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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?
It makes you wonder why there aren't more female gamers. Why do they look so derogatory towards video games. The only games that really get girls are Tetris (Dr. Mario) or Sonic the Hedgehog. Now, I'm not saying that there aren't girl gamers that play other games than those, but when you look at the average girl that plays any kind of video game, those two usually come up. Oh, by the way, girl gamers, please show your support. If more girl gamers were honest with this kind of thing, than others wouldn't be reluctant to start. I think all girl gamers should unite (at my house)! We can do stuff... er- play games.
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I'll
Seriously, most women aren't going to line up to beta test a game which features a chick with boobs so big that you'd swear her implants came with anti-gravity devices.
Let me put it this way: most guys would not jump at the chance to beta test a video game in which the main character was an incredibly ripped half-naked man with thong underwear and an incredibly unrealistic buldge in his crotch clearly outlining every detail of his oversized genitals as they freely bounced around in ancient tombs.
Bad thought huh?
Trolls make great pets. Adopt one today!
For context, go read the real column, and remember all the good times with oldmanmurray. Anyone have any idea what happened to them?
I can see that being the case. However, just because women may have an appreciation for breasts doesn't mean they enjoy seeing a digital chick with an oversized rack bounce around for the amusement of oversexed immature teenage boys. No sir.
My deviantArt site
favorite quote:
"A women's mind would bring a different angle to the game."
Maybe women could offer a new perspective on weapons. Things like guilt grenades, verbal tripwires, performance increasing sports bras (those things are huge- any woman will tell you it would hurt to jump around like that), crotch kicks, and keyring stabs would add a new dimension to the game.
Finally, female players would be able to work out their aggressions and live out their fantasies on a level equal to their male counterparts.
That's ok, Jesus likes me anyway.
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
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
They should solicit at chat rooms. We all know there are lots of women there.
-Sean
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.
What kind of "female games" do you have in mind, and what is involved in testing them?
This could be a lot of fun!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
You do realize how many Slashdot readers have been waiting their whole lives to hear those six magic words?
"I am as shocked as you are to find this blanant sexism in Street Fighter, Soulcalibur, Dead or Alive, and others!"
... uh.. elongated Dhalsim can get? You just know that guy can.. well.. uh.. you know... from across the room...
Ever notice how
Of course not.
Women arn't offended by thin big-chested women in the magainzes they read, I can't see how they'd be offended by thin, big-chested women in the games they play either. (And come to think of it, arn't most of the women in chick-geared comics asthetically well above par as well?)
paintball
OK, who here remembers being an oversexed immature teenage boy?
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 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.
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!