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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.
"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.
I see.
Few women in engineering = systematic discrimination against women.
Few men in nursing = systematic discrimination against women.
Huh?
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Mod up
Don't quote me on this.
As I've said every time this nonsense comes up - the people who write these bloody articles tend not to bother looking for the women who DO write games to talk to us, either!
Heaven forbid we get in the way of their preconceptions. It might make the articles take longer to write.
I've gotcher 'Women In Gaming' RIGHT HERE!
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
First, even though another reply to your post says I agree with you that discrimination against women could (not saying it is) be the reason for both those things. It's not inherently impossible for one thing (discrimination against women) to have multiple effects...
I also agree that it's possible that more men are garbagemen/coalminers/whatever because, in general, those jobs require physical strength and, in general, men are stronger than women. However, I do think it's worth noting that those are also jobs which, for whatever reason, are more socially acceptable for a man to hold that a women. Not gonna guess why, but there it is.
One thing I did have issue with, however: Um, what? "There are more male criminals, because more men commit crimes." Well, yes. Saying "My walls are white because the paint I used is white" is true but not very informative. I'm not gonna try and guess why there are more male criminals than female (or even say if that is true - I'm guessing it is, but don't have statistics in front of me) but saying it's because "mostly men commit crimes" isn't giving an explanation, it's just restating what we already know. That I wholeheartedly agree with you on, although it's somewhat OT. But again, the fact there are vastly more black men than white (or black or latino or rainbow) women on death row is, in part, due to the fact that (to my understanding) more black men commit crimes eligible for death row than white males. Again, I think there is racism and sexism in the criminal justice system in addition to the skewed demographics of those who actually commit the crimes, but there's a skew there as well.
Just some thougts.
-Trillian
It does start to get tedious, eh?
The point I was making was that there is discrimination, PLUS OTHER FACTORS, and I then went on to talk about the OTHER FACTORS. I am sorry if I wasn't clear, but I was not trying to prove that there is discrimination, which I think it obvious to any rational observer (of American society, anyway), but rather discuss some other factors that contribute to the dichotomy of male/female jobs etc.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
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.