It goes across the board from games to comic books to movies. I love a strong female protagonist who is not just a man with ovaries or lovesick damsel prancing with a distinctive jiggle. Characters like that are not always easy to find.
We have no shortage of interesting female singers and have for the last thirty years – so many with character and flamboyant personas and they sell records, push boundaries and have long careers – too bad that the powers-that-be do not always see the obvious and open the door in other areas of popular culture as well…
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It diminishes our ability because if you can’t nail down the nature of the problem, you can’t work on solutions. The entirely legitimate complaint against gaming is entirely against AAA gaming and maybe to a lesser extent indie gaming. These are games that have an actual narrative to be sexist in. Candy Crush isn’t AAA gaming, and it isn’t sexist. There is no point in discussing in it. It is like pointing out that 100% of people drink some liquid, and that 40% of alcoholics die early. The two have absolutely nothing to do with each other. The number of women playing Candy Crush and the sexist nature of narrative AAA games are completely and utterly related.
Because you are not talking about gaming when you are talking about sexism in “gaming”. When you talk about sexism in gaming, you are talking about sexism in AAA games, not Candy Crush. Casual gaming is, for the most part, devoid of narrative to be sexist.
There is nothing repulsive about it. It is just that people who play AAA games realize that they are fundamentally different from casual games that have no narrative. My mother (and father for that matter) will never, in a million years, play a AAA game. It doesn’t matter how perfectly you targeted it to her tastes, she just won’t play anything with a narrative. She will play Candy Crush. Including my mother as a “gamer” when talking about a problem that is fundamentally not a “gamer” problem but a AAA gamer problem, is stupid.
If you want to be pedantic and declare all “gaming” the same, than there is no significant sexism in gaming but that sort of inane logic. 45% of gamers are women, and vast majority of gaming hours spent by most people are in games that everyone agrees are not sexist casual games. Stuff your head in the sand a little deeper. There is a problem with a very specific type of gaming. If we want to talk about that very specific type of gaming, and I absolutely do, we need to actually stick to just that type of gaming.
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Those numbers are averages, so there are probably a lot of women with reaction times faster than the average man. Also, those numbers say nothing about whether or not those averages would even out with practice or even if 10-40 milliseconds would make a difference in a video game. If the difference in reaction times was noticeable in a video game, you would still have to consider accuracy before making any claims because reacting quickly does not mean much if you miss your target.
Actually, no. The results were extremely consistent, and it was also found that practice does not improve fem reaction times at all. It was determined that the difference is not in the actual speed of muscles working, but a lag between recognition of a signal and firing time of the muscle - so, a fundamental physiological difference.
I already mentioned accuracy. But in those studies, they found women more likely to miss auditory signals, and men more like to jump the gun. But, we could probably argue that does no good, either, unless they are competing in a game where the signals are visual and firing too soon in error creates a penalty? Certainly, the opportunities could be leveled out one way or another. But, that idea wasn’t actually tested, as the only games I saw mentioned were athletics. You might want to read the linked paper, though. It’s interesting, and not too long.
And really, vive la difference. It’s ok that we aren’t the same. I’m just tired of superhero movies!
My point is that segregating the Capital-G Gamers (fans of the AAA titles you speak of) from the allegedly female-dominated casual game market is intrinsically sexist. Narrative vs non-narrative (or what board gamers call “abstracts”), casual vs AAA, they are all just artificial means by which people can neatly rationalize market segregation.
If you label a group of people as non-gamers, they really aren’t going to chomp at the bit to join in. If it’s just a big boy’s club, why bother? The really pernicious part is when people pre-emptively ascribe those identifications to people . This is why Dudebros get so creepy when a self-identified female pops up on their server. Girls play casual games, casual games are not AAA games, AAA games are not games, therefore girls are not gamers.
Trivializing 45% of the gaming population is not the way to fix the underlying gender segregation.
I’m female and I play games. I’ve been playing games since the 1980s beginning with the Atari 2600. These days I play a lot of games on my phone. My favorites include Asphalt and Dungeon Hunter.
I used to play a lot of RPGs, but these days everything is an MMO and I just want to play alone and not deal with guy gamers.
I don’t know where this assumption that we all play Candy Crush comes from. Is there some sort of study on Candy Crush?
And just for the heck of it: http://www.gamingmommies.com/ < no mention of Candy Crush
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The funny thing is, I know more ladies who are into the mainstream triple-A games than men.
And yet…
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
If it is so fundamental and physiological, how is it possible for it to change at all? I’d like to reiterate that even 40ms, the maximum reported difference in the data quoted, is hardly going to give males a significant advantage even in the twitchiest shooter game I can think of. And I have played a fair number.
(for context a “low ping bastard” has 39ms or less ping to the server, whereas an old school analog modem connection was at least 200ms, perhaps 250-350ms. Those are differences that matter.)
Some other interesting data points, if women are really nearly 50% of gamers, how do we explain these gaming website numbers?
- Penny Arcade quantcast: 8% female visitors
- Kotaku quantcast: 5% female visitors
- Gametrailers quantcast: 9% female visitors
- Gamefront quantcast: 19% female visitors
- Supercheats quantcast: 35% female visitors
That seems… pretty far from the vaunted nearly 50% of female gamers in the gaming “audience”. Although the supercheats number is somewhat encouraging.
(I apologize for the limited data points, and I know PA dickwolves, etc, but these are the only Quantcast validated numbers of anything resembling a popular “gaming” website I could think of or find. Feel free to add.)
No, try reading. I know it’s hard, Cory didn’t do it either before he vented his rage.
Jesses, I play nothing but “casual games”, for a couple of minutes at best, because it’s not worth my time anymore.
The point is that the data Cory quotes doesn’t at all support his main point. (Which I happen to agree with, but that’s besides the point, either.)
And as long as people accept such sloppy reporting, actually activists have a hard time, because the general population is smart enough to see faulty reasoning, but not interested enough to do the research themselves.
The funny thing about anecdotes are: There are lots of them.
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So, where’s the part where you show us that the gaming website audience is the same as the gaming audience and thus representative?
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t go to popular gaming sites. I stick with niche sites. Or, if I like a particular game, I might go to fan sites of that particular game. I’m also subscribed to a few gaming channels on YouTube (ie PBS Game/Show and Geek and Sundry).
The reason I even play games is for escape and part of that escape is my personal gender being a non-issue. I don’t even mind playing male characters if it’s like a hack and slash (I prefer swordplay to guns). So, I would be less likely to be part of communities where my gender would be an issue or if I had to prove myself over and over.
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I never labeled anyone a gamer or non-gamer. I pointed out that there are different types of games. “Gamers” are an ultra broad category with sub categories. Further, I pointed out that that the sexist nature of the gaming industry is mostly prevalent in one particular type of sub-category of games, namely AAA games.
If you really want to insist that all games are just games, then rejoice! Gaming no longer has a sexism problem! The vast majority of gaming hours spent are on non-sexist games like Candy Crush and Bejeweled, and the gender split is almost 50/50. Hooray! Sexism is solved with by defining it away. Man, we should have done that earlier.
Sci-fi and poetry are both writing, but they are different. Liking one doesn’t imply you are going to like the other. Pointing out that they are different and attract different audiences with wildly different taste isn’t a slight against people that like poetry or sci-fi.
It isn’t sexist to call casual games and AAA games two different things. They are different. No. Seriously, they are different. They are as different as poetry and sci-fi, movies and books, and cars and bicycles. It isn’t a value judgement. I am not saying one is better than the other. I play them both, but they are different. Stuffing your head in the sand and insisting that they are the same thing when they are clearly not causes you to miss the fundamental reason why casual games tend to not be sexist, and AAA games tend to be far more likely to be sexist.
The difference between AAA games and casual games is not that one is made by sexist pigs and the other isn’t. They are made by the same rough group of people. The only difference is that a casual game generally can’t be sexist because it has no narrative. You have to go out of your way to make Words with Friends or Bejeweled sexist. Boring old unconscious sexism on the other hand will make any game with an actual narrative that can be sexist, inclined to be sexist if it is written by a few dozen 20-30 year old men who are not terribly introspective on sexism.
Willful ignorance isn’t going to solve the gender segregation problem either. Liking Candy Crush has essentially zero correlation to whether or not you are going to enjoy a FPS or a turn based strategy game.
When we talk about sexism in gaming, we are exclusively talking about non-casual games, and mostly about AAA titles. If we want to fix that problem, we need to understand the problem. Is the problem that 45% of the players of those AAA games are women and feel undeserved, or is the problem that 10% of the players of those games are women because they are sexist in nature? Those are two fundamentally different problems whether you want to acknowledge it or not. Throwing in the worthless stats about casual gaming tells you nothing about the nature of the problem. Both of my parents and grand parents are “casual gamers”, and hell will freeze over before they touch a console or PC to play a game with a narrative that is more involved than scrabble or Bejeweled.
The real numbers are actually bleaker, but folks tend to not like them because the solution can’t possibly be fixed overnight. If the problem was that half of all gamers are women and they are being undeserved and simply dying to grab a game pad and play, it just takes someone with a little vision to swoop in and steal the market. That isn’t the real problem though. The real problem is that due to the pervasive male dominance of AAA gaming design and consumption for decades, there are hard cultural forces at work that will need to be struggled against in order to have any sort of hope of righting the imbalance. You can’t just make a non-sexist game and suddenly your numbers will double.
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Did they control for the years of casual ball practice the boys most likely got with their fathers vs. playing house for the girls with their mothers?
If one gender spends their childhood learning eye-hand coordination skills and the other does not, how surprising is it that by the time they are in high school, one gender happens to be better at eye-hand coordination skills?
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How does quantcast determine gender? It’s not like we put something like that on the UA string. Are they actually polling people or using 3rd party cookies and building up a profile? The latter approach is probably a bit suspect, as it’d be hard to accurately determine gender based solely on browsing history, or that there is even a single user for a given ip address.
Silverman reported that the male visual reaction time was getting shorter. Male. Visual. Nothing at all concerning females or non-visual signals.
I don’t know that it is changing at all. In that case, a single study, and the study methodology was not even reported, let alone any replication. Which leaves it at the point of being an idea only. Would be nice if it turned out to be correct, but I don’t expect it.
Don’t take my word for anything. In fact, don’t even throw up more offhand stats. Grab an ordinary ruler, and replicate the old Biology class experiment I described with the men and women around you. See what happens, and decide for yourself - but with actual evidence. It’ll be true or not - but we won’t end up arguing over stuff without any evidence - because this time, it’s not just a philosophical position, and not something distant that you can’t test and observe easily.
I dunno. I played ball with my dad, as he had no sons until I was nearly grown. I spent most of the rest my time doing specific eye-hand coordination learning - sewing, needlework, art - and any of those is closer to the motions needed to click a mouse…so. I still can’t beat most any guy in that reaction time test. The study stated that practice and learning yielded no improvements.
But that’s 1 example, which means nothing. There have been many formal studies conducted, and the results showed the same, over and over again. I didn’t do said studies, didn’t make up the results. And those results would be a nearly invisible thing most anywhere in real life. About the only place they would be meaningful is in video gaming.
Yeah, the Quantcast data is limited by nature, but it’s somewhat accurate in my experience (sites I know are dominated by dudes show as such, sites that ladies prefer also show as such) and it is at least a data point to look at versus endless opinions. If anyone has better gender data by website, don’t hesitate to share it.
45% of women may be “gamers” but they certainly are not going to any gaming websites I can find data for.
And as I keep telling you, and you keep ignoring, a maximum 40ms difference in reflexes between the sexes, as shown in the experimental data you cited, would matter very little even in competitive twitch video gaming.
Now if the difference between male and female reaction times was 200+ms, then definitely! Plenty of historical precedent in the modem players versus DSL and cable players, as previously linked.
And the vast majority of games are not particularly twitchy, rendering this even more moot.
