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

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DarthLolita

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Nothing degrading about giving players the option to put traditional makeup on their female characters. But would it kill them to simply make the same options (make up, scars, war paint, tattoos, piercings or whatever) available for both genders? Even if more players opt to give their male avatars scars and their female ones eyeshadow, not everyone will. A full range of choices will make the game appeal to a wider variety of players.

Oh I definitely agree, but I was responding to a poster who seemed to imply make-up on a female character was somehow a terrible thing. I liked having those options, and would love to have a lot more for all the genders. (Particularly because make-up isn't impractical. It's not the same as skimpy armor or twenty-inch heels. It's just a nice little addition).
 

kuwisdelu

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Wiseman polled male children regarding what made someone "strong." Height, emotional detachment, athleticism, popularity with women, and skill at video games (short of being obsessed) were some of the answers she got. Those characteristics are the contents of the "act like a man box," said Wiseman, and they read like a direct description of a certain hero from an insanely popular science fiction franchise who wears green power armor and fights aliens.

If Master Chief expressed fear rather than always being a tough guy, he could be used as a tool to teach boys that they can accept themselves as emotionally nuanced people, Wiseman argued. If boys' only acceptable emotional outlet is anger, which is "strong," that anger leads to hate, which helps feed into the homophobia and sexism which is endemic in the video game audience. Emotional openness is the antidote to that, she said.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/03/how-to-break-games-out-of-the-act-like-a-man-box/
 

Satsya

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If Master Chief expressed fear rather than always being a tough guy, he could be used as a tool to teach boys that they can accept themselves as emotionally nuanced people, Wiseman argued. If boys' only acceptable emotional outlet is anger, which is "strong," that anger leads to hate, which helps feed into the homophobia and sexism which is endemic in the video game audience. Emotional openness is the antidote to that, she said.
http://thepunchlineismachismo.com/archives/comic/but-mental-illness-is-so-cool-and-enviable

Seriously though, that arstechnica article is depressing. Expectations like those hurt everyone. I do agree with the panelists that airing out these bad habits can give us the needed kick up our arses to improve as a culture.
 

VeryBigBeard

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I love this thread but I am so very, very late to it. I honestly stopped checking the Games forum because nothing ever happens in here that relates to game writing, which I do. I don't know how many other game writers are on this site, but hello!

Anyway, some thoughts:

AAA games have a money problem right now. VWS's statement (on page 5, see above re: late to thread) is actually kinda accurate. I'm working on projects even at the student level where the entire narrative gets cut for scope. I sigh and fire it in documentation so hopefully someone can do something with it later. We just don't have time before deadline. Developing stories, approving concepts, editing--it all takes time and, as everyone on this site knows about every type of writing, is really hard. Selling story in games to higher-ups (or even teammates) who either don't think it's important or don't know that a story is about more than a male revenge fantasy plot is frustratingly difficult. Threads like this give me a lot of hope that story in games is valued. It's a culture change that has to happen but I'm sympathetic to AAA studios that increasingly need insane financial returns to even have a hope of keeping the operation afloat. The level of depth people expect in games combined with current graphical standards mean that producing a single asset for a console game really does cost thousands, if not millions. As a writer I'm always wanting to "just add a character" to take care of that, or fuse characters, or perform any number of storytelling tricks--but even to fuse a character would have a catastrophic effect on a game pipeline. So it has to be proposed early. Mostly I wish studios would not just think about story early in the process but also vet it early in the process. Even then, it's going to change at some point in development. Sure games are stories. They're also games, aural experiences, improvisation, and visual installations. That union to me is their power and potential but it makes the creative meetings kind of delicate. Writers sometimes lose. Even often, because writing is still less established in game culture than art.

/end rant. Sorta.

Point being this isn't an easy thing to do. I love games with depth and story. Zelda, Final Fantasy, Dragon Age, Ace Combat, Mass Effect, and so on. So I believe that it can be done. There is a lot of interesting indie work that uses story in innovative ways. The problem I have with indie is that the innovation sometimes saps actual enjoyment, and smaller teams and budgets and lower scope and graphics quality means the full experience I like in AAA games isn't there.

I don't want to wade too much into the gender-in-games subject because I'm a white, heterosexual male with no real knowledge to talk about it. I know I value games that subvert the oppressive, stereotypically masculine display currently offered. There are exceptions--again Zelda, parts of Bioware's stuff, a lot of indie games--but a lot of these aren't "girl games" or LGBTQ games per se, though they do exist and have their spheres, I think. Good games are good games. I know that's reductionist. But Zelda isn't a game girls might like because it doesn't have 40kg submachine guns. It's a game anyone who likes puzzles, exploring, and precise strategy can enjoy. I think it can be dangerous to get into considering demographics as "for girls 12-25" because really, is a game mechanic, on a cognitive level, for girls 12-25? And Zelda is successful because it is, mostly, marketed to that mechanic not to stereotypes. Mostly.

There are games for girls. There are games for people who like mountains. There are games for people who like gardens (if you're interested in my prototype...). None of these are right/wrong. Just saying "for girls" demands further explanation, though, and is probably too broad a brush to be a proper part of any qualitative persona. Some marketing uses personas. Some doesn't. I wish more would. Culture change needed.

Even the debate alone is good and thank goodness it gets some more people in the Games forum. But there are SO many issues wrapped up in all of these things. The much-needed culture change probably won't happen until the AAA business model is fixed. That may involve the rise of the indies, if the hype is to be believed. Better stories are needed in games, but a lot of that comes down to the skill of particular producers/project managers in setting up teams where it can thrive even in competition with other creative areas, but they won't be hired in volume until the business model is stable. Game development is stressful enough that folks deserve to be paid for it. Same as publishing a book.

All the usual caveats apply. I am not by any means experienced in games. I only know what I've seen as a player and as someone currently learning the art of developing them, faced with trying to get a job in six months time.
 
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Alessandra Kelley

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I'm not sure the idea is games "for girls" so much as including options in games so that they are not so lopsidedly "for guys", which a remarkable number of them seem to be.

There's nothing like being in a disregarded group for being able to see just how dramatically things are skewed towards the regarded group. It's like how women are only 17% of the figures in crowd scenes in movies, but someone had to actually count them to get people to take notice.

I sympathize with the whole budget complexity thing, believe me. I imagine trying to put in stories after the game design gets rolling is a logistical nightmare.

But it seems to me that asking for at least one female character with the same abilities and affect as all those male characters is not asking for all that much. For example.
 

kuwisdelu

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I don't think anyone here is really asking for "girl games."

Just that games aren't so straightforwardly hostile to gamers who happen to be girls.

I remember when Pokemon: Crystal first came out and it was the first Pokemon game that let you choose whether to be a boy or a girl.

I chose to be a girl.
 

kuwisdelu

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I don't remember if anyone posted this story before, but here is a moving story about a father who hacked Wind Waker and bit-by-bit (literally) edited the whole script to change Link into a girl for his daughter.

It's frustrating that stuff like this is has to happen.
 

Zoombie

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That is one damn fine father.

But yeah, unless there is a good reason, choosing the gender of your character seems to be logical to me.
 

VeryBigBeard

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I'm not sure the idea is games "for girls" so much as including options in games so that they are not so lopsidedly "for guys", which a remarkable number of them seem to be.

There's nothing like being in a disregarded group for being able to see just how dramatically things are skewed towards the regarded group. It's like how women are only 17% of the figures in crowd scenes in movies, but someone had to actually count them to get people to take notice.

I sympathize with the whole budget complexity thing, believe me. I imagine trying to put in stories after the game design gets rolling is a logistical nightmare.

But it seems to me that asking for at least one female character with the same abilities and affect as all those male characters is not asking for all that much. For example.

Absolutely agree.

And I probably wasn't clear enough when I was writing late last night: I don't think saying any game is "for girls" is an adequate descriptor. The question of representing not just women but all minorities better in games extends beyond simple tags. Designers have to be aware of the choices they make. Which is a point I think that Polygon article made very well, and which I made a mess of rehashing.

And I qualified Zelda for a reason, too. Link is male, the story is still marketed as a typical hero's journey, save-the-world quest (which is getting tired no matter which gender one is), and some of the earlier games especially have legit issues with Zelda's portrayal (later ones have at least attempted to subvert it, with varying success).

All games have story inherently because the player creates her own as she plays. The nature of that story, its narrative cohesion, and how well the game reacts to player agency is the purview of the design team. How much the design team knows about the craft of storytelling varies. It's not just writers who are needed. It's people who understand the craft of what writers do with words. There isn't a word in Journey, but it's a terrific story perfectly meshed with its gameplay.
 

kuwisdelu

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Another great article.

“I’ve always felt like I was a part of gaming, because the people who raised me always made sure I felt welcome in play,” said UC Santa Cruz game design student Lauren Scott. She told a story of a particularly nerdy upbringing, and she showed photos of her and her younger sister hunched over a game of King’s Quest. “Up until recently, the worldwide gaming audience was completely black and completely female,” she quipped.

Her father, a coder at Oracle, made sure his daughters had computer access at a young age, but he also did them one better: “Instead of resigning himself to the fact that a young, black, female protagonist might not come around for many years of gaming, he took the tools at his disposal and made this.” Scott gestured to an image of a 1997 Java-coded game her father made starring his daughter. “At five years old, I knew a black girl could be a character in games.”

Though the day’s conversations were highly proactive—full of high-minded ideas and calls to action—frustration and discontent bubbled up, and deservedly so. Most panelists included either a slide or a reference to nasty, anti-diversity comments, made either online or by real-life encounters. Macklin sighed at men in an industry-insider site's comments section trying to explain away why more women didn’t work at their companies: “The discrimination has to do with their ability to perform the task at hand; programming doesn’t interest many females; gender and sexual preference is an issue, but it’s being overplayed.”

It’s not. Two of my game-industry peers told me they were aggressively spoken to and groped at this year’s GDC by total strangers. No matter how much work, effort, genius, and creativity they put into their work, they still left GDC having to question whether they attended as game designers or as objects at the mercy of the conference’s men.

It wasn’t until Kiai found the browser-based RPG Fallen London at the age of 25 that they felt a tinge of inclusion at being allowed to choose “person of mysterious and indistinct gender” as a character option. “I didn’t have to be a defective woman or a defective man. Just myself.” From there, Kiai rode a wave of other game makers defecting from an unsavory games industry to make their own games, and in Kiai’s case, it was one they could pour newfound feelings of identity into.

The takeaway, Kiai said, was that other men and women could create more inclusion in the industry, a larger safe space in which big and small studios increase their diversity, without sweeping any of the anger, frustration, or disappointment under a giant, digital rug.

“Authentic, true, and weird,” Kiai said. “That shouldn’t just be okay, but important.”
 
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