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Talking With the Women Working In Games
MTV's Multiplayer blog is working, all this week, on a series of interviews called Women Working in Games. They've already had great discussions with Ubisoft's Elspeth Tory on the Ubisoft/SomethingAwful thing, and X-Play's Morgan Webb about her work on cable television. They've also spoken with GameGirlAdvance's Jane Pinckard about the differences between men and women and the games they play. "I also think that women have traditionally been at the forefront of this, because they're burdened with more than their fair share of house work and childcare, usually. That's just statistical. And so they're going to have less leisure time for games. Now men are sort of catching up. But I think women have always been less free to play games the way that men have. So maybe that's why women play casual games or they play more casually. And they just don't want the same kind of game that requires 20, 40 hours of play. I think that's totally right." Tomorrow they're speaking with Brenda Brathwaite, a designer and author of the book Sex in Games.
I think it is easy to explain why women aren't as "hardcore" when it comes to gaming as men are. Billy Crystal explained it all in two sentences.
"Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place."
This was my favorite question and answer: Multiplayer: When disparaging stuff comes out on the Internet, what advice do you have for women dealing with that type of scrutiny?
Tory: Don't read the forums! [Laughs] Don't read the forums. That's what I was told by some people and I stopped doing that, so that's good. That's helping. And try and focus on the positive aspect of what you do and the end result. I think it's tough to know what to do. Do you react against it? Do you sort of say things verbally? Again, I think it's more about visibility. So if people are having issues, well then we're just going to go out there and make more games that are kick-ass and more games where there is a woman running it and more games where we're doing a great job. I think it's just going to have to eventually erode. It'll just eventually come to an end, and it'll be completely normal to have high-profile women on big projects. Guess we won't be seeing posts from Elspeth and Jade here... But I hope they keep making games, we need some diversity in the industry in all aspects of development and productions. I'm playing Assassin's Creed myself right now and though it has many flaws, I'm still enjoying it.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
In a messed up way, that's probably the most concise and insightful explanation.
;)
See, back when games were abstract, like Pong and Pac-Man, we already know that they drew about 50-50 crowds. Just as many women were into those games as men were.
Then gradually the industry became a boys' club. Male nerds began using the extra polygons and pixels to catter to other male nerds' needs, and often it was just the publisher's heavy handed intervention that stopped it from becoming all out porn. (Read Bartle's surrealistic "I was young, I needed the money", if you don't believe me. The surrealistic story of his trying to make a cybersex MUD, in spite of the management's keeping telling him not to, and that they'll never find a publisher for that.)
Women in games became helpless princesses to be rescued, rewards for the brave knight, erotic objects, and other such roles.
As an illustration of how far downhill that went, when Tomb Raider decided to have a woman as the main character (IIRC because a guy there thought it would be more fun to stare at a woman's arse in third person, than at a guy's arse), it was something almost revolutionary. It had become that much taken for granted that the player or the hero must be a guy, and the women are just the rewards he gets. And even that franchise eventually became an excuse to show Lara's... assets.
A lot more took the same route and assumed that any female char _must_ be played by a guy, and/or for the benefit of other guys. So, you know, a female knight can't possibly fear a sword to the gut or a severed femoral artery. (The effect of which on your blood content is not unlike cutting the bottom off a cup.) Of _course_ they'll go into battle wearing just a chainmail bikini
A lot of games which grudgingly offered women as playable characters, gimped their stats in various ways. Just because, you know, in a game where you shoot fireballs, ride dragons, and generally rape the laws of physics, chemistry and biology with a vengeance, it would be _so_ unrealistic if a woman (even a rare, exceptional, non-typical one) could possibly have the same strength or constitution as a guy.
And, gee, who would have guessed? Eventually that ratio between male and female players wasn't anywhere near 50-50 any more.
Maybe that quote hits the nail on the head. Maybe women do need a reason to play an inflatable sex doll.
Actually, would the males play such a character if it were male? I know quite a bunch of us had an aversion to playing Voldo in Soul Calibur. (For those who don't know the chap, he was dressed in a BDSM outfit, and with arse-less leather pants.) And that's still one notch above the portrayal of women in some games.
Mind you, it's getting better, but just saying... maybe that quote does condense a lot of wisdom in a very concise form.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
See, its not us women making the big deal - its the men who look down upon women and think we *do* have less talent than men. As a resut we are forced to near claw our way to positions that many men just "get" by virtue of being male.
I actually tried an experiment, because I have a name that can be shortened to a unisex one - I am a rather talented programmer/sysadmin type - one with a "name" as it were. If I post resumes in non-open source job communities (where my name is less known), I get more responses to the unisex version of my name than the patently feminine one - and my resume is not altered besides name. In some cases I sent it to the same place - and the "male" sounding one was the one responded to, *and* they addressed me by male appelations: "Sir"
This is itself makes it pretty obvious to me that us women have a lot more obstacles to overcome than men. Maybe not with people like you, but not everyonke in this industry has such an enlightened perspective as you do.
Here's why there's still so much "hype": it's because a lot of men actually believe that women aren't as good as men at doing whatever job it is that they're doing. And a lot of these men are working in the videogame industry. As a result, it IS a big deal if a women gets to a position of power in the videogame industry. I'd love to see the day where no one bats an eye when they see a women working as a dev, producer or other significant position. In the meantime, I have to listen to endless stories of groping, stalking, mistaken-for-booth-babe and just general disbelief that a woman could possibly do that job well.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Sure. The point is that Jade isn't putting herself forth as a sex symbol, Ubisoft isn't either, it's the media and fan response that's doing that. Predictably, maybe, but I can't hold Ubisoft so responsible for something they didn't actually do themselves.
When people complain about how much media attention she's getting, they're mostly responding to the phenomenon and the interpretation of what Ubisoft PR did and not what they actually did, which was put someone who should be well-qualified to talk about the game and represent the developers and who had good experience doing publicity in the position of doing publicity. Shock! Horror!
Part of the response seems to be that people didn't at first believe that she could possibly be qualified for her job, and instead assumed she was put in that position just so she could do PR as a pretty face... which is the absolutely shaming part of this whole thing.
the reason gamers are skewed toward male is because women are too busy doing housework?
No, the real reason why lies in the content of the games. Let's take a few example games, say, Call of Duty 4, Kane & Lynch, and GTA San Andreas. These games feature cars, helicopters, fire weapons of all sorts, and killing tens of people every couple of minutes. Make no mistake about it, these features on their own aren't what turns women away from such games, no, the real problem is not what is in these games, but what's not in them. Namely, ponies.
When is the last time you've seen a pony in a game? Where are the scenes of combat against pony-riding RPG-totting Iraqi insurgents? Where are the cops who protect themselves from your bullets behind ponies? Where can you jack a mother fucker for his pony and run away with it with the mounties on, literally speaking, your tail? Not in any of the games mentioned, and that's why so many members of the female population prefer to watch cheesy movies that reminds them of the pony their father never offered them for their sixth birthday than to play the games we like to play.
You just got troll'd!