Is there a text version of this? I’m not going to spend almost 14 minutes listening to slow machine speech.
you could download it from youtube then speed it up in vlc by pressing the ] key to speed it up without distortion.
There are definitely gender issues with game producers and audiences (particularly the angry guys not getting laid), with some great examples of public meltdowns last year such as Penny Arcade, etc.
However, I’m not sure that this is a meaningful statistic. The vast majority of (visual) pornography consumers are men, which primarily features women. It would be silly to argue along the same lines as original post with this example even if the numbers would support it - “Pornography is unfair to men as they are underrepresented.” … ha.
Similarly, the original Tomb Raider was clearly catered towards men regardless of the protagonists’ gender. We could make all video games to be in the same category completely flipping this statistic, but they would be no less misogynistic.
We have to dig a little deeper to get meaningful insight. This is a distracting statistic.
The 4% claim seems odd. 4% of 25 games is 1 game. But as I look through the cited list of games, the only way you can end up with that result is if you restrict it to games where you can only play as a female protagonist. Pokemon X/Y, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, and Monster Hunter 4 all let you play as a protagonist of either gender. Mario Kart 7 lets you play as any of a number of characters, male, female or indeterminate. I’m not familiar with Just Dance 2014, but while I don’t think “protagonist” applies, it seems your avatar on the screen may be of either gender. It also seems that in The Last of Us, you control a female protagonist for at least part of the game. Add in Tomb Raider, and that could be 7 games out of 25, or 28%… certainly not an ideal number, but not as shocking as 4%.
And leaving out PC-based gaming also tilts the results. Looking at the games I’ve played on Steam this past year, most of the games support having a female protagonist: Portal 2, Torchlight II, Dungeons of Dredmor, Starbound, Sims 3, Borderlands 2, Terraria, Gnomoria, Saints Row IV, Skyrim… (Some of these games weren’t released in 2013. And of course “games Tsuki played on Steam” is an inherently biased subset…)
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Do things not exist for you if you can’t see them?
Most women avoid taking over headsets in most games as it takes far too much effort for others like you to deal with the fact that they are women. It’s easier to play as a mute guy. If you’re into MMOs you should see a healthy population of women once you find a good guild to run with.
The game industry isn’t looking at it’s own data. When developing The Last of Us, the developers had to demand female focus testers. That’s pretty nuts if you think about it. This means that it’s pretty standard to ignore half of your potential revenue base. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/123139-Devs-Had-to-Demand-Female-Focus-Testers-for-The-Last-of-Us
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My point is that despite Tomb Raider’s critical reception, it only exists as a coda to a long series of games featuring a female protagonist because the developers thought no one wants to spend hours “staring at some bloke’s bum”. The number of well-crafted female characters is appallingly small. That pretty much makes the industry sexist.
It’s kinda like how electing a president of African descent doesn’t magically erase racism. A ray of hope, perhaps, but certainly not the cure.
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Like others have said, the 45% number seems misleading to me. They are counting causal games like the stuff on Facebook and Candy Crush. Only premium games should be considered because that’s where the big money is made by developers. I rarely hear a female voice in chat channels or see females in game stores.
That being said I’m all for more female representation because if developers can attract more females that is good for the industry. Some of my favorite voice actors are female. I like Jennifer Hale’s performance of Shepard in Mass Effect better then the Male performance. I would say the same goes for Laura Bailey’s performance in Saints Row. Pretty much anything those two women act in is top notch.
So because women don’t play the kinds of games you play, they don’t count? That’s pretty myopic.
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I have a number of close friends who are women and who game. My friends intentionally do not run in gamer company. Considering how overtly hostile a perhaps vocal minority can be, I don’t think it should be that surprising if statistics don’t line up with anecdotal evidence. I don’t think I need to be more specific here. XBox has completely retooled its gamer rep system at least twice to deal with asshole gamers. This sort of hostility is why you don’t hear women chatting over headsets in games.
My friends are also not as excited about the same games that I see my man-acquaintances excited about. That’s not to say that they prefer solitaire (as I saw someone above say -_-), just that my friends are more excited about WoW, Dragon Age, and Mass Effect than about Borderlands, TF, and COD. Not some sort of “women prefer RPGs because of biology” crap either. Two of the three of those are largely single player and the one that isn’t single player has PvE as an option so if you are a woman playing it openly, you’re less likely to suffer in-game consequences from anti-woman griefers.
We all (gamers) like to play games that challenge us but I think we like an element of fairness too. No one wants to play on (social) Nightmare mode while everyone around them is playing Normal or Easy.
While I haven’t heard them complain specifically about representation, I have seen complaints from women concerning representation in side products for say Mass Effect (spotted on ThinkGeek while Christmas shopping for 2013).
I’m also not fond of this idea, “because capitalism, don’t improve.” Before Tetris, no one said, “There’s a major unserved market group of people who like to stack falling boxes.” Alexey Pajitnov made the game–almost certainly without a bit of the larger form of marketing research–and I think it’s the most popular game of all time. If not, it’s pretty damned close to it.
The gaming industry can–and must–improve regardless of whether statistics approve of the idea.
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That is actually one of my pet peeves. The left-handed bit, just to be clear.
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So a real game is defined to be “games I think women don’t play much”? I’ve been watching the border creep inward as we see what games women do play; it’s like the dudebro gamers (excuse me, “real gamers”) are laagering up at Battlefield 4.
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I don’t play games, but I’ve seen a few movies. The idea that a production company would knowingly avoid a profitable genre simply because of the personal prejudices of “a few people at the top” is absurd. The people at the top want to bring in money and don’t much care what the content is.
Thus we get games and movies that are geared toward what is most likely to generate profits. They are not about reflecting reality, or portraying a “fair” version of it. It’s about what sells, within the limits of the law and production budgets. This typically means something very close to what has been done before, since more change is interpreted as greater risk.
There are two ways I can think of to affect change. The first would be to ignore economic forces and pass laws requiring X percentage of female characters in Y percent of the scenes initiating Z percent of the action. This would happen only if taken forward by the people doing the complaining, and would of course be fought tooth and nail by the gaming and film industries whose profits it would endanger. It would also likely run afoul of the First Amendment.
The second would be to work with economic forces and create market demand for more gender-balanced games and films, so that production companies would willingly crank them out. One way would be to bring the market around to your way of thinking- which, if you can do, you have a very lucrative career waiting for you in marketing. Another way would be to make your own games and films to portray and project the values that YOU want, and as the author implied, technology has lowered most of the barriers to doing this. If your product makes money, you have a bigger budget for the next one, and off you go.
I know a young woman in SF who lives in an apartment, has a day job, takes the bus to work- and has written/directed/produced a half-dozen short films and one feature (with more in the works), all on shoestring budgets. Do these films have a predominance of female characters? Yes. Does that make them good films? No, the talents of the writer/director/producer do that.
So if you don’t like the games/films available, make your own. Nobody is stopping you.
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This whole thread (and the 2 or three recently on this topic) is depressing. I’m not a gamer, but it would be kind of nice when women gamers said stuff, they didn’t immediately get shot down as being harpys and anti-male. I mean, how hard is it, really to just listen to what women gamers have to say about how they feel about things like this, about their treatment by other gamers, about how representations in games of women make them feel and to take that seriously. Is it so hard to do just to listen, and not assume it’s some conspiracy to make male gamers look bad?
Moreover, how hard is it to treat a fellow human being WITH RESPECT!!! Is that really such a threat to someone’s masculinity, to treat a person like a person? Really, truly? Is someone’s masculinity in question by treating other people with respect? Really? Because the way some people are coming off, it seems so. I promise, if you stop treating women like objects and act like we are human beings, your balls won’t fall off…
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I love the circular logic.
‘‘I never see women playing games so these stats are dumb and developers are justified continuing to shovel out games focused on satisfying men, if only more women would buy games this would change!’’
That line of thinking is pretty indefensible.
edit - I hate how this forum software translates double quotes into a block quote, by the way.
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So let me tell you about why you generally will not see me in an online game (at least on a console).
One day I was playing Catan on Xbox. That’s right, the board game Catan. Not feeling much challenge from the AI that day, I logged into XBL and looked for a game with real people. My gamertag is not specifically gendered, but my avatar is female. I was playing with 3 male avatars.
Five turns in, I roll the first 7 and move the robber to the most obviously logical location; a 6-hex with none of my pieces on it. Guy #1 has two houses there. He doesn’t care for this move. He begins screaming at me over headset. In English and Spanish, and I grew up in So Cal, I know when I’m being called disgusting things in Spanish.
Guys #2 and 3 find this rather funny. So when one of them rolls a 7, they put the robber right back on his space. Which leads to Guy #1 screaming more abuse at me. At no point does he say anything to the other two even though they keep moving the robber back there. Finally, Guy #1 decides to quit the game and also trash my XBL rank by rating me “unsportsmanlike” and “rude”. Just me. I asked the other two.
All for a game of fucking Catan. Because I moved the robber once and have ovaries. It’s just not worth the hassle when I can play my games offline.
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At least you weren’t playing Diplomacy.
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Ironically even as a guy this is why I have fallen out of gaming. For me it was growing up on a console/PC and multiplayer meant the other person was in the room with you. This whole headset, hearing the other person, just makes me think of a bunch of teenagers (all men can regress to being 15.)
Like I want to deal with that shit when all I want to do is game. It’s one thing if it’s my friends, entirely another if it’s an asshole online.
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And I know all about that. But no, in observable practice, most female gamers are either in MMOs where they can sink a lot of their time into, playing games with dudebros and not saying anything because they don’t want to be ostracized, or in the case of not-quite-gamers, casual gaming ala Bejeweled on facebook. It’s likely there’s actually more female gamers than male if you count casual gaming. It’s just harder to find examples of an audience that tends not to make itself known.
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Was that an IT Crowd throwback?
No, I was pointing out that the reasoning between “women are underrepresented” and “look at this shiny collection of factoid” is utter trite, on the same level as arguing that the current conditions in Boston refute global warming.
I abhor this shite, regardless if it supports or opposes positions I agree with. Even more in the first case, because such weak and borderline lying sensationalist reasoning is just an opening for the fallacy fallacy.
Oh, by the way:
I wouldn’t know what “real” gaming is supposed to be. I assume it’s the English equivalent to the German “serious play”, a term that brings me to hysterical laughter.
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