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Wanted: Female Game Testers
BaronVonDuvet writes "The BBC is covering
this story
regarding the lack of female testers for the new Tomb Raider game. Given that there are a number of female gamers (admittedly far fewer than male gamers) why are they having so many problems finding women? Is this a sign that the female gaming market has never really taken off? Is the way men and women approach a game really that different? Are they really interested in finding women testers or is the whole thing a publicity stunt? If you're an interested woman maybe you should get in touch."
..she's be substantially redesigned from the previous games. She's still generously proportioned.. but the designs seem to be a little more sophisticated than previous versions. Before you're critical, please:
Look here or here.
I agree. As a woman in tech and sometime gamer, I prefer the Myst/7th Guest type games over shoot-em-ups any day. And I never really cared for the gigantic breasts in Tomb Raider - once again we get to be measured up against Barbie. Even with the Quake style games, I'm best at finding the secrets, and enjoy getting to new levels, but leave the killing to hubby. Today's games have gotten so extremely violent (grand theft, etc) that I have completely lost interest and stick with the older, tamer styles.
An interesting note is that I also work in the public school system and can say that something has happened in the last few years to push girls further and further away from tech. We run Lego robotics and have to beg to get 2 girls out of 30 kids to join. Visual basic classes are lucky to have 1 girl and it is beginning to look like the old 'wood shop' - it's for boys and if a girl takes that class it's just because she is just trying to meet boys. When you do get the rare girl to join VB, she will usually write a calculator program or some type of game that would appeal to a small child. The boys will always include a gun and something to shoot, and the cooler the blood the better. For robotics we noticed that once we made a demo bird robot and glued brightly colored feathers to it, all of a sudden many girls took notice of the legos.
eSchool News (free reg required) has an interesting article about how the DoE is investigating sexual discrimination in tech-ed throughout the country.