Is that a requirement now? One thing I always notice in these discussions are the way the goal posts keep moving. A couple of decades ago, the idea was “women don’t play video/computer games”. Today, the games women play are dismissed as “not really games”. And now, it’s not enough to play games, you’ve also go to go to websites? I mean, my parents are unlikely to visit the AV Club, but they sure watch a lot of television. Besides, the culture on those kind of sites is enough to keep any sane person away. Have you see the comments on Kotaku?
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see, what you’ve shown is that women don’t want chat on forums or read stories with vague connection to gaming.
And frankly it’s a wonder why anyone would read Kotaku.
For that matter, why is Boing Boing so sexist?
https://www.quantcast.com/boingboing.net
I’m curious how they choose who is female and male. I’m a female, but last time I looked, Google identified me as a male, presumably because I do ‘male’ things like web development and cycling… Oh yeah, I play games, too…
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Between being a writer and being trans*, Google very frequently changes its entire strategy toward me. One day, it’s telling me how to get pregnant or win back my man. Another day, it’s telling me how to become a member of law enforcement. I’m also fairly curious. If it’s by those surveys that pop up, I wonder how they’re accounting for respondent error.
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If you are playing with the second card, do you yell Bitch or Bingo?
Ironically, of course.
No of course not, but “gamer culture”, for better or worse, probably consists of people who do go to such gaming websites.
Anyway, just trying to inject some data in the discussion. I like data. More data is more betterer.
Good point, quantcast shows 24% female audience for bb.net itself. That’s still decent by gaming website standards though!
If you’re Jesse Pinkman, both.
Catriona tumbled this enragingly shit site design. Who needs readable text, anyway?
Edit: Yeah… while the gender imbalance in gaming is obvious and undeniable I think this is cherry-picking stats to prove a specific point. IMO (and this is impossible to tell from the .pdf cause the gender stats are lacking) the types of games that feature protagonists are played much more by men than women. Isn’t it sensible for games to be marketed to their demographic? Like it or not, this is often how these decisions are made.
I also just want to say that I don’t give a flying fuck about game storyline or characters… like… at all. I skip all cut scenes and always have. If a game isn’t engaging on gameplay alone then it fails at being a game.
When they added the teenage female in a punked-up schoolgirl uniform Mechromancer character to Borderlands 2, they set her up with two very different trees. One was internally called “girlfriend mode”, which lets your robot do most of the work. The other is anarchy mode, which is for intellectual berzerker tanking and the hardest tree in the game to play. I’m not sure what their marketing plan was on this. Maybe one reason that B2 has broad appeal is that they don’t let the marketing people into the room until after the game is designed.
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Replying to you because your post touches on why I find this Tumblr post to be troublesome. It’s a problem how under represented women are, not to mention LGBT and all, but posts like these are pretty inaccurate and disingenuous.
My problem with the Tumblr post is that the sources don’t really “talk” to each other at all.
The ESA paper includes mobile gaming/casual gaming as part of its study of the male/female split - and that changes things a little bit (I’m not sure how the gaming audience on mobile is).
And then it compares to VGChartz, which last I checked only looks at retail games and not digital platforms (take your pick of UPlay, Steam, Origin, XBL, PSN etc). Also, I understand why VGChartz split its games into each individual consoles, but that means that the statement “only 4% of the top 25 games” is inaccurate.
The statement “top 25 games” implies that they’re different games, especially in the context of the Tumblr post.
Also, VGChartz ignores mobile games.
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Them calling it girlfriend mode is pretty damn sexist obviously, but the concept isn’t that unusual. When I last played World of Warcraft, hunters and warlocks both had specs that let the pet do most of the work if you didn’t want to pay a lot of attention. They also had specs that required a complicated rotation of abilities to do maximum damage.
Absolutely, a newbie mode that lets you play for fun with more experienced friends is great. The only reason we know that they called it girlfriend mode internally is that they mentioned it in a couple of interviews. I wish they’d identified it as “roommate mode” or “beginner mode” or even “idiot mode”. On the other side of the Mechromancer menu, however, this girlfriend-identified character is the hardest to play, at least for experienced players. (Anarchy play is complicated and trained combat habits can screw you up.) That is a compliment of a sort. I wonder if this strategy to encourage girlfriends has been working.
If a writer and others all made the same, apparently incorrect, assumption - maybe it is the way it was written? Something to consider before starting your reply with an snooty comment. Obviously I read your post. I was far from the only one to take it the way I did.
Ha! Now that’s the truth, indeed.
Thank you. That was the point I was trying to get across and you said it well.
And @AliceWeir it is worth mentioning that it takes about 80ms for packets on the Internet to travel from the east coast to the west coast of the USA. As they say, the speed of light sucks.
I have no doubt that at the Olympic (or even college) level a demonstrated, scientifically reproducible 40ms male/female reaction time difference is profound in real life sporting events, where there is no inherent latency in delivering a physical action.
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Honestly, aside from the blatant sexism, what I thought reading that post was, “What do you expect playing Settlers?” That’s the most rage inducing game I’ve ever experienced.
Sure but as with pretty much all traits there is more variation within the sexes than between them. It’s fine to say that statistically men have better reaction times because that’s true, but when two people compete its down to the individuals, not their sexes (except at extremely high levels of play where everyone is practicing to the max and tiny edges make a difference).
For real? Porn is so sprawling it’s hard to imagine how you’d even conduct a study to test this, and obviously individuals experiences are going to be so heavily affected by their tastes that anecdotes are useless. What is this based on? Sales stats?
And now just me:
Anyway, I think its important to think about what it means to look at the top 25 games of the year. We should expect these games to be more conservative and rely more on established tropes that have brought the audiences in in the past. Same with movies. You aren’t going to see the progressiveness in the number one grossing film of the year that you are in an art student’s movie-thesis. I don’t think these stats are really that depressing. Let’s make the same stats for 2009, 2006 and 2003 and look at the trend. I bet it would be quite encouraging.
So I’m very encouraged by what I’m seeing in games, and I feel like game developers are a lot more progressive than they are given credit for. My experience with bother gamers and game designers is that they tend to be quite enlightened more often than not.
But between those headsets on consoles (which I have never experienced) and the online forums and comment sections (which I have) it seems like we give a hugely disproportionate voice to assholes who make it terribly unpleasant for everyone, women especially. I don’t think that good female characters in games is going to do much to affect this problem.
Came here expecting a hoarde of people desperately trying to explain to themselves how girls can’t really like games, and… well, here we are. Apparently, if you don’t know much girl gamers, they just can’t exist.
I just went over this in another thread (“How gender bias in games and geeky movies got there” - read it, everyone!), so I’m too tired to repeat myself all over again, but I’ll sum it up: women like games just as much as men do. Their preferences differ just like it does for men. Women don’t like games that has women character who do nothing but show their tits around, and honestly, I can’t imagine that men want that either.
Women don’t like talking out loud in online games, because they are harassed. Some guys can’t stand losing to a girl, so they will get really competetive (“die bitch!”). Many women don’t like partaking in the community, either, because some people are just terrible.
I’m an avid gamer (right now I’m playing on The Walking Dead, Halo: ODST and Beautiful Katamari). So is my sister. I know a lot of “girl gamers”. We exist, want it or not.
Video games have always been made by men and for men. They aren’t played more by men because of some innate reason. You don’t have to start making “girl games” with glitter and dating to attract women - just work towards curbing the sexism in the community and make the female characters wear some clothes. Games could make a lot more money if they realized that their demographic IS men and women and just made even one believable female character. When you make better characters, everyone wins - just look at Firefly.
If you people want some examples of great games with great characters, try The Longest Journey and Syberia, and their sequals. Both have a female protagonist.
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Given the odds, gender-biased attendance, and number of players involved, the correct answer would be, “Bingo, bitches!” (Better, if you can do a half-decent Jesse Pinkman imitation.)
I actually don’t care much about this as a gaming issue at all. I’m remain convinced that wage disparity and under-representation in the IT field in general is the cause. I’ d love to see that change, period. When I entered the field, it was said to be over 95% male. When I left, it had improved, but was still 75-80% male. If the field itself generally changes, then I’d expect a specialty like games development to change as well.
Now. Quit arguing with me. I have no power whatsoever over this issue. You do. Go teach your daughters how to code and do data modeling and stuff, eh?
@AliceWeir: I’m with @codinghorror on this. I have a hard time believing that such a small difference in reaction times would actually have an effect on results in FPS games. They aren’t about millisecond decisions, more like half a second. A 10-20ms difference doesn’t really mean anything in that regard.
You say you’re worse than the guys at that kind of games, but that’s just you as an individual. If we’re talking about anecdotes, then I’ve gotta say that when I got really into Unreal Tournament, I kicked ass.
