Slashdot Mirror
ARGs And The Female Gamer
Gamasutra has a feature up by Andrea Phillips examining the world of Alternate Reality Gaming, musing that finally designers seem to have found something that works for both genders. From the article: "At the end of this road, you don't find an exclusively female audience and a disenfranchised male ex-playerbase. Instead, you find a gaming audience that looks a lot like the world we live in every day. Welcome to the gender-balanced world of Alternate Reality Gaming ... In the most successful ARGs, the game and the story are inextricable from one another. In an ARG, there simply isn't a way to devise a game without simultaneously devising the story, and the quality of the game lives and dies based on the quality of the writing. In every ARG team I'm aware of, the lead writer is a crucial part of the dev team. Poor characterization, bad pacing, or lack of plausibility are showstoppers just as much as a blue-screen would be. The action item here for conventional gaming: Make the writing an integral part of the development process, and not an afterthought. "
So, how long will it take, until we get away from leveling/looting RPG games, to more story based online-games, where there are semi-professional players/actors, which will drive indiviual storylines in MMORPGs?
Putting Diamond Age and the current article together, it seems the logical step.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Who would've thought that if you make an accessible game with a good story that develops an active community that other people (women included) will want to play it!
I am truly astounded at GamaSutra's grasp of the obvious.
e2 | LJ
CRPGs are in an interesting position, because as a game genre they tend to be very literate/sophisticated - CRPGS typically include more written text than other game genres - but at the same time genre convention demands a level of violence and slaying that's equivalent to (if not exceeding) the amount of violence in FPS's. I think a lot of modern computer RPG games are at least subconsciously expressing a dissatisfaction with the tired kill/level/loot progression that is genre convention. KoToR 2, for example, explicitly recognizes that over the course of the game the player character engages in an obscene and absurd amount of violence and killing, and writes this absurdity into the plot line. (This involves some typically recondite Star Wars pseudo-Zen mumbo-jumbo about the player being a "void in the force" or some such that feeds on the death of others. The point it it's not very heroic stuff, and it's an arresting moment in the game when the player is forced to confront the weight and sheer magnitude of his/her actions.) The entire BG series can be read as an artful dodge/acknowledgement of the problematic neverending-stream-of-foes paradigm of CRPGs. The player character is the direct progeny of the game world's god of _murder_. In the NWN campaign an evil character who venerates death expresses a desire to follow the PC around as the PC invariably leaves a trial of blood and corpses in his/her wake. That this very distasteful character appreciates the player's actions could be interpreted as an indictment of the player. Now that I think about it, a lot of RPG's I've played lately have at least acknowledged that the amount of combat in these game is sort of silly.
I saw a special on MTV entitled something like "True life: professional gamers" (I probably got the title wrong) recently. There was an American all female team that played Counter Strike against many other female teams from around the world. They made it to the finals, playing against a team from Brazil, and proceeded to kick tail left and right. Whether of not they would have won (which they did), they earned a lot of my respect for putting forth their effort. They trained for four years, had printouts of various maps and tactics to best acheive victory over their opponents. I think that female gamers are often over-criticized or under-estimated. Yes, if my nickname did not imply, let me state for the record that I am a male.
I speculate that there are probably an equal number of women masquerading as men in online games (to avoid all the comeons and crap) as there are men masquerading as women (for odd kicks, I guess).
resigned
Also, you still power leveling and loot envy going on. I think it's more the adolecent male behavior that keeps women away from games.
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
Those numbers are utterly meaningless. Let's assume that there are 90% males playing a game and 10% females. Let's further assume that a given person is equally likely to play with a character of the other gender as with a character of his or her own gender. That gives us 5% females playing females, 5% females playing males, 45% males playing males and 45% males playing females.
In this case, 10% of all male characters are played by females, while 90% of all female characters are played by males - even though males and females are equally likely to play with a character of the opposite gender!
Clearly, your numbers don't show that males are more likely to play female characters than the other way around. In fact, they don't really show anything at all since we don't know how many males and females were in the sample.