Nahhhh…I’m just tired, I’ve been tired for like the last few days and am under a lot of stress, so am missing things lately.
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I can see that.
What I was referring to was not real-world correlations, but rather, in-game correlations. Needing to solve simplistic problems gets boring quickly. So the game industry pilfers cues from movies and such where it strives instead to keep people’s attention via narrative entertainment rather than pure interactivity. It seems rather regressive to me.
If anything, I’d say that the influence has been the opposite - that people apply simplistic understandings of the real world to video games because they seem easy to relate to. This might seem comfortable enough to generate sales, but it does not challenge people. Interactive virtual environments have a huge potential for people’s learning of new ways to think.
What you are describing sounds like the more superficial kinds of realism that big studios strive for, which mostly amounts to making them photorealistic and pretty. What I was referring to is more like self-consistency in how it simulates or creates environments. For perfect examples I would point out the Portal games, where the physics and map portaling are integral to framing and solving the problems of the game. Rather than an interchangeable graphical overlay which could just as easily be substituted with anything else.
If “reality” is based upon appearance, then we are dealing with a superficial model of reality. Simulations are not based upon what it looks like, but how its relationships are modelled.
Same deal, hardness as a mere style is meaningless. But when stories are based upon actual science, this fundamentally differs the very kinds of stories which can be told. The sci-fi genre suffers more than most from borrowed window dressing - feudalism in space, westerns in space, military adventure in space, etc. Unfortunately, most of the genre is scientifically illiterate fantasy. But there are still gems with regards to social critique and literary style. Extrapolation of trends into the future can still be entertaining speculation, even if it is not well-grounded.
My way of making video games more realistic is to not make them resemble daily life, because they aren’t. Game avatars are not real people, they are not male or female. What appear to be violent conflicts are only streams of coordinates. Here’s an exercise: when playing a game, switch off all of its brushes and textures, playing it only as a wireframe model. Then create a few test maps and models using simple wireframe geometries like this. It looks and feels much different, like an abstract computer model. Because it is an abstract computer model! As a follow-up exercise, communicate with your local game server directly, and read the i/o of the game events as text. It is not a matter of making the game environment resemble a real one - but rather, knowing that it is a virtual environment, and having enough ideas to exploit and tweak this into an interesting game, regardless (at first) of what it looks like. What are the relationships between the environment and the entities which exist there?
The point isn’t that innate gender differences don’t exist, but rather that gender differences are rather more complex than a binary A/B and this makes them a poor lens for creating entertainments.
Meanwhile, innate gender differences – real, complex, important – have fuck all to do with writing software. No one has shown that ladybrains are less productive, ever. Evidence of systemic exclusion of women and minorities, on the other hand, is rather easier to find.
So the discussion of innate gender attributes seems like a bit of distraction from that systemic exclusion, which is an obvious, massive problem in software.
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And like any other drug use, people have some responsibility to treat people well and take proper care of themselves when they use them. Those who fail to exhibit any self control, especially where they or others suffer injury or death as a result of their impulses, can be seen as failed drug users. Treating people like a douchenozzle because some powerful drugs were available has never been a valid excuse.
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No, just that we have to concentrate extra hard with our lady-brains:
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The rub is when you go from saying it has some influence maybe/probably to saying it absolutely definitely causes (Gender Discrepancy X). Treating it as one element of a complex cocktail? Totally reasonable. Treating it as an explanatory force? Less sustainable. More “this is what I like to tell myself because it makes sense to me.”
Where you’d go wrong is if you thought that had significant predictive power when it comes to actual human behavior. Saying testosterone might contribute to aggression is one thing - saying that this contribution is what causes men to murder more frequently is different. Saying girl babies maybe pay more attention to faces than machines is one thing. Saying that this difference is why girls aren’t into videogames is different. Saying that certain strains of Kenyan DNA make you a better runner is one thing. Saying that this is why pro athletes in certain sports tend to be black is another.
In a small, limited, controlled way, X seems to be true. And one could reasonably hypothesize some broader effect of X, perhaps. But human society is much more complex than some proclivity or talent might indicate. Biology isn’t destiny, and you can’t say that your road rage comes from your balls or that Wilson Kipsang only won because he’s Kenyan, or that women don’t take finance careers because men are less risk-averse. All of these things - road rage, the NYC marathon, careers in finance - are affected by many, many more inputs than that. And even those inputs are murky and caveat-filled at best.
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I find the premise of this article weird. I’m sitting between my 65 yo mom playing Animal Crossing on her DS, and my 9 yo daughter playing Tomodachi Life on her 3ds. In a household that’s 3/4 women we have 2 WiiUs, 4 DSs of various vintage, 2 Gamecubes, a Wii, and an ass-tonne of emulators.
We like video gaming.
I’m not saying representation isn’t problematic, or that things couldn’t be better, but we are women and we like gaming.
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It’s heavy, really damn heavy, no two words about it.
But I think there is still cause for hope. Things are changing, and changing fast. GG is a sure sign of that. GG is smallmindedness fearing change.
These things build up slowly sometimes, by many people talking and arguing and doing things and creating and putting their energy into it. And then suddenly there is a shift, and you’re living in a post-change world. And I think gaming is fast approaching one of these points, at least that’s what it looks like to me. We’re getting closer and closer to critical mass.
Things are not good, not by a long shot, but there’s just that whiff in the air of a continent of old, stale ideas slowly cracking and coming apart, pried asunder by many voices finding new purchase on what seemed like glassy, unassailable slopes not long ago. I’d say the next few years could be really interesting for a lot of us that aren’t so fond of the old status quo.
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Yeah, managing to create the idea that working in the game industry is incredibly desirable has really managed to maintain the status quo in a lot of ways. When people get fed up with things as they are, they generally just quit - there’s a huge amount of turn-over in the game industry as a whole. In many ways, things like Kickstarter just make things worse because on top of everything else, they’re starting off with not enough money. (Kickstarter just doesn’t raise full game budgets.) The indie game world is full of people burning through their own savings for the “privilege” of working on games. Although that happens with studio developers too, just not in such obvious ways.
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I don’t get this. Yes, a higher percentage of men play games than women, so more games are made for men. That said, the guys that want games to be a “boys club” are in the minority. They may be loud, aggressive, and angry, but that doesn’t mean they represent the majority of us.
I am a gamer, and I love nerdy, gamer girls. I converted my ex-fiancee into a gamer, and she is still a gamer today. I play games with girls regularly, though I often only know that because I’ve heard them talking over various forms of voice chat (Mumble, Ventrillo, etc.). In my personal life, I automatically like gamer girls more than non-gamers…both romantically or as a friend. It is a shared interest.
My guy friends are mostly gamers as well, and feel the same way. Ive spoken with many of them about this very subject…
Its sad that some women feel like they cannot be accepted as gamers. Don’t let a few angry assholes push you out. Don’t let other women make you feel childish for liking games. The gaming community needs you.
We need you, not just as gamers, but as developers, designers, critics, and executives. We need your involvement in every aspect of gaming, from creation to playing.
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Nope. There are roughly equal numbers, thanks to mobile, where women lead ~ 55% 45%. On consoles, it’s ~ the opposite split. (Cue platform-loyalist whining about real games…)
https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/scmsAdmin/uploads/007/532/Homer%20et%20al%20CHB%20BASCC%202012.pdf
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Yes, but I don’t think people here are saying any different. When you look at a population, you can see certain elements as factors in the way things turn out.
Video games have the potential to be so broad that I don’t see why any factor would make much of a difference there. Certain genres may be more popular with certain people though, for reasons that can’t just be explained by culture. It doesn’t matter - if you like a game you should be able to play it, but it could give some explanation for why @codinghorror loves violent video games and Anita Sarkeesian is troubled and depressed and “can barely watch” when she sees people enjoying violent gameplay in Doom. Or it could just be that he grew up liking them, while AS is more shocked as an outsider. Likewise, there’s nothing causing men to murder, but there are factors (including physical ones) that could mean that this happens more often.
There are some great Japanese runners out there - you probably wouldn’t consider them to have the same genetic predisposition for this kind of sport, but there are a lot of world class runners. It’s easy to mistake cultural differences along demographic lines as inherent differences in these demographics, which is why I criticised the claim that the correlation of testosterone and career choices in a specific WEIRD group was conclusive at all.
At a year and a half old, there has been plenty of time for socialization. Hell, there’s another study that looked at the way that six month olds were being socialized into gender roles by their parents. Even when the parents were trying to be egalitarian.
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Ah, I see, realism as in “consistency” + “complexity” of game’s internal mechanics, without any strict relationship to “reality” as seen outside window.
This is an interesting angle to ponder (though I might quibble as to whether it constitutes “mere” style, or rather, whether “style” is indeed mere)
Methinks that the main limit to games having really innovative, internally consistent mechanics that aren’t “borrowed” from “real life” and dumbed down is the fact that truly innovative and original mechanics imply a rather unusual difficulty hike for the player (the more original gameplay mechanic, the less helpful are “common-sense” considerations from IRL and/or past gaming experiences), which is something that bodes poorly for people incapable or unwilling to spend a lot of time and effort trying to “grok” the game.
Games that challenge you in new ways are games that require a certain commitment, and that’s something even self-described “hardcore” players have in relatively short supply.
It’s an interesting problem
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Oh really? Interesting to know. Thanks. I’ll take a look at those links in a moment.
I would like to know if there are statistics available for PC gamers.
Part of the problem is that the skills required to make video games have been subject to essentially the same gender pressures as video games themselves have, albeit not quite as vigorously, so even outside the games industry it’s hard to find women who either have, or believe they can acquire, programming chops. That makes it difficult to turn outsider women into game devs. Tools like Twine and RPG Maker may make this slightly easier, but it’s still an uphill battle.
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Male MLP fans are subject to more furious, frothing vitriol than any other fan group except possibly furries. If you’re trying to say that most modern male geeks are okay with “feminine” themes, that is not a good example.
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Style Savvy is the heat. It’s fire. It’s one of the top 3 games of all time (I’m counting both the DS original and 3DS sequel), in good company with Devil May Cry 3 and Chrono Trigger. It has depth and strategy for those who want it, an easy learning curve for those who don’t, and tons of customization for all (a gameplay element widely considered to entice both male and female gamers).
I don’t think developers have to target specific demographics when designing a game (Mario Kart, Mine craft, The Sims, etc. are sort-of unisex fun for all), but Style Savvy is proof that they can make games specifically for girls that boys can also enjoy. It’s just sad (or indicative of the market, as some would argue) that 99.9999 percent of games go the other way - designed for boys, but fun for girls who can put up with the alienating aspects (overly sexual character designs, male-centric narratives).
Style Savvy 3, which hasn’t been announced for a Western release yet, looks to be skewed even younger and more towards girls than ever - you can do makeup, be a hair stylist, play with a little dollhouse (the game’s plot itself involves your character shrinking down to inhabit a dollhouse world)… But so long as the core gameplay is there, I think guys will still enjoy it just as much. And boohoo for them, they’ll have to suffer a little more alienation.
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It’s actually much simpler than the article suggests. In the 90s, the top AAA real games were adventure games that I spent countless hours playing with my sisters. So many games, absolutely considered real games, contenders and winners of game of the year, equally enjoyable by guys and girls. These kinds of games are still made, not as much, but often enough. What happened is that First Person shooters were invented and they just sell MUCH much more than those games did (or do), at similar development costs (adjusted for inflations). They did not take the market away from those games my sisters and I enjoyed; they captured an external market that is hundreds of times larger than the total game market of the 90s.So it’s not that games failed to grow up. The games you want exist and they’re as big as they were in the 90s. It’s that one specific non-mature, boy-oriented genre is extremely lucrative and extremely enjoyable by its (huge) target market and girls are simply not willing to spend as much (time or money) in the games they like so they get dwarfed by comparison. So do guys that love slow-paced, story-driven games. I don’t mind at all, as long as the games I like are still made but, now then, I’ve never cared for external validation.
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Are you a deliberate troll?
Yeah… not all women are stereotypes from your imagination. Some of us spent the first quarter of our life on our career and have not ever had the inclination to have children.
Don’t try to reverse what you don’t understand.
Fuck yeah, not all fucking women.
Comparing those two things though, actually, makes you look like a complete troll so this is all I’m going to say to you. No response from me will be forthcoming.
’
I just wanted to call out how twisted this comment from you is, and how completely wrong it is.
“Damn it sucks that I spend a good portion of my time and curtail events I go to out of fear of being raped. I wish rape was taken more seriously”
“NOT ALL MEN!!! SHUT UP!”
“Damn, I wish this person would stop assuming women are a monolithic largely sexist stereotype.”
:“Seriously 'Not all women?” that’s all you got?"
coughs
No, strike that.
Spits
Either you have no idea what you are referencing or you are a troll. Calling it.
:
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