Why, IMO, it's hard finding a game to like as a female gamer

[papillon]

I stopped caring about gender in video games a long time ago on a playground, playing Mario and Pokemon with boys and girls alike. No one cared about genders, it was all about the fun game. It's impossible for me to comprehend why anyone would care about the genders when it's the game play that counts... Does one need to identify with someone of the same gender to be able to enjoy a game?

I have to agree with Fawn here, I'm one of those types who don't read too deep into the games I play and hence never really have much of a problem with them. Games are merely a form of entertainment, and saying that they're supposed to be a fair representation of society, etc. is kind of asking too much from them. ;;

Again - if worrying about gender is 'reading too much into' things, then why are so many men reluctant to play as female characters? Or do you think that's totally false and it's just crazy marketing people who think that men would have a problem with it?

Games ARE entertainment. That doesn't mean they have absolutely zero social responsibility, and that doesn't mean it isn't perfectly reasonable to complain about things that currently aren't available in games.

It might be because this is a gaming forum, but the demands of a lot of the females I've seen here seem to be different from those I meet in reality. I know a lot of girls here like action/horror games, etc. and are more averse (?) to maybe casual gaming, but I've got quite a few female friends who got bored playing Dragon Age/Portal at my house and instead settled for Cooking Mama 3 on my NDS...

Congratulations! You've noticed that women are not a completely homogenous entity and they want different things. Some people like RPGs. Some people like casual games. Some people like both. Some people like FPSes, even though those games are obviously stupid. (As you can see, I personally do not enjoy shooters.) Women want a range of options instead of being put into very limited roles.

So do men! Not all men like to play burly snarling space marines blowing the crap out of everyone they meet. Many men enjoy casual games. Some men enjoy visual novels! Those freaks.

For that matter, you may have read some rants from male h-game fans about standard hentai game protagonists... because being stuck in the same role over and over again, always having to be the dorky loser, is pretty obnoxious. Men want a range of options instead of being put into very limited roles.

It's almost like men and women are both human or something.

Furthermore you can't blame it all on the developers; a team of game devs consisting entirely of women might end up, um, objectifying men or something equally sexist. If you know what I mean ;; /poor explainer

This isn't exactly an excuse, especially as it leads RIGHT into the issue of few women being employed in the industry and many of those that try to get involved getting chased out by harassment.

Again, there is NOTHING WRONG with having a male protagonist. There is NOTHING WRONG with having sexy half-dressed women in games. There is a problem if the proportions of available characters are way skewed. There is a problem when the typical industry response to pointing out those skewed results is "Well games are for guys anyway."

[Joey]

@papillon:
Er, I think you're missing the point of my post here, I don't think the main problem is the male/female developer ratio (and I'm not saying this is an excuse, just pointing something out \o/) or whatever but more of "they think their female playership is negligible enough that they think it's unnecessary/too costly to spend more time tweaking their game to suit them". I'm pretty sure the number of females playing these games have been steadily increasing, though, so yeah I think the gaming scene will see -- and has already begun to see -- changes in this aspect.

Didn't mean to offend anyone with my post ><;

[papillon]

Ah, but you forget - video gaming was not always a "for guys" thing. In the early days it was far more gender balanced. Producers intentionally pushed the male angle and drove down the number of female players.

For that matter even now some studies suggest that if you take the complete scope of videogaming into account, there are more female players than there are male. I've seen some male-focused gaming sites get incredibly bent out of shape by those studies, however, insisting that There Are No Girls On The Internet, those studies are all liiiiiiies.

Don't worry, I'm not offended by your post, just trying to offer a broader perspective.

[AxemRed]

There is a problem when the typical industry response to pointing out those skewed results is "Well games are for guys anyway."

That sounds incredibly sexist, but I'm gonna have to say [citation needed] because I'm pretty sure it isn't true.

[papillon]

Fair enough - the phrase in quote marks is most often seen in comments threads rather than official press releases. But if you're like me and you happen to read a lot of threads on the subject you get smacked in the face with it pretty often.

Largely, it's difficult to find *official* statements because most companies who have PR people know better than to make an *official* statement that's going to open them up to response on that subject. They're going to phrase things politely and dodge the issue quietly as much as possible because they don't want a shitstorm.

For instance, take a recent game that had supposedly *billions* of unique looks available for male PCs but no female PCs at all. Official response:

However, given the realities of development, we had a choice between having a wide range of options for male characters, or a much more limited set of clothing options that allow for both genders.

Obviously, they're not going to say "games are for guys anyway" in so many words, but they are saying it through their actions - it is more important to have 102,247,681,536,000,000 unique male characters than to have to cut that number down a bit by wasting time on female characters.

Predictably enough the comment thread immediately spawns a troll snarking that female characters obviously couldn't hold the gun properly anyway, and would you really want your character to be 30% less good at everything just so you could have tits? (sigh) But that's a forum troll, not a developer. Still, the point remains - it's clearly more important to provide a positive male experience than to include women at all.

When you are time and time again seeing games featuring men in full-plate armor and women wearing nothing but a handful of strings, does it make a difference whether the company puts out a press release saying "Well, the important thing is that guys like it"?


You may also find http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/2971 ... vision.php to be of interest, but unsurprisingly the quotes tend to be anonymous.

[Aleema]

@Aleema: Maybe they meant "not specifically for women" by "not for women"? That's the flaw I see in a lot of the "feminism" arguments, that because something's less than half geared towards women, it's not acceptable. Anything that doesn't feature strong female roles isn't "fair". It just seems like more trouble than it's worth to try to stress over.

If something is for a specific gender, its not for the other. It's for the one its specifically for. As for your feminism statement, yes, feminism is for the equality of women to men. You've hit the nail on the head. The fact that you think that's a problem tells me all I need to know about debating with you. Earning $0.70 to every $1.00 isn't fair; putting on plate armor that turns into a bikini when it doesn't for male chars is not fair - and I don't need quotation marks to say that.

So maybe it's not that the game devs are chauvinist, but maybe that they think their female playership is negligible enough that they think it's unnecessary/too costly to spend more time tweaking their game to suit them. Furthermore you can't blame it all on the developers; a team of game devs consisting entirely of women might end up, um, objectifying men or something equally sexist. If you know what I mean ;; /poor explainer

Those are the excuses that get dragged out every time there's a issue. It's tiring to be marginalized for something you don't have control over it, time and time again. The money issue is void, because if you're only targeting half of a population, you're missing out on a lot of it. Furthermore, pushing away an audience will get you exactly that. Don't push away women as a potential customer, and you'll get some.

Your statement about not blaming developers ended with blaming developers, by the way. If women devs are entirely capable of being sexist in their games, then so are male devs.

I still don't see it. What's so overwhelmingly male about the storytelling in those games that it makes them hard to enjoy?

Because you have the privilege not to see. Your views and needs must be being catered to, because you don't see or feel a lack of it. That's not your fault, but, again, open your mind a little to pretend you are someone who is not you for a moment. Here is a study about how women only occupy a third of speaking roles in the movie industry. That's just speaking roles. How about protagonists, you know, who the entire story revolves around? Go down this list and make a tally mark for every movie that has a female lead (not counting the movies in which the lead is both a male and female). What's your number?

Alien / Aliens
Spirited Away
Amélie
All About Eve
Some Like It Hot
Pan's Labyrinth
Rebecca
Black Swan
The Wizard of Oz
Kill Bill Vol. 1
My Neighbor Totoro

I stopped at #200. I don't think I can handle anymore disappointment. I was expecting a slightly higher number, nope, out of 200 movies, only those had a female lead. I think I was going to expound on this and prove a point, but I just acquired a bout of depression and need to lie down.

[Fawn]

@papillon, using the article you posted from Gamasutra (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/2971 ... vision.php), a lot of the comments in the comment section there make sense. Why don't guys want to play as girls? Here's one opinion from the commenter Charles Stuard that's understandable:

...a lot of the problem with a female lead comes with the loss of romantic subplots. Or, at the very least, making said subplots far less interesting to the core market. In Uncharted 2, I found myself genuinely concerned for my female compatriots (although I must admit I preferred Chloe), whereas I think if I were cast as one of them, I might not care so much for Drake (at least not in the same way).

And, this quote by the user Derek Hartin that also makes sense:

While I agree with the sentiment, isn't this reaching a little? I'm pretty sure Activision, like many big companies, tries to just go with what sells. I can readily imagine them changing the focus of a project based on focus-testing or marketing, but I struggle to think that this is some kind of inherent gender bias issue further than that.

I share this opinion, the company is most likely just going off what has sold before. They're afraid if they change things it won't sell, that doesn't necessarily mean that they hate female characters. (Though, from other comments the game and company itself seem pretty incompetent anyways, so they shouldn't be taken that seriously in the first place)

In general game companies don't seem to get significant crap for not being completely "female friendly", since a huge demographic of theirs does not give one crap about gender roles in games (including myself).

The "needs" for most people are only that the game be fun and nothing else. Same goes for movies. I do not care who the main character is as long as they're interesting- I see characters as their personalities. It's very beneficial, because that way I don't have to get upset over the little details and can just enjoy the entertainment. Call me a patriarchal fool, but, I have never cared and I never will.


@aleema: You still haven't told us what girls "needs" are in a game specifically... What do you want in a game that isn't out there in some form?

[Camille]

This article pretty much sums up how I feel about all of this girls in videogames/represented by videogames business.

[Voight-Kampff]

I share this opinion, the company is most likely just going off what has sold before. They're afraid if they change things it won't sell, that doesn't necessarily mean that they hate female characters.

My anecdote would be Fate/Stay Night. Nasu wrote the story originally with the protagonist being female. But because they were afraid that no one would want to play a VN with a female lead, they changed to a male lead...and turned King Arthur into a cute little school girl...

[Aleema]

@aleema: You still haven't told us what girls "needs" are in a game specifically... What do you want in a game that isn't out there in some form?

Equality.

[Fawn]

Sure, equality. But, there has to be more to it than equality... I'm asking game play that you consider "equal", and game play that is lacking in games that you'd like to see.

[papillon]

@papillon, using the article you posted from Gamasutra (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/2971 ... vision.php), a lot of the comments in the comment section there make sense. Why don't guys want to play as girls? Here's one opinion from the commenter Charles Stuard that's understandable:

...a lot of the problem with a female lead comes with the loss of romantic subplots. Or, at the very least, making said subplots far less interesting to the core market. In Uncharted 2, I found myself genuinely concerned for my female compatriots (although I must admit I preferred Chloe), whereas I think if I were cast as one of them, I might not care so much for Drake (at least not in the same way).

How exactly does having a female lead mean the loss of romantic subplots, unless one gets into the double standard of "it's weird for a man to have to play a woman and have relationships with men, but it's totally fine for a woman to have to play a man and have relationships with women"

The use of the phrase "core market" in this context also is one of those ways of saying "games are for guys" without actually saying it.

I share this opinion, the company is most likely just going off what has sold before. They're afraid if they change things it won't sell, that doesn't necessarily mean that they hate female characters.

There is nothing wrong with having a male protagonist. But if all games feature them, that becomes a problem. The problem is not the fault of any individual developer, especially if that developer is just trying to stay afloat in a tough market. It doesn't make any developer evil. But it still creates a problem for female players.

In general game companies don't seem to get significant crap for not being completely "female friendly", since a huge demographic of theirs does not give one crap about gender roles in games (including myself).

Actually, a huge demographic of theirs does care about gender roles in games, and is very insistent that those roles be male.

And the fact that they aren't currently getting significant crap for it is exactly why threads like this exist. People who do care are making a fuss and trying to get their voices heard.

The "needs" for most people are only that the game be fun and nothing else. Same goes for movies. I do not care who the main character is as long as they're interesting- I see characters as their personalities. It's very beneficial, because that way I don't have to get upset over the little details and can just enjoy the entertainment. Call me a patriarchal fool, but, I have never cared and I never will.

If you don't care, then why does it bother you that other people want more women? Surely you can be perfectly happy playing the resulting fun games with female leads? Why is it important to you to loudly assert that nothing needs to change?

[Aleema]

@Fawn: Besides equality? Maybe understanding, such as not slapping the same walk animation on a woman sprite as a male, but all in all, it comes back down to equality; caring about the woman's animation as much as the man's.

Have you read the OP, or the thread Auro linked to? They both have very specific suggestions. Here's an oversimplified graph, too. Maybe read up on the male gaze, and why games like Mass Effect, even though it's one of the most progressively equal games in the industry, still isn't equal. Did I get to see Kaiden's butt for the sex scene? Nope.

[papillon]

... of course, many people *like* that femShep has more masculine body language than the oversexy slinky walk some women in games get, and there are men who'd like their male characters to be able to saunter around sexily too. Proper equality, they should both have options!

(I can get into long rants about Mass Effect (2, the only one I played) but I don't want to derail here.)

[Sapphi]

This article pretty much sums up how I feel about all of this girls in videogames/represented by videogames business.

Me too. Thanks for posting it.

To be quite honest, I do get tired of the over-sexualized women in video games, but I have sort of made myself cope with it, because whenever I make a comment about it, my male gamer friends get defensive. For this reason I'm not as actively vocal about it as I might once have been. It seems like a lot of guys I know are like "You're a girl that thinks like a girl? Go away. You wouldn't understand. Oh, you're a girl that thinks like a guy? Great to have you! Hey, by the way, why don't more girls like video games? I'm going to be forever alone!"

For instance, to use a personal example, I came across a guy on Youtube who was talking about eroge visual novels, and who then asked the audience, "What do you think about these sorts of games? How do you feel about them?" The general theme of my reply was that they made me feel terrible as a woman. He wrote back to me and pretty much berated me for my views, then told me if I didn't like them, I shouldn't play them. Well, duh. But you asked for my opinion.