I think this is an element of the larger social construct that gets forgotten. Video Games are a mass-market, multi-billion dollar global industry. That wasn’t true fifteen years ago. Along with that comes an ever-narrowing view of games as a product to be consumed. That’s why a studio like Ubisoft will just make another Assassin’s Creed every 10 months. It is easy and sells like hotcakes regardless. Hell, the whole AC “no women player characters” thing was most sad because they were basically just saying, “Uh… we’re just really lazy…”
Many developers used to have a passion and a dream. They created not products, but sprawling narratives and huge worlds only matched by epic literature. The “great” RPGs of the 80’s and 90’s weren’t about blood and gore (primarily) but about characters, relationships and actual mythologies. Hell, Planescape: Torment is a rumination on the ideas of identity and person that is deeper than most modern novels.
Or, and here’s the real suggestion for anyone looking for a game to match what is asked for in the article, go play The Longest Journey, Dreamfall, and Dreamfall: Chapters. There’s a protagonist that has more depth than if you stacked every action hero head-to-toe.
Now that games have matched Hollywood’s size and scope, they will inevitably be run into the ground by metric, numbers-based analysis and any shred of vision goes out the window in favor of a better Metacritic score and a wider appeal. Crowdfunding and indies aren’t an answer either, since they’re engaging in what amounts to stealing from investors (generally without malice or ill-intent).
I’m not defending his sexism - his sexism is exactly the problem with the gaming industry. It’s a problem because he doesn’t appear to think he’s being sexist (or maybe he does and he’s just a really subtle trolley - I am still 50/50 on that point of view). He classically mansplains it but instead of trying to lead him to the light, to show him that his viewpoint is precisely because of his cis-nerd privilege - he was attacked, derided, branded sexist and silenced.
My point, my only point, is that this is not how to win friends and influence people.
Hmm…
"This user is suspended until May 23, 2289 7:44am.
Reason: Standard issue sexism "
Ayup, moving on…
This whole thing is worth repeating, because it’s a great example of the way that game dev is currently boned by its own working conditions in many ways, going so much deeper than an issue of diversity. A lack of diversity, in some ways, can be an effect of these toxic, destructive, ineffective, inefficient, unsustainable labor conditions.
I just watched Double Fine Adventure. By many accounts, DF is a LOT better than many other game developers, but even they went HUGELY over budget, massively over the time-scale, made team members physically ill, had remarkable team turnover, and still didn’t do the business they were hoping to do. All of this without even a publisher breathing down their necks! As someone with some solid training in business operations, it was killing me watching that. This is not how you value employees or make a sustainable business practice! So much avoidable suffering. And I’m sure that experience pales in comparison to some of the other horror stories in the industry.
Cultural change there seems to be difficult - a combination of folks not wanting to change and not seeing a possibility of change. Occasional half-hearted grousing about “unions” is as far as it gets (and who has time to worry about unionizing when you’re constantly looking for a new job because teams expand and shrink like a clown with OCD is blowing up the balloon?). I really think the industry can do better, and that it needs to. And if they want to hire someone to help, I’m available.
This is a truth. I’d argue we’re in a no-risk zone for most AAA studios. Consumers and reviewers have become next-to impossible to please in the retail sector and the only smart bets are tried 'n true sequels or reboots. Why make a new worlds with excess cost when you can re-use art, lore, background and mechanics ad nauseum?
It is Assassin’s Creed syndrome. Call of Duty or even Halo. Release as frequently as possible, with the least amount of overhead. The AAA industry is stuck back ten years since it won’t take risks since it has become so expensive to make a AAA games. So we get the redux of what was popular in 2007-08 over and over again.
If you look at metacritic scores and press reviews, why would any AAA studio subject themselves to that sort of uphill climb? So they slap a familiar name on the new game and just go it all again, but this time with some new gameplay gimmick.
This is beautifully written, and I think it’ll stick around as an entry point for discussion of how narrow, and and how narrowing games have become. Because there’s a lot of people, of all genders, hoping and waiting for a gaming culture that paints with colors other than army drab.
Also naming yourself “a pack of wankers” does not get you any brownie points in my book.
And I’m very, very sure that so-called gender study with the norwegian babies and the faces has been massively discredited. I know it is cited a lot by sites that are overt MRA sites, I can’t remember all their stupid names, but reign of kings, we hunted the mammoth, that kind of junk.
We looked at babies that were one day old. And again, we presented them with either with a mechanical object or a face to look at. And filmed how long does the baby look at each of these two objects. And we find that more boys look longer at the mechanical object, and more girls look longer at the face. Even on the first day of life. So this is before toys have been introduced, or various cultural biases or prejudices have been introduced.
As a basis for his theory, Baron-Cohen cites a study done on newborn infants in which baby boys looked longer at an object and baby girls looked longer at a person. However, a review of studies done with very young children found no consistent differences between boys and girls.
That said, estrogen and testosterone are both a hell of a drug, and part of normal human gender development.
Woah woah woah… We Hunted the Mammoth is an MRA tracking site! They are amazing and do amazing work! Do not put them in the MRA category! They are anti-MRA to the bone! They are not, in any way shape of form “junk” and you do them a great discredit! Please, amend your statement!
WHTM tracks and mocks the New Misogyny online, focusing especially on Men’s Rights, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), and Pickup Artist (PUA) sites.
My feeling is men and women want different things from videogames, enough to support a “men’s magazines / women’s magazines” or “romance novels / military fiction” dichotomy.
The point is to keep the magazine rack and book store full of a wide range of choices for everyone. And that can and possibly even should include explicitly gender-targeted stuff.
I’m in a similar boat. After a long hiatus I’ve returned to play some games. Though I’ve been really timid, research driven, and have good friends to guide me. Steam has been my favorite thing. I like games that don’t put me in contact with people (hard to harass me when you don’t know I exist, non?) and that I can play alone.
I’ve been catching up on, like, the last five or more years of games and it’s been surprisingly rewarding for some reason. But… probably because I found a good niche of friends and I avoid the hell out of people otherwise. I kind of stick to the odd indie art games and when people ask I say I don’t know anything about games and stare wistfully away much in the manner I do when a salesperson or Jehovah’s Witness comes to the door.
I had my first child at 36. Why do you assume that young women’s lives are so full of housekeeping and children that they couldn’t possibly work long hours?
Hint: if you’re never home, there’s not much to clean up.
It’s not that biological differences don’t exist, it’s that their effect is horribly misrepresented by those with an agenda and that stereotyping does real and lasting damage to the true diversity of human experience. Even if “in day-old children, boys looked more at motion, girls looked more at faces” was true at the level of instinct and neurochemistry (and it’s far from evident that this is the case), it would not follow that men are naturally more inclined to play video-games than women. That’s a horribly dehumanizing level of biological determinism that has the bang-on effect of being utterly BS to boot. It’s not like fewer men enjoy movies because they just “don’t get” facial expressions at biological level.
You’re going to have to show me where I responded with “hyperbole and raw aggression”.
And if you’d like a perspective from someone in the games industry who has both worked long hours and knows a large number of women who do so right alongside him, I could ask my husband to post sometime.
Most “gamers” hate mobile skinner boxes, or at least their advertising. it’s just a well funded version of popup ads with unrealistic and unrepresentative women.
