unnecessary harm to minions just doing their jobs. Because tactical stealth units donât have to be about body counts (though really, if they were a good stealth unit they wouldnât be killing people anyway).
What TobinL said really. It wasnât âderidedâ in that no-one played it, but it was never held up as a âseriousâ racing game or something âcoreâ gamers could truly enjoy and appreciate because it was seen as too cutesy and not challenging enough (though online play was vicious and getting hit with a blue shell just before the finish line during a tightly packed race made my housemate rage more than once).
Yes!! Give us more variety in games! Dang, I never even tried cooking mama - now I wanna give it a shot. Or animal crossing. Too many years looking down a rifle or a sword⌠Gaming is so explosively full of possibilities - surely someone else than Nintendo can work in this space? And surely it can all get to be called âreal gamesâ, whether itâs the sims or manshoot game #4673 or frying pancakes or whatever?
But even if I do enjoy shooters and many other typical âboyâ games (if not all of them), I can get really, really tired of the lack of choice in protagonists. Do we really need this many games where we play another damn Dull McGruff-face white guy? And furthermore, while sometimes I enjoy playing a scantily clad gal of voluptuous shape, that should be a choice. If thereâs a choice to play any kind of butch or all-business woman, then playing a scantily dressed ass-kicking gal can be a meaningful choice, right?
Cooking Mama is terrifying when you mess up and she says something like âIâll fix this!â with animated hellfire in her eyes. I didnât play much Cooking Mama, but I sure worked hard never to disappoint her!
I think this is an important opening salvo to a complicated question.
As a dude, the first thing I see and want to blame is the marketing materials, which isnât a problem confined to gaming. Disney bought marvel so that super heroes could be for boys and princesses could be for girls, and now we have an entire generation of girls growing up with the idea that super heroes are not âfor them.â Gendered advertising in childrenâs properties is huuuuuuuuugely problematic and pervasive, and videogames - as things crammed in to the âkid stuffâ ghetto - have had this problem in spades. Either itâs for girls or its for boys, and the marketing reflects that, itâs never for everyone (of course not, âeveryoneâ is not a targetable demo!). I feel like thereâs a giant conversation to be had around gendered kidsâ entertainment that no one is having and that will certainly affect videogames when we have it.
Thatâs a formative element - if games are just for boys when youâre 8, theyâre just for boys when youâre 58.
That helps create some of the other problems youâre seeing - the marginalization, the disqualification. That marketing makes marginalization OK (âitâs not for you anyway, itâs for me, why are you complaining?â) and makes disqualification natural (âthis isnât for you, itâs not sold to you, you donât get to join it.â).
Itâs a reason, of course, though not an excuse - folks are always responsible for their own actions.
Weâve been taught that games are a boyâs space by people who sell games as a boyâs space, though.
I think this is why itâs really important to get folks like your sister playing neat indie games - theyâre gamers, theyâve just been chased from the space. I canât blame 'em for retreating, but GETTING THEM BACK is my desire!
