Slashdot Mirror
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."
unless the Sex your trying to attract isn't having any fun with the current selection of games (with the exception of the few Women gamers out there)
imagine a world where Hollywood concentrated on providing entertainment to just the Female audience and told guys to "have fun" watching Movies written for Women
/. is overrun by bed-wetting elitist nerds
let it be known, for anything other than servers, a *nix OS sucks
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."
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.
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
> 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?
Exactly. The problem here is that games are produced by young men, for young men. Women in those games are portrayed as either sex objects or helpless victims. And yes, there are exceptions, some brilliant, but that's what they are: exceptions.
And it's pretty arrogant to think that men alone can produce games that are universally "fun". As long as the games industry is dominated by males, the gaming public will remain dominated by males.
READY.
#
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
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 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.
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.
Preferences > Homepage > Customize stories on homepage > Authors > Zonk > Uncheck
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