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Recruit More Women Developers, Attract Women Gamers?
Thanks to MSNBC for its fresh look at the problems of integrating the needs and tastes of the female into the male-dominated videogame industry. It's suggested by Microsoft's Laura Fryer: "Half of the population isn't having input into what's being created... And the one thing that I learned is that people make games they like to play. Having a diverse opinion helps games." Sheri Graner Ray of Sony also points out: "The purpose of recruiting women is not so they can make games about pink fluffy kitties... You can't say that women like this or Japanese gamers want this." Thus, it's argued: "The solution to this dearth of female fandom... lies in recruiting more women coders, artists and level designers, the type of positions that can shape a title's story, look and gameplay."
We have zero hot chick developers at my company! I don't know about you, but I'm ready for some change.
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
Heh, as interesting as this is to me, and really - it is - shouldn't the idea be - make better games, get more male and female gamers? I mean, EVERYONE likes to have fun, from the poor kid down the street with one of those second edition Nintendos to the upper class catholic schoolgirl only child who got her choice of two cars when she turned 16. Why lose sight of the 'fun' and instead go for attracting a certain 'sex?'
Doesn't seem to make sense to me. But what do I know, I have a penis.
schild
editor, f13.net
It'll just attract more male gamers.
I guess I'm just pessimistic about the prospects of meeting women in the gaming world. I know just as many men who pretend to be women gamers as I do actual women gamers (as far as I can tell).
I suspect that most of the women gamers out there pretend to be guys, to avoid all the lameness that choosing a female nickname attracts.
I'd say in general, if you're a woman game developer, you probably have similar tastes to other women game developers rather than all women.
On the other hand, focusing on women (maybe near naked) with oversized parts of the anatomy does turn women off. Developers are supposed to concentrate on the character of the female avatar (strength of will, determination, I am woman hear me raaawwrrr), but instead choose to appeal to the traditional male demographic because they're the only consistent game buyers.
Lastly, this topic was talked about at GDC2004. They didn't seem to get anywhere though.
(Off topic... I'd tried to read the article at msnbc but it looks like they stop
But one serious problem is that to be able to hire female game-designers, there needs to actually be some of those available. Before women can start taking a big role in design, artwork, story and coding for games, women need to start getting an education and experiences that makes them qualified for those kinds of jobs.
Sure, there are some exceptions, but not very many. I've *been* on the employer side of the table, trying to hire more mixed. We put in ads explicitly requesting women and minorities to apply. Inspite of this less than 10% of the applications we got where from women, and to add insult to injury, the average qualification of those few women who *did* apply was abysmal. Not "sligthly lower than average of the males", but more like the best qualified of the females would still be in the last quartile of the men. Hiring unqualified workers won't help produce quality anything.
I don't like contact sports, but I don't see the people that run football thinking of recruiting managers that don't like it in order to attract me.
Uhm, what? I don't really disagree with the assertion that female gamers are not something you see everyday, but I certainly don't think an entire gender of gamers are being ignored. Like another poster said, people create games that are fun, regardless of gender.
This seems to be a bit of a hot-topic, with mainstream media skewing the facts on female gamers. GameInformer ran an interesting feature about female gamers and women in the development and production of games, the results were astoundingly positive. I can't be troubled to walk 7 feet to get an issue of GI so I can login to GI-Unlimited for some linkage, but it's there if someone wants to put up a linky.
Additionally, Pew Internet and American Life Project ran a survey that had some statistics to support the GI article, namely (straight from report) --
Microsoft (of all people) also featured an article about women in gaming, noting that games like EverQuest and Quake have a very large, vocal community. Add that to a Reuter's report that the women 18+ now outnumber the target audience of 8 years ago, and the claim that an entire market is untapped is sounding more and more like propaganda. I mean, obviously game developers/publishers are doing something right.
My point being this: While I believe that, collectively, female gamers are in the minority in the gaming world, I refuse to give into the whole "WE MUST HAVE WOMEN DEVELOPING GAMES OR ELSE WE WON'T TAP UNTO THIS GIGANTIC MARKET" bit. Hire whoever gets the job done (regardless of gender)and make games that are interesting and fun, and everyone will be happy. At least, statistically.
"You and your third dimension."
As a teenager I remember a few years back when everyone was ubcessed with The Sims-yes, even the girls, and the hot ones too. I can only recall of two fems I know that were into computer games. The games were The Sims, DiabloII, The Final Fantasy Series, Starcraft, Everquest. One thing I notice about all of these games that they have in common is that they have some kind of distict heroine that is user-selectable or within the game. However, this does not apply as much with (for example) the Tomb Raider series, which features the lovely Lara Croft with her...gigantic bosoms-something not appealing to most females in a videogame. The ladies seem to like more adventerous or life-like fantasy games and less gory shoot-em-up games.
Even without many women contributing to the development of the games I named above, they(and I'm sure many others) are still a sucess among females.
This does make me curious as to how other types of games that appeal more to men would turn out if more women helped in the development of them.
In a time where it seems like developers are out of game ideas, this may be just what the gaming world needs-more women to spice up the way guys and gals game from now on.
I've heard this "solution" bandied about often enough. But it's not as easy as it sounds, in a practical sense. Female programmers are unfortunately very few in number compared to the males in the field. From what I hear, there are a much larger number of females graduating into the field now than there were when I graduated only a few years ago and even when I was in school it was much better than it had been before then. Which is good, but it also means, that if the company does happen to come across a female programmer, she is more likely to be relatively inexperienced, and therefore unsuitable for a lead programmer position or anything else where she would get any creative or directional control.
Also, female programmers are, in my purely anecdotal experience, less likely than males to get excited about the prospect of joining a game company, presumably because of the lack of good experiences they have had with games. For many of the gamer guys I know, on the other hand, working at a game company is something of a nirvana, and any job openings are applied to with the appropriate amount of religious fervor.
The only solution I can see is to simply get more female programmers out there. There needs to be some way to attract women to the computer engineering disciplines. Eventually they'll filter down into the gaming companies, and from there into positions of creative control, and then we'll start to see the sort of games that attract girls.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see the female approach to games. Hell, I'd probably want to play it. I just think that it's not likely to happen in the near future. I think it's a bigger problem than just "the games aren't made by women". There is something on a very fundamental level of these technical fields that is keeping women out. It probably has something to do with the way women tend to use the computer as a communication and information tool, while men tend to use it as an engineering or entertainment tool.
Anyway, good luck to all the female programmers out there. We need your skills in this industry. The more people that realize it, the better.
Random and weird software I've written.
I know a few gals who like MMORPGs like City of Heroes and Star Wars: Galaxies.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
You would have thought that by now game developers would have figured this one out.
.....but it won't happen! Women hate geeks and their games because geeks are clueless!
A certain demographic of young women spend their waking hours endlessly entertained with shopping for clothes (to attract boys), putting on makeup (to attract boys), watching endless images of boys on music video, and talking about all three things above... including how to get lots of boys and everyone else to fall hopelessly in love with them.
Jeez... if the geeks of the world were paying enough attention, they'd have a slew of girlfriends by now and enough common sense to develop a suitable game for women!
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
You know I think you could argue if there were more games for women more women would be interested in being developers. Not that there aren't any games for women just that it could be argued that an increase in either will correlate with an increase in the other. Of course women do make up the majority of games by about 51% (think bingo et al.) So mabye the question should be why aren't there more women game developers?
meep
AFAIK the only roles in game design that determine the aesthetics of the game are lead designer, art director etc. Coders, and subordinate designers/artists have little impact on the direction of the game. Moreover designers who are skilled at their jobs are gamers, and know the material first hand.
Now, anybody see the problem? You want more female-friendly (not neccessarily feminine) gaming? You gotta have girl gamers who grow up to be GOOD game designers and find themselves in positions of authority. First we need more female gamers (already increasing as a previous poster mentioned) and then THEY have to go professional. Trying to simply "hire more women" won't work if, for instance, they're coders or subordinate to a male lead.
Also, sexism and objectification in female roles aside, who says that the current crop of games (even FPS/3rd person action etc games) aren't going to appeal to women? Isn't this like assigning GI Joes to boys and Barbies to girls? We don't have to rigidly seperate male/female gamers.
The truth is: Hardcore Gamer = Computer Geek, and us geeks USED to be predominantely male, but that's changing. As Computer Geek goes from 95% male to 50/50, we'll see more women gamers. And casual gamers are ALREADY 40-50% female (look at the Sims), so the "gaming is a boy's club" stereotype is already out of date.
Just my $0.02
RsG
I had a truly freaky experience a few weeks ago, regarding women and gaming. Neither of my parents are really "into" computers, although since I left home four years ago, they've always had a relatively recent PC around the house, for web-browsing, word processing etc. I normally get phone calls from my mother, whose technological incompetence is normally only matched by that of particularly luddite sea-urchins, about once a month, asking how to attach a document to an e-mail, or something of that ilk.
Therefore, my latest computing-related call from her came as something of a shock. "Do you know if Silent Hill 4 is coming out for computer? I was reading a website, and they only mention it being for Playstation, and we don't have one of those." When I recover from my shock, I find out that she's played through Silent Hill 2 and 3 (on the recommendation of a colleague at work) and basically thinks they're the best things since sliced bread. This is a woman who regards Space Invaders as "too complex", and she's telling me that she's just played through two recent, sophisticated Survival Horror games, but "your Dad doesn't like them, I think he's scared".
After this conversation, I went out and picked up the games (the PS2 versions of both are dirt-cheap now). I can see the attraction; they're well plotted, the production values are near to movie quality and the puzzles, on the top difficulty setting, are more demanding than anything I've seen in any other recent game. However, this is a long way from the "Tetris, The Sims, Mary Kate & Ashley, Anything Nintendo" stereotype of female gaming.
On a more relevant note, I suspect that having more women involved in games development would be a good thing. My experience is that mixed-gender offices will always be more creative (if not always more productive), than single-sex environments.
Stevie Case is hot http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/deve loperId,13426/
There are only two moral categories in the world today: "good for business" and "subhuman." Men, right now, are bad for business. Men buy less, spend less, and are in control of less (privately held) money. Therefore, an industry which caters to men is neglecting its economic duty to the homeland. Or "immoral," "deviant," "child-endangering," or whatever--same ethic, different rhetoric.
That this argument is always coded in moralistic terms--saying, essentially, that any activity which is mostly enjoyed by and controlled by men is unhealthy and socially harmful by its very maleness--is a smokescreen.
Young women, your place is in line for a cash register. Your failure to buy video games is disruptive to order. Get with the program(-ming jobs). Young men, your place is in a heap of corpses in a faraway desert. Those game-designing careers you wanted have proven demographically inefficient and will be filled by a quota of longer-lived, more affluent consumers.
exit truth mode
more female developers is always a good thing.
Hasn't the (typically unsuccessful) goal of most males in the tech world been to try to attract females? The problem is that the females simply aren't responding!
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
You are forgeting positive discrimation quotas can easily be circumvented by dressing up Joe Bloggs as a woman. If anyone says anything about the beard, accuse them of being superficial.
I think it's great that this is getting press. It's not just a simple "shove girls in and girl games come out" issue.
As several other posters mentioned there aren't many female programmers out there. And the few that are out there aren't interested in video games. In order to get women into these areas, at least in the US, would take an overhaul of the education system. Get the girls into Math. Get them into Science. Get them into technology. But do it at an early age and make sure they stay interested. If you run searchs in ACM and IEEE libraries there are plethora of articles on this topic and the topics of games in the educational system. Even if you do a good Google search you can find them.
Now most of the research was done on the previous generation of female programmers and maybe we'll see that change in the future. But for the moment the easiest way to get women to buy more video games is to market to them. The TV ads I've been seeing lately are a start but there needs to be more. Put them in fashion magazines, put them on Lifetime, put them everywhere just so long as women are seeing them. And just don't put men in the ads either. I'm sure showing one girl playing isn't going to drive away the male customers.
Companies can get all the female game designers and programmers they want but if the female purchasers don't know the games exist they aren't going to buy them.
Women play a different kind of video game.
It involves real life clothing, jewelery, shoes, accessories, makeup, perfume, and getting guys to pay for it all and then some.
They see the visa/mastercard flash, quickly sign the slip with practiced abandon, and off they go to the next shop.
Instead of wasting all their gp on some armor that's sure to rust and a dagger of poison resistance, they get the +4 white skirt of fatal attraction with the greaves of smooth-skin, which does massive area damage and renders all mages speechless.
Of course, they have an arsenal of spells, from the "Let's Be Friends" of Doom to the "I like your friend too" of monster confusion.
Surprisingly, their bag of holding actually is able to contain all magic artifacts, and is fully skinnable with the latest Gucci or Louis Vuitton wallpapers.
It should also be noted that while most of them adopt a winner takes all style of play, they will cooperate as a team when faced with a room-full of drunk monsters. They will use the "Wall of Silence" for defense and stick together like a cluster of giant spiders to fend off the most gallant palladin or the most gruff dark elf.
Oh, the payoff for paying the game well is not some cheesy animation with glowing credits scrolling up, but rather the latest Benz in the driveway of a million-dollar house with "Bob the level 60 Lawyer of Litigation" sufficiently charmed to fight all her battles, and an unlimited supply of lowfat Dannon yoghurts, to be enjoyed at all times of the day while deciding which restaurant to make a reservation at for the evening.
No wonder they don't like our stinking video games.
"Piter, too, is dead."
It's not about attracting really, but more about "not repelling".
For example, go to the store and look at a review and screenshots for the game Freaky Flyers. It's a cartoony flying/racing game for multiple players. Sounds like fun for both sexes.
Now go look at the box art for the Xbox version. Why does the female character have big chrome nipple things on her tits?
That's just one minor example of how you can "turn off" 50% of your potential audience by making stupid decisions. In this case, some marketing monkey thought that they needed to "attract the men" to the game. Meanwhile, it's a cartoony game that should be enjoyed by everyone, of either sex and kids as well.
womens place is in the kitchen, or serving beer, or cleaning bathroom, or making children. I dont want no women in my online games.
:D. :D
On a serious note. I was running a big community forum for a TacticalOps game in Poland for over a year (Was here before closing, the main site is still up, but unmaintained). ~5000 registered users, ~250 active players. There were two womans among the players. I repeat, TWO. And one of them was kinda good at it, while the other one was 15 and desperatelly wanded to meet boys in her age
What are the conclusions ? Womens involvement in that particular game was around 0.8%. Total women involvement in the comunity was arround 0.2%. Those are well within statistical error. Conclusion = there are NO woman gamers !
Go grab those torrents.
you need female game designers; coders, whether male or female, just do what they're told for the most part.
As kindergarten teachers or nurses?
Most aren't interested? Wow what a concept eh?
Hey it's not like men wouldn't be useful in those fields. It's probably easier for male nurses to develop upper body strength - which helps when you need to move/shift bedridden incapacitated patients - to avoid bedsores, etc.
So where's the push to even out the gender imbalances in those areas?
The barriers to _entry_ for programming/software development aren't high. PCs are cheap. Internet connections are cheap. Info about programming is paid for (internet). Write a game/program, stick it on the net and if people think it's good enough they may even pay you for it. Heck contribute to an opensource project while you're at it.
There's nothing really stopping girls/women from taking up programming except themselves.
If they are so easily discouraged (parents/peers/teachers) from programming, then it's VERY LIKELY that programming is NOT the field they should be in. Try something else, for everyone's sake. Please. Really. We need better programmers, not more.
A common complaint is lack of _women_ role models. A good programmer is someone who writes great programs. If anyone is still thinking gender then they're not getting it.
By all means give people opportunities, but if they aren't interested, there are millions of other things they can do. If they think they have better things to do, then for everybody's sake let them do it.
I disagree; as Slashdot readers have noted, females are often good at communication, and I can't think of anything more useful than a well-designed API that truly serves the needs of the designers. I think the code design process as a whole could benefit greatly from more female programmers.
a prophet on the burning shore
I think the whole women gamers-women designers is just a big catch-22. Women won't play games (as the theory goes) until women design games, and women won't design games until they play games enough to care.
So obviously the solution is to break out of this catch-22. Since obviously women play games that aren't designed by women, game company just have to figure out what they like about the games. They don't have to hire women to develop if that's problematic, they just need to ask women what they like. Find out who the girl gamers are (advertising) and send them surveys and such asking them what they like about the game and why (I'm trying to do my part; I'm the only one I know that sends out those game regestration cards. Basically I'm saying "Look Sega, a girl bought your game!"). Another option is hiring girls as testers. Not for bugs, but to see what they think of games. Expensive, but less expensive than hiring random girls as developers irreguardless of experience, and presumably the money will be made back when the other 50% of the population starts buying games.
Now why is it important for girls to have an input on games? Why can't they just play good games made by guys? Well, at least for me, I'm so sick of having to play a guy who saves a girl in every video game (I like RPG and action/adventure games). Despite the fact that I'm a big time Final Fantasy fan, I'm probably not going to buy FF12 because I'm sick of the same old concept. I love Zelda, and Four Swords(GC) is the best multiplayer game I've ever played, but the storyline just grates. You have to save about 10 girls in this game, however, some of these girls seem even more powerful than Link, yet they can't save any other girls on their own. One of the girls even brings this up (after she blows up about 30 enemies by clapping) and then brushes it aside by talking about the "tradition" for young men to save maidens. Now obviously you can't have someone follow you around blowing up monsters through the rest of the game, but then why create a charator that could? Or at least give her a reason not to other than that's she's a girl.
Ok, that was a bit ranty. Basically, I'm saying girls would like games more if the girls in games won't damsels in distress (and wearing clothes).
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
Exactly. A good game design is a lot more than programming. I think having women in the up-front spec stage and the testing stage would have a lot greater effect on the result than in coding.
I, for one, would love to see games designed for other than teen males. Most games look like the same hack/slash/shoot/burn your way into a building cliche. I pretty much just buy games when a new Final Fantasy or Myst title comes out.
Funny how pieces like this never seem to consider the fact that most women don't buy and play games because they don't want to.
I don't care what gender the creators of any piece of media are. What relevance does that have to anything? Are these strapping male developers solely engaged in making games that drive women away screaming? Of course not.
Look at Nintendo, they'd be hard pressed to make their games any more inclusive. Perhaps more women buy their games than the industry average. I don't know.
But what about those (increasingly few, almost exclusively Western-developed and aimed at the teen market) games that focus primarily on violence? Well, why is it assumed that women are as superficial as to judge games based on their content? Is everyone who plays Splinter Cell a right-wing conspiracy wacko? Of course not. Setting is just wallpaper that gives the gameplay a recognisable grounding and context.
Are we ever going to see a 50/50 gender split of gamers? I doubt it. Do we need to? Not really. The objective is to provide everybody *who wants to play games* with something they want, not everybody period.
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People are complaining about game developers focusing on men, and yet a lot of games I've seen appeal at least as well to women (The Sims being the most obvious example, but there are plenty of others). The number of games now-a-days that portray women as helpless sex objects is really rather small, and a number of those also have strong female characters at the same time (GTA3 comes to mind). They're also balanced by the growing number of games with female leads.
It would be nice to see female designers bring their viewpoints to the fray, but it's certainly not necessary in order to get a bigger female demographic. It's already getting bigger as it is!
Really, this whole issue is kind of offensive to male game designers. It suggests that none of them would know how to please a woman with a roadmap and instructions.
Rob
...games about pink fluffy kitties... You can't say that women like this or Japanese gamers want this
What? Havent you heard of the 'Hello Kitty' brand?I couldn't think of a sig.
I'm an exception to this generalization, but perhaps I can shed some light on why what you have quoted might be true for many women.
When I'm bored, I shop online, or possibly post on bulletin boards (like Slashdot!). I play games for fun. I've been known to play MMORPGS for 18 hours straight, though it is rare that I have that much time available for gaming. I like games that I can install and play-- Age of Mythology has afforded me many hours of enjoyment. For the record, I don't play "The Sims." I have several adventure games that I enjoy, but I'm more interested in the problem-solving aspect of them than the "plot," as such. (E.g. the side storyline in Syberia about the main character's love life just annoyed me. But perhaps that's because I couldn't affect it.) Indeed, I've been enjoying games for decades, all the way back to playing "Heliocopter" and "The Wizard and the Princess" on my father's Apple II. (There is a rock here. Look rock. There is a scorpion here! Go east. There is a rock here. Look rock. There is a scorpion here...)
However, my gaming habits were not always this way. Several years ago when I was in law school, I would occasionally buy an adventure game and play it during semester breaks. The rest of the time, I had too much studying to do to have time for gaming, and I felt guilty about every moment I wasted on "leisure time." I still gamed, like my most of classmates, and we all played the same game: Freecell, for speed, and strings of wins. If you sat in the back of the lecture hall before the lecture began, you would see all these laptops with people madly playing Freecell as fast as they could. There's something almost meditative about playing Freecell for speed, it requires just enough attention, but not too much. It helped my stress level without taking too much of my time or mental effort. Now that I'm back in the real world, Freecell has lost its charm.
I suspect that the reason that women stereotypically play puzzle games rather than other types of games is that they don't take as much time. You noted that women tend not to play as long as men. That's because they have a lot of stuff to do!
Many stereotypically "female jobs" (cooking, cleaning, etc.) are tasks that must be done every day, leaving short blocks of free time between tasks. Many stereotypically "male jobs" (yard work, auto maintenance, etc.) may be equally time-consuming in the long run, but are only done periodically. This leaves longer blocks of free time for gaming. If you are going to play Everquest, you can't play for an hour here or there, and you can't get up when you want to in order to put the next load of laundry in the dryer, stir the soup, take a call from your relatives, etc. For women with children, I'm sure they have even more gaming interruptions.
I think the buying games vs. playing Bejeweled online thing might be more an issue of familiarity with computer games. Many games can be played online for free, if you like them then you sign up for a subscription to premium service. It's something you just fall into because you are bored surfing the web. Going out and buying a game that has to be installed requires more planning. It is easy to understand how someone who isn't that interested in computer games in the first place and hasn't heard of games that might be fun would be more likely to play an online game than one that must be purchased and installed.
If you want to make games that appeal to women, here are my suggestions:
1) The game must be intelligent. There should be interesting problems to solve.
2) The game should accommodate both long and short gaming sessions.
3) As noted above, pause buttons are very helpful.
4) Games that involve hurting other people probably aren't as appealing. I think in general women are socialized more than men are not to inflict physical damage on one another. I remember being taken on a date to play Laser Tag when I was in my late teens, and it took a while to get over the idea t
I don't know about you. But I have met plenty of smart women who are more than capable of working in engineering. They always somehow end up stearing toward businesses, project management or HR.
It's mind boggling seeing so many super qualified women just say yes at the first site of a business/HR position offer. Some even take pay cuts? There is no explanation for this.
Ok, let's see, games with fat female characters:
Quake 3 - Lucy
Postal 2 - Those Mr. Potato head looking chicks
Surprise, that's all I can think of. Neither seem to really have any redeeming qualities either. Oh well, insert analogy of fat women to mopeds here.