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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."
I guess women don't find large breasted Animation as exciting as Males?
The testers they're after would be on site salaried staff....
;)
you'd want to hope they could tell
Advanced users are users too!
Maybe it's not that there aren't any girl gamers, maybe it's just that Tomb Raider sucks and they don't want to play the next piece of trash they're putting out on that franchise.
I mean, if the games didn't teach them, then certainly the movie would have!
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I believe most women are just as facinated with breasts as most men are. You will never get a stranger on the street to admit this, however women I know well have admitted this to me, and it is actually possible to have a discussion on various attributes of different breasts with them.
a ^= b; b ^= a; a ^= b;
Brilliant double-D size breasts must not be that much of a turn on for the women eh?
Seriously though, this has to be one of the more gender biased games out there. Angelina Jolie had to wear a heavily padded bra to get even close to the required size demanded by teen males with raging hormones. Even then she was still one size too small .
There is a lot of information that indicates the opposite to the idea that girls do not play as much as boys, if you are willing to go look for it. This article has some interesting points.
Maybe if they wanted to appeal more to the female audience, they could remove some of the bias, and hey, it may not be dismissed outright by the female community as soft-porn for the male teen masses.
If you think I'm flaming, just read one of the hundreds of Venus&Mars books on the shelves nowadays.
P.S. I posted this below, but on rereading it seems more relevant to here!
-----
For great justice!
We are two different species. (ok, not really, but close enough) We think differently. Anyone that doesn't realise this has never lived with the opposite sex.
And seeing as how most game developers are male....why should these games appeal to women?
Lara doesn't get naked (admittedly, I've only played TR 1, so maybe I'm missing something that occured later in the series), she's not stupid, she routinely guns down bad guys, she's strong, and she's capable.
She does, however, have large breasts, which coincides nicely with the fantasies of 14-18 boys (and 24-38 year old game designers). But some women do in fact have large breasts.
True story: several years ago I bought my then girlfriend a Playstation and Tomb Raider. I didn't see her on weekend afternoons for a few months, because she was always playing Tomb Raider. She loved it. The fact that this woman also had large breasts might have something to do with why she didnt' seem to mind Lara's physique, but it does beg the question: Why does the appearance of a large-breasted woman automatically make something sexist?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
It would, if it were presented in an insulting manner. And most women in today's world do view objectified female sex objects as insulting, whether or not they find them viscerally intriguing.
My deviantArt site
Hear me out before you scream. What do they care what women think of the game? Since when was it designed to appeal to women? If they're looking for people to do bug testing, then gender shouldn't matter. IF they're testing the appeak of the game content, then the marketing depertment needs to talk to the folks running the beta-test.
I seriously doubt gender matters in bug testing unless women tend to play games in significantly different ways than men (thus excercising different parts of the codebase). Since Women are obviously going to be such a small segment of the target market for the game, what difference does it make?
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
A girl-friend of mine and I were talking while a group of guys in the room started yacking about Star Craft and Heroes of Might and Magic IV. After they'd been going on for five minutes and I had joined in, she noted that guys are too competitive. Even when talking about video games they have to brag or try to impress the others. Women aren't as competitive and it affects how they view videogames and what they'll play. Its not that women don't like a challenge, but there are very few women who are going to pump in $40 a week just to kick everybodys ass at Soul Calibur 2 at the arcade.
Is this a sign that the female gaming market has never really taken off?
Most of the women I know find the majority of computer gamedom less than interesting. And that's no surprise if you consider that so many of the games out there are designed specifically to take advantage of male fantasies: the player becomes the hero, the conqueror, the savior, the avenger. What's more, the player often achieves victory through violence which becomes more and more graphic and gory as memory gets cheaper and processors become faster. And as others have mentioned, many games are overtly sexist.
The computer games that women seem (to me) to enjoy the most are those that are nonviolent and don't require immersion for long periods to gain proficiency. Puzzle-based games are good bets. The games that the women I know enjoy the most are Tetris, Shanghai, Solitaire, Minesweeper, Pac-Man.
The computer game industry has largely ignored women, and the games that have been hits with women have largely been pleasant surprises for the industry. My guess is that one of the real problems for the industry is that (I presume) there aren't many women designing and writing computer games. I don't think it's impossible for men to design games that women will want to play, but it won't happen on a large scale without some serious market research from the industry, and earnest sensitivity to the results from designers and publishers.
Women represent a huge and largely untapped market for game publishers. It's astonishing that more attention hasn't been paid to women and their awesome purchasing power.
Lot's have posters have pointed out that Tomb Raider is a sexist game - Lara Croft's not a realistic representation of a woman etc...
All true - and PLENTY of other games (not to mention Anime or other geek pursuits) are just the same - women with gigantic norks, fsck all clothing, highly sexualised imagery.
But the representations of men are pretty much the same - HUGE chests, massive biceps, chiselled abs.
Is it only because women don't play games as much as guys do that we never hear about male sexist imagery as we do about female?
If you're going to be making analogies here, at least make the correct ones.
A muscle bound man does not compare to a women with exceptionally large breasts. For one, muscles are _used_ during fighting. Laura's breasts are just gratuitous. The games you mentioned would only be sexist if the male characters all had extremely large penises.
-Serra
Its a fallicy to assume that the group of women who read Cosmo are even close to the group of women who are gamers. Generally, those who read Cosmo are not the "liberated woman" type. Not to say that I've never read Cosmo, but only for pure entertainment at laughing at the articles.
Magazines like Cosmo, as well as Britney Spears and games like Tomb Raider give women, and especially young girls, the expectation that to be beautiful, they have to be tall, skinny, and large chested. And Lara Croft and Barbie are not only unfair beauty standards, but also unrealistic. If I had boobs like them, I'd fall over!
Tomb Raider is such a clear example of women being used as sex objects. Since gamers tend to be the liberated, educated women, of course they are not interested in testing it.
Personally, the only "womens" magazine I read is Ms. (which does not objectify women) and I listen to Ani Difranco (the epitomy of a liberated woman).
And instead of arguing this in private, I figured I might as well stand up for woman-kind.
Chris, hon, you gotta think twice before posting that type thing and telling your feminist, small-chested girlfriend about it!
~Sara
90% of the "womens" magazines I see on the news stand seem to be adorned with artificial looking females. Not that I'm complaining, it just seems odd how involved women are with their own objectification.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
While all this talk about sexisim in games is very interesting, The article is about finding software testers for a game company. This isn't playing games, and its not beta testing. You don't go and get a job with a company just because you like playing their games. (It would be nice if that was the qualification that they hired on.)
I'm a programmer who works on writing games and has applied for jobs at game companies. It's HARD to get a job in the game industry. A software tester is often someone with a bit of programming experience, and a lot of attention to detail.
How many little girls these days are saying, "Boy, when I grow up, I sure want to be a softtware tester!". I don't think it has anything to do with Laura's bust size. You don't see that many female auto mechanics, either. The job probably just doesn't appeal that much to women.
(As a side note, my girlfriend loves playing Diablo2 and other fantasy games. Quake style violence dosen't bother her, in fact she loves big guns in games and blowing the snot out of anything that moves. I think she just never learned to +Mlook very well, and FPS requires you to have the controls down in order not to have your ass blown off in an internet CTF game.)
Lara is *neither* half-naked, nor in thong underwear... she just has big boobs.
as the flat-chested geek who tries to go to the gym that i am, i think it's the equivalent of asking a guy to test StreetFighter or the likes, where ken just has huge pecs i'll never be able to match!!
bottom line: it's a game, people.
I think it's the essentialist ones that peeve me the most. Take it from someone who has studied a good deal of evolutionary psych; there is not a whole lot of evidence that there are personality differences between men and women which cannot be accounted for by environment . In essence, the only real difference you're looking at is in naughty bits. There is nothing, nothing about having female naughty bits that means that you don't like to play video games but do like to make cookies and shop. If you don't believe me, say to yourself, "Women don't like video games because they have vaginas" and realize how ridiculous that sounds.
I am a female gamer (my current obsession is Morrowind, for the curious; I spent money I didn't really have to get a Geforce 3, *just* to have the advanced water effects). Furthermore, I know, plenty, plenty of female gamers. No dearth of them; from my housemate who stays up until 3 AM playing Okage, to my Soul Caliber ass-kicking close friend. I don't know where you're looking if you can't find female gamers. (I suspect the answer involves parents' houses and subterranean areas). Go to a convention, for chrissakes!
Admittedly, there probably are more male gamers than female (I base that on environmental, not biological factors), but I suspect that the reason they're suffering such a dearth of play testers is that well, many women gamers have distinguishing taste in games, and let's face it, Tomb Raider suffers in originality. For example, I don't tend to play many FPSes because I don't think they're very interesting. It's not that I'm not "competitive" or don't like violence or don't "want to be feel powerful"--everyone wants to feel powerful!--but that they tend to be ugly and monotonous to me after a while. I much prefer strategy games, especially ones like Alpha Centauri or Civ III which have an endless amount of possible endings, or games that have been well-crafted (hence the Morrowind obsession) to suck you into the experience (so much for the "theory" posited above that women don't like to enter into the world of the game). I think a lot of distinguishing gamers, male and female, would agree with me on this.
Please think before you make generalizations about what women like and don't like. Don't tell me I don't like to be competitive, don't tell me I don't like to feel powerful, because it's a lie. And for goodness sakes, quit reading the John Gray, it's bad for you.
..And I don't think that would interest most females either.
Think of it this way, most females would stare for at least a second if they were walking at the beach and another female accidentally lost top half of her bikini to a large wave.
But if there would some big sweaty guy playing volleyball in shorts that were too short, and one of his hairy nuts was hanging out, most everyone would look away in disgust.
How don't You know that the thing You've described is already done so many times in FPS?
Remember all this psychological stuff about big gun association most men do? Remember what does acronym BFG meant in doom?
Thus reversed games still made to appeal mostly to men.
I'm not a brake. I'm an accelerator. Just a slow one...
Women aren't dumb enough to work 12-16 hours a day playing the same game over and over and over again until they're sick to death of it and never want to see it again, in return for tiny amounts of pay, with no creative input or influence, only - perhaps - a token mention on the back page of the manual.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Crucini said: "First, I'm not condemning Tomb Raider. Game makers have no obligation to cater to women, who in any event will not buy many games."
;)
:P
Can I say two words? The Sims.
Oh, wait a sec. I want to add a third word if you don't mind: Myst.
Women WILL buy games. We will buy them by the truckload, and we won't flinch at popping out the plastic for the lame, overpriced expansion packs. You know, the one that lets the characters go on dates, then the one that lets them go on vacation, then the one that lets them have pets... ad nauseum.
I don't have statistics, but I'd be willing to bet more than a handful of women also bought the first Tomb Raider game. Why? Because it wasn't all about shooting and gore. It was basically a puzzle game. It had cool (for the time) graphics and a female main character. Oh, yeah, and Lara's breasts were a more manageable size back then.
What we don't buy, no matter how many times you guys remake basically the SAME FRIGGIN' GAME, is an FPS where the whole point is to run around fragging (or for most of us, being repetitively fragged by) 14-year-old hormone spouting boys pretending to be big macho men. Ugh. In what way is that supposed to appeal to us? Well, ok, the thing about getting to take out some of our aggressions by blowing away a few testosterone OD cases does have a certain appeal, but you have to practice WAY too much to become good enough to do that. Meanwhile you have to be humiliated over and over again by swaggering male figures... and basically, we get enough of that in real life.
So look, what I'm trying to say here is, game companies could make a lot more money if they would make games that appeal to men and women both. Sure, they could just keep doing what they're doing and marketing to the pubescent males, but the real money comes when you create a game that appeals to both sexes. Of course, the game would have to have a PLOT, and CHARACTER INTERACTION (spraying the other person's brains all over a brick wall does NOT count), and interesting SITUATIONS or PUZZLES to solve... oooh that's just too much work. It's probably a lot easier to just make another FPS with, I dunno... bigger guns or something. Or more realistic gore. Yeah that's it! More gore!
There's evidence to back this up.
The American Association of University Women did some extensive research into why girls don't tend to get into computers -- and one of the things they studied were games.
And they found that the typical computer game (Go Forth and Shoot Things) did not appeal girls because they generally found them boring and repetitive. ("Oh look. Yet another game where you make things explode. Been there, done that. YAWN.")
Games ostensibly designed for girls (Talk, Shop and Be Popular!) also didn't appeal to girls because they generally found them inane and dumb.
Games like Myst, however, which was more goal-oriented and focused on problem solving, were a huge hit with girls. (Note that games that girls would tend to enjoy would also appeal to boys.) That is, girls like games that make them THINK, not mindlessly shoot things.
I'm female, and it irks me to know end when the knee-jerk suggestion for a "Game for Girls" is something like "Chat with the Computer". Here's a clue -- why would any woman chat with a computer when there are REAL, LIVE people to talk to?
I can spell. I just can't type.