No Girls Allowed: A story of the sterotype of male gamers

Yeah, TR2013 is much less boob-waggling. Story is good (so far - I've not finished yet!), and some nice character development, although there is a slight tendency to revel in inflicting injuries on Lara.

Zoombie said:

I don't like this as it implies that men can't not be sexist jerks.

I want more women in the marketplace. But men learning to not be sexist jerks seems like a nice place to start.

Plus, it'd make it easier to get more women into the job, since their coworkers won't be asshats.

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That's assuming the sexism is deliberate. I personally believe that most of the sexism in gaming is as of a result of lazy, uninspired, uncreative writing that panders to the male demographic. Say a game developer wants to make an action game. He could take th time to create a well thought out storyline with sensible plot twists, but not all developers are that creative. Instead that developer would more than likely go down the 'generic beautiful girlfriend of jacked up, badass good guy is kidnapped/killed by generic bad guys who are evil for no good reason and will raise hell to get revenge' storyline because it is simple and easy to do.

Also, more female game developers can point out and/ or eliminate certain elements in games that should be obvious but apparently is not, for example, that not all female characters need to have coconut sized breast while wearing slivers or cloth that barely covers anything. Or that just because a game is targeted toward men, the main character doesn't have to be a guy. At the end of the day, what matters most is how good the game is, not the gender of the MC.

EMaree said:

Do I feel like the target audience for Skyrim? Ehrm. Errr. Not really.

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Yeah that's really what I want to express - it feels obvious to me that I'm not the target audience for Skyrim, and I hate that feeling. Why do someone else's tastes always have to get preference over mine? T_T I don't want to feel unappreciated and marginalized.

onesecondglance said:

Sorry, I'm still not understanding. In what way is the main gameplay catered towards men over women? And what is it about the story?

I'm not trying to pick a fight. I just want to understand where you're coming from, because I don't see anything in the elements you're describing that are tailored towards men specifically.

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It's complicated to explain, because whether something is tailored to men, truly neutral, or tailored to women is a holistic evaluation of a lot of factors. But let me list a few things that are in Skyrim, and pay attention to how many times the only two options are join or kill other humanoids:
- drug dealers you can choose to buy from or kill
- werewolves you can choose to join or kill (or in one case join AND kill)
- tribal terrorist druids you can choose to join or kill
- 2 organized crime families that you can choose to join or kill
- bandits and pirates everywhere, who exist purely for you to kill them with minimal guilt so you can take their amassed treasure.
- crazy egotistic gods who use mortals as playing pieces
- 2 dog fighting pits
- a suicide cult, who were in the business of creating zombie warriors before they decided suicide was the only honorable option left
- a demon who wants you to beat a priest to death with a rusty mace
- 3 different kinds of cannibals, whom the player can choose to join (!)
- orcs who apparently have a culture where only the dominant male of each settlement gets to reproduce and young females who are considered to bring shame upon their mothers if they want to leave this system or fight within it for equality
- an old orc who asks you to help him commit an honorable suicide by killing him in combat, for no reason other than that he's old and it's unacceptably uncool for a male to be too old to be a warrior
- female nature spirits who hate all intelligent animal beings
- Morlocks Falmer who are an "inherently evil race" that it would be a good thing if the player committed genocide upon them.

Many of these elements come straight out of the heavily male-focused mythological tradition of monster-slayer heroes, (because "everything weird should be destroyed to clean the world and as a nice side-effect amass the hero will amass wealth, gain a reputation for having masculine prowess, be fawned upon by bards, women, and non-warrior men, and demonstrate that the hero is chosen/approved of by fate/the gods") or the modern flip-side of that tradition, also heavily male-focused, where an anti-hero is or becomes a powerful 'monster' and kills would-be heroes because "good is dumb", "goody-two-shoes" are boring, and, oddly enough, "as a nice side-effect the powerful monster will amass wealth, gain a reputation for having masculine prowess, be fawned upon by women and non-warrior men, and demonstrate that the monster is chosen/approved of by fate/the gods." That's male supernatural fantasy in a nutshell.


Also, here's a conversation I just had:
Male friend: "In this book I'm reading the action is about how all the characters need to fight and bravely hold their ground even though 3/4 of them will die because if they endure until the deadline against the sadistic psychopath villains the villains won't be able to end the world."
Me: "Wow, that's such a boy story, lol."
Friend: "Yes, yes it is, lol."

sunandshadow said:

It's complicated to explain, because whether something is tailored to men, truly neutral, or tailored to women is a holistic evaluation of a lot of factors. But let me list a few things that are in Skyrim, and pay attention to how many times the only two options are join or kill other humanoids:
[...]

Many of these elements come straight out of the heavily male-focused mythological tradition of monster-slayer heroes, (because "everything weird should be destroyed to clean the world and as a nice side-effect amass the hero will amass wealth, gain a reputation for having masculine prowess, be fawned upon by bards, women, and non-warrior men, and demonstrate that the hero is chosen/approved of by fate/the gods") or the modern flip-side of that tradition, also heavily male-focused, where an anti-hero is or becomes a powerful 'monster' and kills would-be heroes because "good is dumb", "goody-two-shoes" are boring, and, oddly enough, "as a nice side-effect the powerful monster will amass wealth, gain a reputation for having masculine prowess, be fawned upon by women and non-warrior men, and demonstrate that the monster is chosen/approved of by fate/the gods." That's male supernatural fantasy in a nutshell.


Also, here's a conversation I just had:
Male friend: "In this book I'm reading the action is about how all the characters need to fight and bravely hold their ground even though 3/4 of them will die because if they endure until the deadline against the sadistic psychopath villains the villains won't be able to end the world."
Me: "Wow, that's such a boy story, lol."
Friend: "Yes, yes it is, lol."

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And...what exactly makes those things "masculine"? If all of those things are "masculine", then what would define a "feminine" game? If the crux of the gameplay of something like Skyrim can be branded as "masculine", how exactly would you make a game like Skyrim aimed towards women? Could it even be considered anything like Skyrim?

After all, one could argue that the point is that you don't need to be a man to do/deal with those things.

lilyWhite said:

And...what exactly makes those things "masculine"? If all of those things are "masculine", then what would define a "feminine" game? If the crux of the gameplay of something like Skyrim can be branded as "masculine", how exactly would you make a game like Skyrim aimed towards women? Could it even be considered anything like Skyrim?

After all, one could argue that the point is that you don't need to be a man to do/deal with those things.

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The idea that those things need to be done/dealt with in that kind of straightforward forceful style is in itself masculine. On average, female problem-solving, goal-setting, and prioritizing don't work that way, but instead focus on a holistic assessment of a situation to evaluate which elements are out of balance and how they can be slid or twisted, or the pressures upon them rearranged, to bring them into balance. (As opposed to killing/destroying them.) But I thought I had done a decent job in my previous post of illustrating why the monster-slaying-warrior-hero-rewarded-with-social-admiration is the essence of masculine wish-fulfillment storytelling. Female wish-fulfillment storytelling focuses on different wishes and fulfilling them with different methods. So if you're still asking why those things are masculine, I don't know how to explain it. They're masculine because men are mostly enthusiastic about them and women are much less so. Not prescriptively masculine, descriptively masculine.

To answer your other more interesting question, let's say I was hypothetically given a copy of Skyrim's engine and a creative staff who could make some new 3D assets/levels/quests. And I was told to use this to create a new IP targeted mainly at adult women. I think it would be quite possible to make a game adult women would love using the existing gameplay, especially if the expansions were included. And the result would certainly be something like Skyrim since it would use the same engine and could probably reuse many of the models and textures. It wouldn't be extremely similar to Skyrim because the whole point is to change it to be female focused. And also it wouldn't be part of the Elder Scrolls IP because that whole thing is male-focused and I'd rather start fresh.

So how would I start making "Skyrim-like RPG for women"? Well, a survey of what women who had played Skyrim considered their favorite elements would be a good place to start. It's pretty predictable that horses, dogs, marryable NPCs, own-able houses, puzzles in dungeons, armor-crafting, and alchemy/cooking would be among the survey responses. Maybe the sequence where you ride the dragon too, and the more puzzle-related shouts. And the pretty wilderness portions of the game's setting have been repeatedly praised by female players. By my own estimate, I can predict 70% of the survey result, but I'd really like to see what the other 30% would be, it would be really interesting.

However, to continue the thought experiment today I'll have to press on without that additional data. :/ But there's some supplementary data available - I can look at existing and historical which have/had a lot of female players and see what their big features are. Pet capturing and breeding games get a lot of female players. House building and decorating games get a lot of female players. Adventure games with dialogue puzzles get a lot of female players. Games which incorporate colors, shininess, pretty characters and stylish clothes consistently attract female players. This gets to the comment I made earlier about "to a lesser extant, the graphical style" being not female-targeted. The people and many of the locations in Skyrim are kind of grimy. Many of the male NPCs are unattractive simply because they are dirty or their hair is matted; there are also a lot of locations with sickly-looking plants, gross skeleton zombies, slime, spiders, impaled heads, burned bodies, etc. I'd clean all that crap out of the game and replace it with clean male characters who looked like popular actors, locations with looks ranging from healthy to magical, stylish monsters like gryphons, and an assortment of non-gruesome decorative elements.

As far as the story goes, if we wanted to stay similar to Skyrim I could keep the part about the hero(ine) being destined to unite a land that starts off filled with problems and unhappy people. A few of the problems explored in Skyrim's story could be reusable - like the one about the slummy lower city of poverty-stricken people working at the silver mining and processing business owned by nobility living in the upper city. And the parts about exploring the dwemer ruins to find interesting bits of clockwork were pretty cool. Having settlements of different fantasy races with their own cultures would also be cool if they were less obviously miserable cultures for women to live in like the orc ones. There was a storyline about curing someone of a disease that would be great if I replaced the part where the cure requires beheading intelligent creatures.

As far as the part of Skyrim where the main game activity is killing anything that moves, that would be the most challenging part to fix. There are different approaches to that, ranging from making all humanoids non-hostile by default and replacing the bandit hideouts with monster-filled areas, to making the gameplay more Zelda-like with more focus on careful arrow-shots and use of spells and less on combat, to replacing the first-person combat with something more tactical like pet monster battling, or even something more abstract like minigame play. I'd want to take another survey of my hypothetical group of female gamers to see what they preferred.

Zoombie said:

Of course, one of the issues is that masculine/feminine is largely cultural (as far as I understand the issue.)

Though, I find it interesting to note that of your listed "feminine" gameplay things Sunandshadow, I would have appreciated all of them if they had been given more focus in Skyrim.

Especially puzzles in dungeons. That would have been nice.

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Some aspects of masculinity and femininity are culture, but some are less so. The monster-slaying-warrior-hero idea is 3,000+ years old, and is/was found in a variety of cultures; not every culture ever, but including those as separate as Native American, Greek, Norse, and African. The parallel feminine story type involves a young woman dealing with either an arranged marriage or a witch, often both; typically the young woman had to pass some tests, often involving a household skill like cooking, sewing, or basketry, or a cultural skill like singing/playing music.

Along with historical evidence that men consistently prefer different things than women prefer, we also have modern brain imaging data that there are consistent differences between male brains and female brain. The most recent one to come out showed that after puberty male brains developed more front-back connections within each lobe, and had more differences between the two lobes, while female brains developed more right-left connections and had fewer differences between the two lobes.

Glad you thought the recommendations of which features to keep and emphasize sounded good.

Perhaps the problem lies with the association certain types of games and gameplay elements with "masculinity" and "femininity". Zoombie—a guy—finds some of your ideas intriguing, whereas I—a girl—find your idea of a Skyrim-like game aimed towards women to be quite boring in my opinion. I'd rather play a gritty, dark fantasy where I roam the land and slaughter ne'er-do-wells and monsters than a prettied-up version with pets and an expanded cooking system.

Which begs the question of whether it is appropriate to attribute game marketing that focuses on traits deemed "masculine" as aiming for a male audience specifically, and whether marketing that is actively aimed at male gamers (rather than marketing that focuses on elements in a game associated with "masculinity" by some) is based on lack of concern towards female gamers or research showing that there just isn't enough interest from female gamers in those types of games to warrant promotion aimed specifically towards female gamers.

Zoombie said:

Especially puzzles in dungeons. That would have been nice.

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*obsessively shills Lufia II for the SNES* =^_^=

lilyWhite said:

Perhaps the problem lies with the association certain types of games and gameplay elements with "masculinity" and "femininity". Zoombie—a guy—finds some of your ideas intriguing, whereas I—a girl—find your idea of a Skyrim-like game aimed towards women to be quite boring in my opinion. I'd rather play a gritty, dark fantasy where I roam the land and slaughter ne'er-do-wells and monsters than a prettied-up version with pets and an expanded cooking system.

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Ew, lol.

But, two individual examples aren't actually enough to say anything about the statistical correctness of my statements about what generally appeals more to women or more to men. Given the high percentage of non-casual games that cater to masculine tastes over the past decades, current female players of non-casual games are likely to be those who have tastes toward the masculine side of the spectrum, because the more strongly feminine their tastes the more they would have felt there were no non-casual games worth playing.

...whether marketing that is actively aimed at male gamers (rather than marketing that focuses on elements in a game associated with "masculinity" by some) is based on lack of concern towards female gamers or research showing that there just isn't enough interest from female gamers in those types of games to warrant promotion aimed specifically towards female gamers.

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Why would this be an either/or question? It's a lack of concern toward female gamers because female gamers aren't materially showing their interest with their wallets. Well, that plus the fact that it's difficult for a mostly male group to think of game concepts that would strongly appeal to women.

Very interesting article (and great format!).

One thing I wish it had gotten into more is how games themselves have changed. The articles makes a point about how early games were less gendered, but it doesn't really get into how much of this was due to marketing, how much as due to the type of games coming out at the time, how how those two things have influenced each other. The earliest games, like Pong, weren't very gendered, but they also weren't very story/character based. I can think of some early games that involved popular characters (like Mario) that weren't really gendered, but I think games started changing more once there was a bigger emphasis on characters, and when graphics reached a point where they could, for example, give Lara Croft huge breasts. I'd be curious to know what others think.

But overall, I agree with the article's argument about how marketing has influenced the game industry. And I think it makes an excellent point about how different types of games are sometimes kept very separate--consoles are more associated with "boy" games like FPS, war/military-related games, and other action games. But there's also a decent market for casual games (which are often played online and on smart phones), hidden object games (there was a thread about them in this forum recently), and games like The Sims. The latter two are more commonly made for computers than consoles.

But I don't care for the strict division people make between "guy" games and "girl" games. First of all, I don't agree that game tastes are dependent on your gender, though they can be masculine or feminine. But also, I don't see why enjoying narrative-heavy or character-driven games is "feminine."

I'd really like to see more diversity, not just in the types of characters in games but in the types of gameplay available. I enjoy games with strong characters and plots, and I don't always like a lot of focus on combat. But I like playing on a console, and I have no interest in things like hidden object games.

I think it's interesting how gameplay styles that are more or less accepted on some platforms aren't on others. For example, one criticism I see a lot of Heavy Rain is that you're often allowed or directed to have the characters do rather mundane things (like go to the bathroom or make dinner). But that type of gameplay is completely normal in a game like The Sims. And since Heavy Rain is more focused on the plot than on puzzles or combat, allowing the player to interact with the environment and direct conversations is a way to keep them involved to some degree. Personally, I thought it worked really well. But I don't think it's a gameplay style that people expect with a console game.

DancingMaenid said:

I think it's interesting how gameplay styles that are more or less accepted on some platforms aren't on others. For example, one criticism I see a lot of Heavy Rain is that you're often allowed or directed to have the characters do rather mundane things (like go to the bathroom or make dinner). But that type of gameplay is completely normal in a game like The Sims. And since Heavy Rain is more focused on the plot than on puzzles or combat, allowing the player to interact with the environment and direct conversations is a way to keep them involved to some degree. Personally, I thought it worked really well. But I don't think it's a gameplay style that people expect with a console game.

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The Sims is a life simulation game, so doing things that people do in real life is more-or-less the point of the game. (After all, there are Sims games on consoles.) In a game like Heavy Rain which has an actual plot, those sorts of scenes rarely progress the story or provide any meaningful character development. It's why you often don't see characters going to the bathroom in other works of fiction—it's just boring and doesn't contribute to the story.

sunandshadow said:

Some aspects of masculinity and femininity are culture, but some are less so. The monster-slaying-warrior-hero idea is 3,000+ years old, and is/was found in a variety of cultures; not every culture ever, but including those as separate as Native American, Greek, Norse, and African. The parallel feminine story type involves a young woman dealing with either an arranged marriage or a witch, often both; typically the young woman had to pass some tests, often involving a household skill like cooking, sewing, or basketry, or a cultural skill like singing/playing music.

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Yeah, no.

This is entirely Jungian, and it's from the Joseph Campbell School Of Ethnocentric Sexist Retellings of Myths Based On Texts Joseph Campbell can't Read.

The only dead language he learned was Latin; while he had an M.A. in English, and specialized in medieval literature, he couldn't even read Middle English well; he makes stupid assertions about Middle English texts in his books and in his lectures.

He used the Victorian translation of the Mabinogi by Lady Charlotte Guest as his text. When he delivered a graduate seminar at UCLA with grad students who were Ph.D. candidates in Folkore and Mythology, it was embarrassing because he kept relying on Victorian translations of Old Norse, Celtic and French medieval texts, while the grad students were reading them in medieval mss.

In short: this is a Bowdlerized view of women in I.E. myth that is, in this day and age, embarrassingly wrong.

Scathach is not a witch.
Tiamat is not a witch.
The Morrígan is not a witch.
Medb is not a witch.

All behave as independent individuals. None of them sew.

lilyWhite said:

The Sims is a life simulation game, so doing things that people do in real life is more-or-less the point of the game. (After all, there are Sims games on consoles.) In a game like Heavy Rain which has an actual plot, those sorts of scenes rarely progress the story or provide any meaningful character development. It's why you often don't see characters going to the bathroom in other works of fiction—it's just boring and doesn't contribute to the story.

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A lot of games have repetitive stuff that doesn't really move the story along. For example, if you were writing a thriller or horror movie, you probably wouldn't show the characters getting attacked by monsters or terrorists every time they turned a corner. I love the Uncharted series, but one of the things that annoyed me about the first game was how there were long stretches where you had to fight a ton of bad guys every time you progressed further.

What makes mandatory repetitive combat scenes better than the (mostly optional) ability to let your character do some normal things like eat dinner and talk to the other characters? I imagine to a lot of people, the former is "just fun" because they enjoy combat in games. Well, I think it's "just fun" to make the character explore their environment and interact with it.

Either way, a game has to engage the player somehow in order to be justifiably called a game. A good game manages to balance things so that scenes don't feel like filler. I thought the second and third Uncharted games were good at that. I also thought Heavy Rain was good at that--the "mundane" scenes early in the game where Ethan talks to his son or makes him dinner develop the characters and offer context that helps raise the stakes later in the game.

Medievalist said:

Yeah, no.

This is entirely Jungian, and it's from the Joseph Campbell School Of Ethnocentric Sexist Retellings of Myths Based On Texts Joseph Campbell can't Read.

The only dead language he learned was Latin; while he had an M.A. in English, and specialized in medieval literature, he couldn't even read Middle English well; he makes stupid assertions about Middle English texts in his books and in his lectures.

He used the Victorian translation of the Mabinogi by Lady Charlotte Guest as his text. When he delivered a graduate seminar at UCLA with grad students who were Ph.D. candidates in Folkore and Mythology, it was embarrassing because he kept relying on Victorian translations of Old Norse, Celtic and French medieval texts, while the grad students were reading them in medieval mss.

In short: this is a Bowdlerized view of women in I.E. myth that is, in this day and age, embarrassingly wrong.

Scathach is not a witch.
Tiamat is not a witch.
The Morrígan is not a witch.
Medb is not a witch.

All behave as independent individuals. None of them sew.

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Erm, actually I was basing that on Levi-Strauss as well as modern English translations I've read myself. The "witch" role is a magically powerful antagonist, as opposed to a wealthy politically powerful patriarch opponent such as a father-in-law or older brother of the intended husband. Witches don't even have to be female - Rumplestiltzkin is a witch antagonist. Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and The Little Mermaid are all well-known examples of stories with witch antagonists plus an arranged or fated marriage.

Zoombie said:

I wonder if fixing the gendered divide in video gaming is as easy as including well rounded female characters and not making the marketing exclusionary or sexist.

I'm willing to bet a lot of money on it.

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I'd bet against it, since it doesn't address the problem of theme. How many AAA games with a theme of romance have there ever been in English, once you exclude male-targeted ones like Leisure Suit Larry? Yet the publishing and movie industries show that there is a huge primarily-female market for romance-themed entertainment.
(And personally I'm just as happy with a yaoi game with all male characters, I don't care if there are no female characters.)

The thing is, the lack of female gamers playing certain types of games is a result of problems inherent in the gaming industry and those games themselves, not proof that women just don't like them. I honestly don't believe that women's brains work differently or that there are such exponential differences between men and women that it's impossible to make or market a game that panders to the tastes of both.

Take, for example, the sexualisation of female characters and reverse it. Would heterosexual men want to play a game where every male character was a perfect example of male beauty, had a huge bulge and wore nothing but a tiny thong and some body glitter? Yet the reverse of that is something heterosexual women are expected to suck up if they want to play games. There are exceptions, of course. I think the most recent Bioware games are a good way to show that a game that has strong, well-characterised female characters and that allows you to choose gay and lesbian romances can also be commercially viable.

When I play games I want them to have an interesting universe, interesting story, interesting well-rounded characters, intuitive gameplay and diversity in that gameplay. I also want to be able to shoot or stab enemies in the face. My friends, male and female, seem to have the same criteria for games so I don't think I'm atypical in that regard.

Alessandra Kelley said:

I'm afraid this is reminding me of the US comic book companies' very weird decades-long attempts to get more female readership.

Women comic book readership in the US plummeted after Frederick Wertham's anti-comics crusade in 1954. US comics companies tried to appeal to women and girl readers with what were supposed to be "feminine" interests: romance comics (written and illustrated by guys who carefully catered to all the cultural expectations of What Women Want), cute kiddie comics, fashion comics, pet comics, more romance comics, relationship comics, pretty pretty comics, and women characters stirred into their central superhero comics. This went on for thirty or forty years.

For years I read the comics I enjoyed (generally well-written, interesting, quirky comics, but also some rubbish I just like, can't account for taste) and rolled my eyes at the slow trickle of "pink" titles that came and went.

The US comics companies never managed to get women readers in any numbers. It was Japanese manga that finally got American women regularly reading comics.

In the same vein, this hypothetical game sounds to this particular woman like a catalogue of stereotypical female interests. Pets? Interior design? Stylish clothes? Cute men? Err...

What I like in a game is choice, and not seeing people like me treated like garbage. I don't like being railroaded into combat, but that's because I don't like being railroaded. I don't mind violence in a game as long as I have a choice about what I do.

I don't like being patronized by what someone expects me to like because of my reproductive organs, and I can't get into games (or comics or movies or novels) where all the fun stuff is reserved for one gender and the other is just dragged around by plot expectations.

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Ah, you expressed this a lot more eloquently than I did. Thank you.

DancingMaenid said:

A lot of games have repetitive stuff that doesn't really move the story along. For example, if you were writing a thriller or horror movie, you probably wouldn't show the characters getting attacked by monsters or terrorists every time they turned a corner. I love the Uncharted series, but one of the things that annoyed me about the first game was how there were long stretches where you had to fight a ton of bad guys every time you progressed further.

What makes mandatory repetitive combat scenes better than the (mostly optional) ability to let your character do some normal things like eat dinner and talk to the other characters? I imagine to a lot of people, the former is "just fun" because they enjoy combat in games. Well, I think it's "just fun" to make the character explore their environment and interact with it.

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Fighting enemies is not something a person does in real life. In terms of gameplay, it's a challenge of skill where you have to overcome the difficulty of the enemies you're fighting. Each enemy you defeat gets you closer to your goal, whereas these scenes of making dinner and such are typically inconsequential in the long run.

Anna_Hedley said:

Take, for example, the sexualisation of female characters and reverse it. Would heterosexual men want to play a game where every male character was a perfect example of male beauty, had a huge bulge and wore nothing but a tiny thong and some body glitter? Yet the reverse of that is something heterosexual women are expected to suck up if they want to play games. There are exceptions, of course. I think the most recent Bioware games are a good way to show that a game that has strong, well-characterised female characters and that allows you to choose gay and lesbian romances can also be commercially viable.

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Well, on top of that being an overgeneralization of female characters in video games, there are indeed many games with male characters that are sexualized and made to be attractive. You've pretty much summed up the archetypical male barbarian hero.

After all, stripperiffic outfits aren't the only means to "sexualize" a character.