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Female MMORPG Developers On Influences
Thanks to Warcry for their discussion with a number of female MMOG developers, asking whether "the reason so many MMOGs follow the same paths... is that they were designed, built, and maintained by men." Of the respondents, Judith at Turbine Entertainment points out that "an audience that skews towards immature males will very likely have exaggeratedly female avatars for them to play with", and Srand at Turbine doesn't see any particular male-patterned design trap, suggesting: "the reason so many MMOGs follow the same paths... is that they were designed, built, and maintained by people. And people, as the mantra goes, are stupid."
Anyone can get laid. It is one of the two driving forces behind culture. The other being laziness.
That said, it's important to realize that the ease of getting laid is different from person to person.
Attractive people can get laid easily. Unattractive people must invest more time and energy into getting laid.
When the effort involved in getting laid outweighs the cost of being lazy, lazy wins and the person goes off and does something like play videogames.
For women, it is relatively easy to get laid. Even the most unattractive woman can apply enough make up, wear a short enough skirt, or laugh at inane jokes to be attractive to someone. Also, women do not base their desire of someone solely on appearance, even unattractive men stand a chance at getting laid by a women. So women spend much of their time investing to become more proficient in these activities in order to maximize their ability to get laid.
Men, on the other hand, do not have such an easy path ahead. Unattractive men will commonly find that they are beaten to the punch by attractive men. Unlike women, men base most of their desire to lay a women solely on her physical attractiveness. So even the most unattractive man would look at an unattractive woman and proclaim that he wouldn't "hit it". Since attractive women have already chosen suitable sexual partners from among the attractive men, and since the unattractive man has already ruled out having sex with an unattractive woman, he is left with no possibility for sex without exerting the effort to become an attractive man. Physically he can exercise, mentally he can read, socially he can interact with others. However, for certain types of men this kind of exertion is far too much. It is easier for them to be lazy and forego sex.
Therefore it is easy to see that women will be less inclined to waste valuable time playing video games and instead focus on increasing their attractiveness, and men will be more inclined to play video games and forego the required investment to become attractive.
Another interesting outcome of this theory is that those who remain in the gaming category, both men and women, will necessarily be unattractive and possibly socially inept. The theory has far reaching implications and predictions such as the "unattractive gamers" hypothesis are clearly played out in reality.
"...And people, as the mantra goes, are stupid."
Absolutely no argument, what-so-ever!
What about the exaggerated male avatars? Are they there because immature females were driving their design?
Step back and figure out exactly what you're trying to say by these kinds of studies. Are you just upset that you can't get a job developing games, or are you actually concerned about a gender disparity in gaming?
And if there is a disparity, will whining and producing statistics do anything contructive about it?
I believe the answer is no.
maybe someday, but NOT YET.
Hi, I've been using QNX for the last few weeks on my 1 GHz Penium III system, and I'm quite baffled by the performance or lack thereof that I've been seeing.
I downloaded the QNX 6.2.1 ISO, burnt a CD, and installed onto my hard drive. This was after erasing an old Windows 2000/Linux dual-boot install. Things went smoothly, and I was easily able to connect to the Internet for updates to various packages. I was really impressed at this point.
After a couple days of playing with it, however, I was boggled at how much like Windows the system acted. Here I was with a 1 GHz processor (the minimum required is 600 MHz) and 1 gigabyte of RAM and Photon, the GUI, was lagging. If I have a few programs open and an MP3 playing in the background, I can watch widgets redraw. Tweaking some options helped a little, but this is not in line with what I have read about QNX performance.
Isn't this supposed to be a hard realtime operating system that runs on medical devices meant to save peoples' lives? How is it that it runs on 33 MHz processors with 128k of RAM in an IV drip yet skips MP3s on a system 100x beefier in every way imagineable? Do they release a different version for free that doesn't try for realtime performance or what?
After less than a full month I've grown dissatisfied with something I'd hoped I could replace my Windows and Linux installs with for leisure and hobbyist purposes. My main system is a dual 3 GHz Pentium4 box with 4 gigs of RAM, but that's a DV workstation and I can't use it just to see how QNX scales with more robust hardware and a dual processor configuration. Something tells me it might not, though.
Can anyone offer me any insights? I realize that this is a free operating system and that I have little room to bitch, but I want to make sure there's nothing I'm missing before I discount QNX altogether and go back to Windows or Linux, which while performing slugglishly are more familiar to me.
Thank you.
Somebody once said something to the effect of "The fool sees ignorance everywhere. The wise sees ignorance within himself". This basically means that the truly wise concentrate on their own ignorance, instead of spewing off on others'.
-Enfors-
Personally, I think the biggest issue is that most MMORPGs cater to a certain type of obsessive behavior. For whatever reasons, women seem to be much more immune to this obsession. Guys on the other hand eat it up. Diablo is a perfect example of a game that made itself a hit not off an interesting story, neat quests, or anything of that lack. Diablo was a hit because you spent hours mindlessly killing stuff. It wasn't even that you were killing things. It was that you were just clicking a button for a prize. I don't think it is even the killing that terms women off. I think it is just how tedious these games are and how you need to be obsessive to enjoy it. Throw the average woman in front of GTA3 and she will find it amusing. Throw her in front of Diablo and she will fall asleep after a few minutes. The difference between the two isn't the killing, it is the obsessive and tedious nature of the games.
The thing is, that while women might be more immune to this then men, I think most men are immune to it too. I think that there is a vast audience out there for MMORPGs. The problem is that they all cater to obsession (granted, there are some exceptions these days, but they are woefully under advertised). Once these games evolve beyond needing someone to be addicted to hitting the button for a prize I think the market will start to really expand. If you could enjoy the game for the games sake, I think that things would drastically improve. How to do this? Build worlds. Build worlds where you don't need to kill to be happy. Even if you do kill on occasion, don't make it so that the only way to kill is to be obsessive about it. I think A Tale in the Desert is about as close as one can get to that these days.
Personally, I'll stick to RPI MUDs until MMORPGs are more then multiplayer Diablo. My MUD, http://www.armageddon.org/ provides a cohesive world based around role playing, permanent death, and it doesn't require you to be obsessive about killing in order to play. You can still kill stuff, you just are not going to gain anything by mindlessly killing hordes NPCs. Once a MMORPG can copy what that MUD has, I'll shell out my 15 a week.
Go ask Hollywood, and the music industry too.
Sequels, rehashes, cover versions etc.
...and just blame the "stupid men"?
"the reason so many MMOGs follow the same paths... is that they were designed, built, and maintained by men." Of the respondents, Judith at Turbine Entertainment points out that "an audience that skews towards immature males will very likely have exaggeratedly female avatars for them to play with"
MMOG's seem to have more women players than any other online genre. They also seem feminized. I'm sure some people won't like that statement, but seriously, what other online games put such restrictions on killing/harming other players? What other online games make such a big deal over what your avatar looks like?
Take star wars galaxies for example, it's almost a barbie game online...You can be a dancer! Customize your clothes! Become a tailor or a chef! Only 1 in 500,000 of you will be Jedi though. YEY FUN! Is this what a typical teenage male wants to do? Give me a break.
As for the women characters being "exaggerated" aren't the men too? Maybe it's just that men don't (typically) have the same poor self-esteem when it comes to their body that many women do. I'd bet that 99/100ths of the men play avatars that have bodies they could never have, even if they tried.
I hope game developers don't take this seriously. I don't want to log on to matrix online and have to chose between my avatar looking like Rosie O'Donald, Opera, or Ms. Cleo.
It's simple. Just like with other entertainment forms, often the makers are backed by large companies who have a vested interest in the success of the game. It's even magnified in the case of these games since they're paying to set up servers, hire support staff, (etc) in addition to the development of the game. They're not going to try anything risky, but rather take the existing model and change a few elements as systematically as possible.
That's how Hollywood's operated since... always.
The sad thing is that MMORPGs likely have operational costs that are too high for independent developers, so the chances of seeing massive innovation in the genre isn't especially high, IMO.
The claim that they're same-ish because of men developing them is frankly retarded, and I'm sad to see it get any sort of exposure. We're in this situation because both men and women want money, and part of the current formula for a successful MMORPG is physically appealing avatars. The sexual politics that created the situation aren't even really an issue.
--- "Yeah, I'm a bit stressed out. I have a research paper due tomorrow and it has to be +5, Insightful."
...that half-naked female avatar that follows you around and talks about "doing it" all the time is probably some overweight, depressed guy named Bruce.