I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt here, that you aren’t being dismissive to women who might like to do the same kind of activities that you do. Maybe there’s a reason that you expect that all woman-identified gamers are clicking around on so-called “casual” games. Perhaps you just haven’t seen them in the games that you play.
Among my female friends there are several quite serious gamers. We all, generally, pick gender-neutral user names and stay away from voice chat with other online players. The few people I am social with have been meticulously vetted. I bet you can hazard a guess as to why I find such a policy necessary.
Yep! Below links to a review of the literature on the subject. Males are faster, even including one study that had over 7,400 subjects. The dudes are just plain faster.
The gender numbers in terms of games points to a cute unsourced piece of marketing trash. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that the imbalance is huge, but numbers without context tell you absolutely nothing other than that stuff isn’t even.
The most obvious point is that while women might make up 45% of the “gaming” audience, is my mother a “gamer” because she plays Candy Crush? The comparison that 3% of the top 25 games have a female protagonist merrily ignores that half of those games have no protagonist at all, a pile of them are double counted for an XBox and PS3 version, and the 45% number sure as hell didn’t come from those top 25. Seriously, just looking at the numbers slapped up together point them out to be obviously fraudulent distortion.
Please, don’t misunderstand me, I want to see vastly more interesting female protagonist in AAA games. The gaming industry needs more Alyx Vances and femSheps, and fewer Duke Nuk’ems. That said, obviously worthless throw away statistics that have Candy Crush usage and the number female protagonist in the top 25 games are such bald faced distortions that anyone you are trying to reach are going to laugh at the obvious attempts to distort.
If you look at ‘casual’ games, I am pretty sure that there is essentially no imbalance. The super majority of casual games are genderless, and that is where you get a disproportionate amount of women gamers. The real horror show of gaming is in the AAA games. These games actually have protagonist to count, themes, messages, and real cultural influences. Candy Crush isn’t going to perpetuate gender stereotypes, but Call of Duty might. So please, keep them separate so we can have a real and informed discussion, or (foolishly) lump them together as if they are the same thing so that it appears there is no problem, but don’t do both.
Wizardry had male/female distinctions. Females tended to rank lower on STR and CON, but had higher CHA and WIS, if I recall. But there were also racial stat modifiers that weighed more heavily, so you could easily make tanks female characters. As well, there were entire professions and quest lines that were gender-dependent… No male Valkyries for example, some weapons could only be wielded by $GENDER, or $RACE, certain NPCs reacted differently depending on gender.
Games with a narrative arc and games without a narrative arc are in fact two different things. They count for sure, but if the complaint is with the sexist narrative, you actually have to look at just those games that have a narrative to be sexist, not throw in a pile of random plotless games about lining up candy colors.
Imagine if you were trying to decide what board game to build and sell for 2014, and so looked up the statistics from 2013 to get a little audience about where the market is. You find that the most played game board or card game of 2013 was poker. Should you try and build a poker rip off (hint: the answer is no)?
Casual gaming and AAA gaming are two entirely different genera that are as far apart as movies and books. Casual gaming doesn’t have a gender problem while AAA gaming does. That means that when you look at the gender problem in AAA gaming you actually need to stick to statistics on AAA gaming, not throw in noise from casual gaming.
''The most obvious point is that while women might make up 45% of the “gaming” audience, is my mother a “gamer” because she plays Candy Crush? ‘’
Until people in the Gaming Hard Core accept that the answer to this question is an unequivocal “yes”, we will continue to see feminist discussions of gaming needlessly derailed by tautaulogies already pointed out above.
Let’s say for example that Candy Crush-obsessed grandmothers are considered gamers and not filtered out as noise… How does that diminish our ability to intelligently discuss gender and gaming? What is it about casual games that the archetypical gamer finds repulsive? And (most importantly!) how might the answers to the previous question impact whether or not the players of these games self-identify?
Quite welcome. I actually saw this demonstrated in my high school Biology class. Very low tech - the teacher held a ruler against a mark on the wall and dropped it. The test subject had their finger on the wall at a lower spot, and it was scored by how many inches had passed before you nailed the ruler with your finger. The guys absolutely pwned us on that one. (Hadda go burn a bra to cast out the bad mojo foisted upon us that day, lol.)
I dunno, but any time they want to go head-to-head at poker, I’m down. Female pro poker players take a lot of the same heat. And perhaps worse, they actually have live all-female tournaments in a game where the only possible edge gender has is that kings outrank queens. So, you still also have to figure there’s also X amount of casual misogyny involved, be it the play, or the stats concerning who the players are.
(Though I still think it’s mainly about perceived market share and the developers themselves.)
Pornography primarily features men. On average, a pornography scene has more men than women. The more the scene caters to men, the more men are likely to be in it, and the more likely it is that domination of women is a major theme. “Couples” porn is more likely to have one man per woman, and is more likely to treat women as actual human beings.[quote=“ackpht, post:33, topic:18429”]
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.
[/quote]
Yeah, because movies are a great example of this. Why is it that movies like Bridesmaids and The Heat are huge hits, but every time a female-led movie succeeds it’s interpreted as some kind of surprise. Or what about the huge success of Tyler Perry? There’s obviously a very lucrative market for black-led movies, yet Hollywood ignores this market and most of the USA has never seen any of his movies. I’m not denying that Hollywood is profit-oriented, but I am saying that when the industry is dominated by white males they are unlikely to think that things that seem unappealing to themselves may be appealing to others, even when those others represent a huge market.
The problem is that the marketing stats create the statistics they’re tracking. Games that are advertised as macho and use women as decoration tend to get a better response from men than women. These responses are then used to justify doubling down on the dudebro demographic (lowest common denominator and all) because the data “proves” women don’t buy games. Which leaves a big market untapped, and creates fertile ground for “surprise” successes when, say, a start-up company with a bigger tolerance for risk takes advantage of it. Everyone now says “oh, well women are casual gamers” but 20 years ago, who was saying that? It’s only common knowledge now because some companies took the risk and made bank.
I played every class in that game, usually through multiple playthroughs. It was weird to me how if I played Maya, public games would outright demand that I respec to heal.
Gaige is pretty fun, and unlike Zer0, her skill trees are indirect and a little screwball. Also, of all the DLC releases, you have to play Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep.
Hmm, the supplied link is interesting (click expand chevron on above quote to find the link), but does not sound at all conclusive to me, despite citing a ton of studies:
Gender. At the risk of being politically incorrect, in almost every age group, males have faster reaction times than females, and female disadvantage is not reduced by practice (Noble et al., 1964; Welford, 1980; Adam et al., 1999; Dane and Erzurumlugoglu, 2003; Der and Deary, 2006). The last study is remarkable because it included over 7400 subjects. Bellis (1933) reported that mean time to press a key in response to a light was 220 msec for males and 260 msec for females; for sound the difference was 190 msec (males) to 200 msec (females). In comparison, Engel (1972) reported a reaction time to sound of 227 msec (male) to 242 msec (female). However, things may be changing–Silverman (2006) reported evidence that the male advantage in visual reaction time is getting smaller (especially outside the US), possibly because more women are participating in driving and fast-action sports. Spierer et al. (2010) reported that when male soccer players were compared with female lacrosse players, males were able to respond faster to both visual and auditory stimuli. They said that the male advantage was greatest when using visual stimuli. Botwinick and Thompson (1966) found that almost all of the male-female difference was accounted for by the lag between the presentation of the stimulus and the beginning of muscle contraction. Muscle contraction times were the same for males and females. In a surprising finding, Szinnai et al. (2005) found that gradual dehydration (loss of 2.6% of body weight over a 7-day period) caused females to have lengthened choice reaction time, but males to have shortened choice reaction times. Adam et al. (1999) reported that males use a more complex strategy than females. Barral and Debu (2004) found that while men were faster than women at aiming at a target, the women were more accurate. Bayless et al. (2012) found that when a choice reaction time task was made more challenging for rats by weak stimuli and distraction, male rats tended to “jump the gun” and make premature responses, but female rats were more likely to miss valid stimuli. Note that this study used rats, not humans. Jevas and Yan (2001) reported that age-related deterioration in reaction time was the same in men and women.
As a long time FPS enthusiast including plenty of online play, I can assure you a difference of 10 to 40 milliseconds as quoted in the study is not enough to win or lose even the twitchiest FPS. Quake is as twitchy as it gets, and the strategy of timing/getting armor, anticipating opponent location, etc is far more significant. And there were famous female Quake gamers too, who were plenty competitive from what I recall.
I don’t think reaction times are the problem; the stylized ultraviolence of Quake is just not that interesting to women. Compare today a relatively recent stylized ultraviolence game like Bulletstorm (which is, actually, surprisingly good) but I cannot imagine even a tiny fraction of women caring about that style of gameplay.
OK but can you point to actual examples of this? Maybe The Sims? Still that is hardly a startup, it’s EA. Where are the mega-hit non casual games that are super popular with women?
I don’t see your problem with all these studies. MS for ms, girls are slower. I already made the claim that I can kick just as much or more butt in a strategy or puzzle environment - so, you brought out a strategy environment as an example? If speed is dependent upon strategy, then I can out-strategize you and presumably nullify your speed advantage. It looks more like you agree with my statement than disagree…
