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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."
There's no game I can think of which has achieved so much notoriety solely for its blatant sexism as Tomb Raider and its sequels. And now they act baffled that the ladies don't want to help make another one?
My deviantArt site
Have they tried advertising? If so, that's probably the problem: the people who are interested in the low-brow games they produce these days are illiterate.
None of the games they are producing these days are targetted at the market "people who can read".
You want to sell a game to my mother? She plays "Zelda" on her Nintendo; she also played "Pogo Joe", and "Space Invaders".
You want to sell a game to one of my three sisters? Try "Zork", or any of the other text adventure games. Or try "Breakout" or "Arachnoid" or "Ms. Pacman" or an older pinball game. Or, if you want to sell a PC game, try "Sim City" or "Lemmings".
I know that doesn't sound like most of the games they sell these days I guess that's why they don't sell them to women.
-- Terry
If female testers are so damn hard to find, seems like they should get More pay. Or am I smoking crack?
I am a bisexual female gamer, and I don't know about other women but the reason I don't play Tomb Raider is because it totaly sucks. I usualy like large breasted game women (I LOVE the Dead or Alive girls, and can't wait for DoA Xtreme Beach Volleyball), but Lara Croft isn't even that hot. Why play Tomb Raider when there's better-looking chicks in less-crappy games? And btw the idea lately that games need to be made more female friendly p!$$es me off... if I wanted to do girly things, I'd go bake and put on make up or some such crap. Dosen't anyone ever think maybe girls play games because they LIKE the male-orientedness??
Do you remember Purple Moon? They thought much the way you do. "Oooh, girls like talking, so we'll make games about how difficult it is to get through school! They'll gossip about the other girls, and they'll try to be popular."
Purple Moon didn't survive. They were eventually bought by Mattel, mostly (as I recall), as a method of acquiring inexpensive office equipment.
As someone who's made successful games for girls, I can say that girls do like to solve puzzles.
It's true that they're not as into score as much as males are; they tend to prefer goals. And they don't project themselves into the character as much as men do, they usually prefer to play alongside the onscreen persona.
Granted, my games are for a slightly younger set, but the lessons translate well into later life.
Also, think The Sims. Very high female user base. Not really much "conversation", per se, but lots of goals.
That being said, I know several girls who game many types of games, both inside the game industry and out. I believe that most of the female aversion to gaming had to do with the way it was introduced in the 80's, rather than a genetic predisposition. But I tend to favor nurture over nature.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
Because Lara has big tits? So what? Duke Nukem has huge muscles. Is it the clothes? Should Lara wear an evening dress, then? And doesn't Duke walk around with a bare chest for most of the time? So what? Does anyone really buy the games to look at Lara's tits or Duke's biceps?
If anything, Tomb Raider managed to make some male gamers play a female character for the first time in their lives. I'm not entirely sure that's a good thing, now that I think about it.
Anyway, back to the subject: why is it so hard to find women to play Tomb Raider games?
Simple: women and men think in different ways (okay, it hasn't been cientifically proven that women think at all, but let's admit they do).
When women play the game, they're playing a game. When men play the game, they're in the game.
This became clear to me one day when I was playing Tomb Raider and my mother walked by. I showed her a few of Lara's moves and I said "see, I can also jump backwards like this". And she said "you? it's not you, it's her, on the screen". I've seen other women react the same way to similar games. Men never have a problem placing themselves in the game, even if the character is a woman, or a robot, or a mutant slug.
Women find it much harder to picture themselves inside the game world, as opposed to sitting on a chair, playing the game. That's why women prefer games like Solitaire and SimCity and The Sims and other games where the player is clearly "on the outside". Games where they move the pieces but are not one of the pieces.
This has been shown again and again by psychological studies, and is also the reason why most men drive more naturally (ie, without having to concentrate on what they're doing) than most women; men become the car while women try to control the car.
Of course, some women can drive instinctively, and some women play Tomb Raider and Counter-Strike and hate solitaire. But I can't say I've ever met one personally, and I do go out sometimes.
RMN
~~~
These visual attributes only serve to objectify female characters (like Lara Croft), because they emphasize sexual attractiveness and nothing else.
So being sexually attractive makes you an object:
bullcrap. Your making a delibrate category error,
between object as in subject/object or goal/object
as in object of desire, and object as in unthinking item, in other languages you wouldn't
be able to get away we such an obvios error. Men should not have to be ashamed of having a sex drive.
Tomb Raider is one of the games women actually *like* to play!
... and it makes for the player to see those cool Animations of Lara Croft which make up allmost half of the game. The riddles built in are also the more challenging sort of game women like - unlike the reflexive, no-brainer 'aim-twitching' you have to practice for hours on end before you can last longer than 30 seconds in an online game of UT2003 CTF and finally can start careing about getting the flag and sorts.
While most of the 'girls' shun FPS like UT2003 as to fast, violent and competetive, it's Lara Croft - once they discovered how fun it actually is to play the game, that makes them agree to invest on an 'also-gaming-computer'.
Tomb Raider is actually a visually diverse game with good animation and a third person perspective that is not just as emerging as an FPS
The problem with getting female testers is that you really have to take them and put them in front of the box until they say: "Ok, it actually isn't that much of a waste of time as I thought."
But having them go out and say: "Hey, I dig sitting in front of a dead, rather uncommunicative box striking my lone wolf ego - I have some time to spare for gametesting."? No way.
Are you really suprised that PC-game testing usually isn't a womens pasttime???
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
Having said that, there are fairly clear reasons why many women would not enjoy Tomb Raider, and I think the inability to grasp these reasons reflects badly on the maturity, sensitivity and empathy of some of the posters here.
First, game characters have personas which players are invited to identify with or work alongside. This is true although the player controls the character's actions. For example, Pacman is an opportunistic, greedy, but essentially nonviolent character. He is not paranoid or vengeful, but believes that "turnabout is fair play". Since he's constantly in motion, we can't tell if he's utterly relaxed or utterly frantic. When Pacman eats a ghost the result is a non-lethal stay in the "penalty box". Likewise, when Pacman is "tagged" by a ghost only one of three pacmans is consumed, like a pinball falling off the board. These softened deaths imply that the interaction between Pacman and his pursuers is merely a game, not a life and death struggle. Pacman is one of the few games that appealed to females.
The typical first person shooter projects a somewhat different character. Although he rarely appears on screen, his persona is clear. A ruthless killer hunted by ruthless adversaries, he is skilled in handling a variety of firearms. His body is a killing machine, not a sex object. He is not on display.
Consider Lara Croft in light of the above. She has the persona, in a way, of a young man - aggressive, exploratory, self-contained. But she has the body of an attractive young woman, complete with a tiny waist and large breasts. And that is also part of her persona - the panting after exertion that emphasizes her breasts. Lara is an attractive woman who is inherently amenable to a masculine style of thinking and action. To understand why this could irritate some women, consider her opposite number: the male hero of romance novels or of soap operas. If you're a man, don't you feel a kind of gut hatred for the blow-dried, earnest, wide-eyed soap character who makes heartfelt speeches about his feelings?
I think the reason is that he's a gender traitor, a man with the soul of a woman. Superficially masculine, he is overly melodramatic and concerned with relationships. Most of all, he hits the spot for millions of women who would like the men in their lives to be like that - handsome, well groomed, full of deep emotional conflicts that he's happy to air.
Lara, of course, is a male fantasy. She has, from our viewpoint, all the desirable characteristics of a woman with none of the unpleasant baggage. It's hard to imagine her asking if you think she's fat. In fact, it's hard to imagine her caring about your opinion at all.
Others in this thread have wondered how there can be any objection to Lara's breasts when male action heroes sport gigantic muscles which could also be considered sexy.
First of all, Lara is eroticized, placed on display for the player's enjoyment, in a way I haven't seen any male game character presented. Admittedly, I haven't played many games recently. I do agree with the feminists, however, that our cultural presentation of females as erotic objects is so ingrained that it's hard to notice. Can you imagine our musclebound action hero filmed from the side, panting in that delightful way Lara has? We simply don't detail, illuminate and present male bodies as we do female bodies.
Second, the muscles of a male hero are assets in his adventures. If combatting a city full of evil aliens, I'd like someone built like Duke Nukem to help. But if I had to pick a woman to help me raid a dangerous tomb, I'd rather have one of those granite-faced female Sherrif's deputies you see in L.A. than a slender, busty model. Lara isn't really built to fight - she's built to titillate.
Lastly, it's interesting to note that Lara, like many heroines designed to appeal to men, is quite a loner. She doesn't seem to have parents or siblings or a boyfriend or husband - any of the emotional connections that would be interesting to women, but a turnoff to men.
I think you make an good argument, but I have a couple of responses.
/. did about gender? It shows a 5% female readership of slashdot. I realize that's not necessarily related to gamers, but still, if _the_ geek hangout on the web is 5% female, you have to see that it's probably hard to find girl gamers.
You state "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."
Whether or not this is the case, it does nothing to invalidate "women don't think like us[...]" You effectively agree with this statement when you blame environment rather than biology. Also, I have some interest in psych and one of my roommates is huge on it. If you could describe or reference any of those studies, I'd be very interested in reading them and showing my roommate.
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.
How about, "women don't like video games because they have different ratios of hormones which affect their temperments and development than guys do?"
I don't know where you're looking if you can't find female gamers.
Did you see the poll recently that
many women gamers have distinguishing taste in games
So we've gone from "Please think before you make generalizations about what women like and don't like" to assuming that all women have good taste in games and "don't tend to play many FPSes"?
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'm not sure if this refutes the theory. It could be interpreted as supporting that theory - many people have argued that women enjoy watching the story, I've seen several comments from women who "can't wait to get to the next little bit of plot information or character interaction" [see here]. Is this a case of being _in_ the game, or watching the story unfold?
She's still pretty young but my daughter loves to play Q3A with me and my son. She basically likes to play anything we want to play. She gets very picky about the models used and wants one that is a "pretty girl" like her. At some point in her life I'm sure she'll have a boyfriend who she regularly beats in whatever FPS is around at the time.
The funny thing is that she will also play on the barbie website for hours. My son won't go near it.
So maybe someone should try and figure out why boys don't want to play barbie.
She played Tomb Raider a little, but found it too scary (she was less than 10 when she first tried). She plays Tomb Raider today, but not on the computer, but as a pretend-fantasy game with the house and her friends (I had to make her a paper gun, and many objects become "artifacts" that need to be collected, sofa cushions and the space under the table become caves). Very cute...
...richie - It is a good day to code.
I guess one place to start would be to figure out what type of computer games women do play. My wife, who is also a quite capable UNIX admin who still enjoys a game of spider , tetris and a few other old-school favorites. I've got a little girl who is bored with flight simulators and such, and prefers puzzle like games where she finds things or builds things.
In other words, from a programmer's perspective perhaps the problem is that games for girls just aren't as sexy or as wham-bam to write as games for guys? Perhaps it isn't as profitable to engage in writing these programs because its hard to dress them up and make them fly?
I mean my wife and I joke about this all the time. Here I want to conquer the world, and there she wants to make it more livable.
--- have you healed your church website?
schlach quoted (from Gamespot):
;)
> There are no women gamers, and anyone who tells
> you otherwise is a liar. They don't exist. In the
> '80s there was one, but she died.
Sorry, but I'm still alive. I started on an old pre-Atari console in the 1970's. I've since played games on the following mainframes, consoles, micro and personal computers:
Honeywell mainframe (StarTrek, with printer terminals)
IBM 370 mainframe (StarTrek, with new fangled CRT terminals)
Timex Sinclair 1000 doorstop
Commodore 64
PC from XT to Pentiums
Genesis (& CD & 3DX)
GameGear
Nintendo 64
Dreamcast
Playstation
Palm III
Handspring Visor Platinum
Macintosh (OS 9 and OS X)
Playstation 2
Sharp Zaurus SL-5500
Game Boy Advance
GameCube
I own or owned all the machines above except the two mainframes; those were at college.
My current favorites are Twisted Metal Black (PS 2), Tony Hawk 3 (PS 2), Sonic 2 Adventures Battle (GC), and Star Fox (GC). I am (extremely) eagerly awaiting the arrival of "Godzilla Destroy All Monsters Melee" for the GameCube, and "Godzilla Domination" for the GameBoy Advance.
Most of you guys don't have a clue about what you are talking about. But you don't let that stop you from eagerly pontificating about what we girls (or my case, women) like or don't like in games.
Hint: women have different interests, in games as in other things. Personally, I love the 3D games with worlds to explore and stuff to do. I also like to fight and smash stuff.
And no, I'm not going to go for a Tomb Raider testing job, because the job is in the UK, and I am in the US. Besides, they would have to do a lot of work to upgrade the graphics to modern levels. Star Fox has fur, even in game play. Fur is one of the hardest things to do in 3D. Before I played the game for the first time I would have said it was impossible for them to do fur on a console. Obviously, I was wrong. But, hey, I am impressed.
"His power is unequalled.
His battles are legendary.
His return is near..."
"Godzilla 2000" trailer.
G Countdown: 18 days (www.godzillaoncube.com)