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The Time for Women in Games
VeeCee writes "Next Generation has an interesting article on why few women are game developers, why it should change, and how." From the article: "Fulton then cited workforce statistics, showing that in 1950, 30 percent of women worked, compared with 70 percent six years ago. 'We're rapidly becoming equal players in the larger workforce. More women are playing games.' Citing a study that showed women outnumbered men as players in the 24 to 35 year-old demographic, Fulton granted that casual games were a factor. 'However I think there's an appetite there. As we get online, as the games start getting more interactive, more social, women are getting more and more interested in what it means to play games.'"
I wonder what could possibly be keeping women from the mainstream gaming market.
I think in more developed countries, game-playing women are perceived as nerds, hence reducing their chances of finding mates.
In less developed countries, game-playing women are perceived as lazy, hence reducing their chances of finding mates.
Honestly, I'm surprised Ms Fulton titled her keynote "The Best Defense... Why Gender Doesn't Matter (As Much As You Might Think)". If gender really doesn't matter, then why would the general public care of 10% or 99% of the game developers are female?
Please stop entering code 2,2,7,6,6,4
...sit my girlfriend down with a bejeweled type game and we may not see her for a few days (well, hours at least). Also, that girl could play the Sonic Collection for years without stopping.
Most of the women I know can't stand shooters or most RPGs, but give them puzzle or platform jumpers and they're as happy as me with Oblivion.
Sadly, long-term gamers are the exact opposite of 'social', so still no sex for them.
You must think in Russian.
I should know. I'm sitting in an office full of men. The only women we've hired were for Sales & Marketing, booth babes, etc. Haha, reminds me of when college recruiters came to my all-boys high school and didn't know it was single-sex. "Oh, it's only guys here. Great! You'll feel just at home in our CompSci classes." It was right then and there I decided not to major in I.T.
The time is finally right for a female-centric game company. Don't know who Brenda Laurel is? You should. The woman is a freakin' genius and a pioneer in the field of human-computer interaction.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Seriously... what are you trying to prove? You took part 4 of a 6-part series. So right away I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. That girls don't play games because guys make fun of their OMG!!! PONIES!!!111! mods? That girls don't play games because guys think they have OMG!!! PONIES!!!11 mods?
What?
My one question is this: why is it always an assumed premise that if there's a statistic in which girls or boys are over-represented:
1. it's automatially a bad thing
2. it's automatically a bad thing for girls
Am I allowed to ask that question?
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
Well, how about starting by simply having a choice of male and female characters for games? It seems almost every game features the adventures of "generic caucasian guy".
Especially in online games (BF2, CS Source etc) a female character would NOT be hard to do at all.
Not a solution, but a start.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
That statistic is BS. Sure, I watch girls play games all the time. They play Sudoku, Solitare, FreeCell. They like puzzle games, and that's cool. But it's almost always going to be on a casual basis.
Being casual does not make you that bothered. I ride bicycles, but I don't want to be a bicycle engineer. I would even say I love cars, but I don't care about their engines past how loud they are and how fast they can go. That's a casual relationship too.
Why would girls who play Sudoku care in any way shape or form about programming Sudoku games?
We can run around these circles all day about why girls play games or why they don't, why they program or why they don't, but the end result is the same. Unless someone can fundamentally change the nature of programming, or indeed, development, they aren't going to do it.
I have stopped caring about how many girls play games or how many girls develop games. It's not a big deal.
I wonder why we never hear people complaing that women are not 50% of the criminal "workforce".
From the UK: "Men outnumber women in all major crime categories. Between 85 and 95 per cent of offenders found guilty of burglary, robbery, drug offences, criminal damage or violence against the person are male. Although the number of offenders are relatively small, 98 per cent of people found guilty of, or cautioned for, sexual offences are male"
Or how about garbagemen (garbagepeople) or coal miners? Why are people never concerned about women not making headways there?
Riddle me that, Batman.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
I work for a rather large software company, and I am one of the many engineers. In the 6 years I have worked here I have worked with a total of 3 women. Most of them were VERY competent programmers. In contrast I cannot count how many men I have worked with, sure enough the number would be in the hundreds.
Back in college (6 years ago), we had similar ratios in all the CS classes, and even in the upper division physics classes. However, my upper division social classes were DOMINATED by women.
I don't want to sound sexist or mysognistic, but I don't think we need more women in engineering any more than we need more male social workers. I think we need more people doing exactly what they want to do; if that fits a pattern, so be it; just as long as we don't restrict people from being in any profession.
McD
People who are against human cloning must be bitter they are not good enough to be cloned.
I don't. I only care if the games are good and fun, and worth my bucks.
If women don't want to make games, that's fine by me and I don't see the problem. I, as a consumer, care only about the end-result product.
You know, part of the reason girls don't get hired is because HR managers of companies dismiss them based on their looks or age. Like OMG a girl wants to be a programmer nerd, she will distract all the male programmer nerds, we can't have that loss of productivity, nooo!
I mean really, the real solution is just to have a women run and managed games company that builds games that they want to play (which aren't all that different from games males want to play)
MMORPG's are fairly popular with women because they can pick what they look like and can go along undisturbed and undistracted by picking male or female characters depending on how social they want to be.
A lot of my female friends find sim-type games really fun, between Sims/Sims2 and Princess Maker 2 (look it up), to side-scrolling fighting games (Capcom vs SNK and such).
Well it seems to me that back in the 90's games were geared towards nerds. Playing a video game was not the "Hip" thing to do. Now comes the 2000's. Now there is a game out to entertain just about anyone. From your casual D&D nerds to your typical jocks wich sports games.
It seems that now there are games out for anyone, the thought of video games aren't so "Nerdish". As more and more begin to look at video games as being popular, more and more females will jump on it because thats what everyone does and its not so nerdy.
There IS systematic discrimination against women, as well as several other factors that contribute to the way some of these careers work out. For instance, nurses. Many women become/became nurses rather than doctors because:
a) they are not expected to support a family alone, but are more likely to spend several years at home, so such an investment of time and money is less worthwhile
b) it is extremely difficult to take maternity leave for a year or whatever in the middle of med school or residency, whereas men are rarely expected to take time off for the birth of their child, and have no physical limitations during pregnancy, obviously
c) women are (to a much lower degree now) encouraged to take over caretaker roles rather than the "in charge" role of doctor.
Jobs like garbagemen, construction work, etc. are dominated by men for the same reason they are crappy jobs. They require a great deal of physical labor, something that men are genetically predisposed (through stronger upper bodies, more muscle mass in general, etc.) to be more fit for.
As far as men making up a greater number of criminals, that is mostly because men commit most crimes. Furthermore, there is a sexist tendency to not give women the death penalty (in barbarous places that still have it, like my homeland) which is commensurate to the racist tendency to give it more often to black defendants and explains a little bit the skewed demographics of death row.
Of course, the greatest inequality in society is between the rich and poor, but it seems naive to pretend that sexism is dead.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
... you can figure out a way to make the proposition "completely give up any hope of having a family to get a salary which is significantly less than what you could get at any non-gaming firm with your same degree and a 40 hour workweek, in exchange for the opportunity to work on games you largely don't enjoy" sound attractive for women.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
"Lara, you're going to have to swim through this shark infested water to get to the next ruin."
"I certainly hope not. Blood attracts sharks quicker than anything else."
"My god, you're injured? Don't you have any medical kits l-- oh."
<icily>"Quite."
I work for a smallish MMOG startup company in a major urban area - I'm the only female software engineer, and the only woman outside of the support staff in an office of ~20 people (including coders, artists, and management). It's quite lonely - the main problem seems to be a lack of qualified female applicants for job openings. We've done the standard craigslist thing, but maybe 1 in 10 of the applications are from women, and all of them so far have been mediocre. As much as I have an axe to grind about lack of diversity, taking someone who's not qualified for a position in the interest of affirmative action is not a realistic or beneficial choice.
I know a lot of female gamers, but maybe that's because I am one. Programmer, too. But I'm a slight anomoly - most of the women gamers I know are tabletop gamers, while I play both, in nearly even amounts. So for players, I can buy the viewpoint that far too many games drive away women with big boobs and scanty costumes. Female armor in most MMORPGs, for example, tends to get a lot of jokes, just like really bad fantasy novel covers.
Regarding women as programmers, I think that there are two things to consider:
a) programmers are geeky and particularly at the moment, teenagers frown on people being smart, as the opposite of cool. Women tend to be more socially aware (or socially malleable) than their male counterparts in high school, so while they may quietly get good grades, they probably won't choose a geeky path like CS in college.
b) there are still, believe it or not, teachers who discourage women from fields related to math or science. I was lucky enough not to have that problem in high school (now a fading ten years in the past), but I have heard plenty of first hand stories on the subject.
You know, if women spent half as much time actually designing games as they do bitching about the lack of women designing games, we wouldn't have this problem. But, then again, I guess they're used to having someone do everything FOR them.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Mod up
Don't quote me on this.
The mainstream games industry sucks. What sane person would want to be trapped in there?
:)
:)
So girls aren't keen to join? That's probably because they have too much SENSE to join the world of perpetual crunch time and all the other misery we always hear about.
Girls who love mainstream games are perfectly capable of getting in there themselves. There's no point in trying to force others into it. I'm a female game designer and programmer and I would be thoroughly MISERABLE if you tried to hire me to work on your FPS.
The problem comes earlier, really. The problem, as I see it, lies in schools and preconceptions. I've been in plenty of places with girl gamers who think games are cool - but have been conditioned to believe that programming is really hard and impossible to understand and they couldn't possibly do it, so they will never try. Even though there are tons of tools out there to make programming easier and help newbies make at least small, crap games with very little experience necessary. The girls are too convinced that programming is beyond them to even LOOK for tools. So they just sit around and talk about games that "it would be cool if someone made" rather than doing anything about it themselves.
Do any high schools bother teaching simple interactive creation tools like Flash? Show more little girls that they can MAKE something cool if they just TRY and a couple more of them might come and join me.
I've gotcher 'Women In Gaming' RIGHT HERE!
Women have the oppurtunity to join the IT workforce but have chosen not to. For a while there was a big push to get women in IT, I have to ask why?
Why promote a sex into a certain field. Women have obviously chosen that IT is not a field for them. In a very generalized sense women do not dig IT. So what? Many women do not appreciate that field while many men do. Is this a problem, no it is not.
Women and men are different, maybe it is how they are raised, but in the broad sense the case can be made that men typically gravitate towards some things, while women gravitate towards other things. That isnt a discouragement for crossover, it just how the chips fall.
The oppurtunity exists, but the demand by women is simply not there. As long as people have the oppurtunity, why should anyone be encouraged to go into a certain field simply because of their race/sex. Equal oppurtunity means the oppurtunity to not choose something also.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
games could be said to be a waste of time. there are so many things to do in real life..to be really productive. i don't see it as a big loss that women aren't interested in wasting their time. if they really wanted to play they'd start their own companies and make their own. they'd know what they'd want to play. no ones trying to avoid making money from 50% of the population you know. no conspiracy.
the hours spent gaming could be better spent reading books. yes you know...to attain knowledge:P
You should have smiled politely and then, with all your might, kicked him in the balls. (What the hell, he's not using them anyway.) Some people just need to have things explained to them in a language they can understand.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.