Yes, this is definitely a problem. However, in a situation like this one when someone complains that there aren’t enough games targeted at adult women that are not about shooting, the best thing seems to be to point them in the direction of the numerous games that do exist, where there is also a lower chance of having that experience ruined by hyper-masculine jerks. In fact, I’d appreciate if those other kinds were more well-known and successful as I’m not a big FPS fan.
I get the idea that we’re continuing to argue about different things though, so I’d better stop. My point has never been that harassment doesn’t exist or that women shouldn’t be able to play whatever they want, but that the problems in this article don’t really seem to be that strongly related to issues like Gamergate. There’s the idea that games designed primarily for girls’ aren’t games games, bullying at school and unbalanced marketing that leads her to think that the games she would be interested in don’t exist. Without dismissing the fact that women should be welcome anywhere and there are many places where they’re not, there’s a lot of scope for pointing out that games that girls play exist and are real games, and that reaching a critical mass is changing the industry for the better.
She wanted “browser” games. There are plenty of those, and easy to find if you look at all.
Pretty much the only videogaming I play these days is on Newgrounds, since games there are essentially free, bite sized, diverse in subject, and come out at the rate of several each week. Plenty are whimsical, playful, and/or not boy/violence/sex oriented. Don’t like the current one? Just pick another.
However, in support of her points:
The site can be a pretty even mixture of gems, duds and excrement.
There’s no particular filter that I’ve ever noticed to what they’ll
host. So some of the media there can be pretty vulgar in the same
painfully awkward vein as a thoughtless teenager attempting to be
shocking.
Additionally, the backdrops on the Newgrounds main page
often tend to advertise third party games, and routinely use scantily
clad women of unlikely proportions. This to the point that, even
being a heterosexual male, I sometimes find the degree of top-heavyness
and means of clothing attachment in the adds bizarre and off putting.
AAA titles cost millions of dollars and take thousands of people years to make. Indie titles do not. Hence, AAA marketing is more aggressive and risk-averse.
I’m 36 and male. I grew up on NES and PC games. Hell everyone that had an NES knew Mario and most people had played Zelda. I’m thinking in my middle school that was probably 80% of the boys and +50% of the girls. Hell it was probably higher than that, I’m not sure I knew anyone personally that didn’t have an NES. It wasn’t like girls didn’t game or were icky or some bullshit - I spent many hours playing Super Mario 3 with a female friend. Now fast foward…I don’t game anymore, at least not by what I define as game. Sure I play some games on my phone, but nothing serious, nothing that I spend a hour(s) a day on (or spend money on). It’s not because I didn’t enjoy it…it’s because the game market went to shit. Yeah, yeah indie this and all that. But seriously look back at the mid 90’s. I remember buying Descent from Best Buy and Freespace from Circuit City. Mechwarrior anyone? Star Control 2? Those were my games, that’s what I want back. No team shit, no having to be online, no having to buy add ons, just something other than the endless FPS stuff that’s on the market now. Women complain there aren’t games marketed to them, ironically I think the same thing.
And as far as critiquing the mind set of a 15 year old boy, eh…why? And I don’t say that unironically either. When my wife and I were dating she happened to accompany me on a “guys” night out so to speak. Never again. I believe her somewhat exact words were “You act different around them, you are so mean to each other.” Apparently this was some revelation to her…to me and my friends it was normal hanging out having a good time fun. I’m not defending teenage boys acting like douche holes on CoD…I’m saying I understand. Society and the gaming scene could certainly work on making the entire community more female friendly, but asking for a game like CoD to be more PG and less R I think is missing some of the point.
As someone who devoted their youth to computers in the late 70s and early 80s, and having worked in the Gaming industry in the 80s and early 90s, and being an avid gamer and professional software engineer, I can say this.
Computer technology, the computer industry, and the gaming industry was built by men. Women have stayed away from the computer and gaming industry in droves. It is long hours of difficult and lonely work, the kind of work that women prefer not to do.
For most of the history of the computer industry, being a programmer or gamer was looked down upon by women. It still is to a certain extent.
Now that computers and games are becoming mainstream, women are complaining about the fact it wasn’t built for them. As a result of their non-participation in its creation, of course it wasn’t built for them.
The solution is not to sit around and whine, but rather to get involved, make the games they want to play, and buy them. I don’t see that happening, given that programming and game creation is the kind of work that women prefer to avoid.
That does sound pretty amazing and I hope the end game is as good as the article makes it sound.
I’m a big fan of Paradox’s Crusader Kings 2, which I have sunk a ton of hours in to and never had a game go the same way twice, so if I was going to trust anyone to create something so ambitious it would be them. They also have a great history of supporting their older games and continuing to tweak things even after release, so if they don’t quite hit the mark the first time they’ll probably try and expand on it afterwards.
I assure you that games programming is long hours of difficult and lonely work.
As for whether it is the kind of work that women prefer not to do, it is worth watching this Norwegian documentary which examines the dogma that all gender differences are a cultural construct.
One aspect is particularly interesting and relevant to this conversation: the Norwegian Gender Equality Paradox, which is the observation that, the more free women are to chose their professions, the more they tend to chose professions that are traditionally feminine.
If you watch the documentary, you will see evidence that the gender-is-purely-a-cultural-construct dogma is false, for example, the results of an experiment on day-old babies is presented, in which female infants spend more time looking at faces, while male infants spend more time looking at mechanisms.
I didn’t use the word feminine as a circular definition. Probably the best word to use to define “feminine” occupations is “social”. Here is a link to an article discussing feminine and masculine jobs http://www.thedigeratilife.com/blog/index.php/2007/05/29/traditional-jobs-for-men-and-women-the-gender-divide/ - its worth looking down the list of female dominated professions and asking how “social” that work is (i.e. how much working time is devoted to engaging with other people), then doing the same for the male dominated professions.
At any rate - women have been completely free to chose their professions for a half a century or more, and they gravitate to professions that are more social and less technical.
Mistaken about what? Im standing by my assertion that there are biological gender differences that influence the choices of profession that men and women make. Culture also has an influence, but it is absolutely not the whole story.
I looked at your links. I am aware of Ada Babbage, Grace Hopper and such. When I graduated university, it was just as the first push to get women into computing started. It seems that the percentage of women in computing has gone down from 35% to 20% since the 80s.
If you scratch the surface of the figures for women in the tech industry, which is something like 10%, and what you find is that the majority of women in the tech industry gravitate to social roles in marketing and such, and away from asocial roles such as programming.
At this point, as far as I’m concerned, I regard someone claiming identity with Gamergate about the way I regard someone claiming identity with the KKK or a neo-Nazi group. I’m not going to trust a word they say.
Maybe there’s really not a major problem. Out of the AAA space, there’s a lot of options.
However, there are many people who are just itching for a fight and/or to get the righteous rush of feeling like a victim. Beware of those, they tend to complicate things. In discourses like these, there are usually quite some Molehill-to-Mountain Construction Company crewmembers. I heard that in emotional currency the job pays fairly well.
Magnitude of the issue, maybe? Proportionality?
“If you aren’t with us, you’re against us. Burn the heretics!”
The takedown of Sarkeesian’s tendency to cherry-pick responses and bury the non-extreme ones was spot-on. This should be done to those who are into needless polarization of whatever is an issue.
Beware of letting the fringes, from either side, to dominate the discourse. Then you’ll end with shit flinging across the deserted middle, because whoever strays in the Land of Nowhere has to be an enemy - of both sides.
Because if you aren’t part of the solution - “OUR” solution - you are a problem and have to be dealt with, or at least marginalized.
Wasn’t this particular study refuted? I remember looking at this and finding it had been rather thoroughly debunked.
Anyways, I tend to agree that guns and violence and sex are rather male in nature, so games reflecting those values will skew heavily male. I mean, I could cite statistics, in that men commit 90% of the murders in the USA, but you know this. Dudes are born biologically aggressive.
However, I also agree that these kinds of games are not the only kind that should exist, because that’d be ridiculous. Plenty of room in the world for games without guns that are non-violent, and not sexualized.
