Gender Inequality in Vid Games industry

[Lyris]

To be fair, if it was on YouTube, I wouldn't be too surprised. I've never seen anything of worth in a Youtube comments section. Even on topics that aren't controversial it just reads like the braying and neighing of barnyard animals. There's no point in having comments turned on if you're not going to read them.

I'm not that surprised that she disabled YouTube comments for the reasons that you state. However, I would genuinely love to see her against her detractors in a one to one debate. From what I've seen, internet feminists are not especially interested in civilized debate.

[Resonance]

http://radicalmadre.com/the-last-of-...t-perspective/ If you want to see what happens when you try to engage a feminist rationally regarding her wrong review of the Last of Us (which she claims is sexist towards women). When people said she obviously had not finished the game and much of what she has said is wrong, she considered it harassment and misogyny. Ignore the article, just read the comments.

The gaming industry has been built by mostly men. Mostly males risked their careers on gaming when it was not popular because they loved it. Mostly males played games when they were not cool and spent their money on gaming. There are women in gaming but the jobs are done mostly by men. Women had the same opportunities to take interest but just had other interests and hobbies.

It would be like the romance novel industry becoming huge, then men complaining they are not represented in romance novels.

[Resonance]

Another thing with that article is that people in 'gaming media' are NOT part of the gaming industry any more than sports reporters are part of the Premier League football teams. These are professional commentators not part of the creative, technical or financial process that is part of making games. If the gaming media vanished, gaming would not change that much.

People are also NOT being harassed by the gaming industry, they are being harassed by the public. Are women unfairly targeted? From what people say it looks so, but that has nothing to do with the people that create games, it is internet assholes. The trolls on the internet are being disingenuously conflated with the gaming industry to add weight to the argument that gaming is inherently anti-woman and needs feminist intervention to counter it's misogyny. What it needs, if it is to more cater to women, is more women to spend money on games targeted towards whatever it is that they want. Social/casual gaming proves that. I seriously doubt that game creators would pass up money because the person spending it does not have a cock.

[Lyris]

http://radicalmadre.com/the-last-of-...t-perspective/ If you want to see what happens when you try to engage a feminist rationally

Let me guess - rather than address the points raised in the debate, they go into victim mode and accuse the critical commenter of "mansplaining", right?

Many times where I've gotten into a discussion with a feminist, I'm told that I am "mansplaining". Apparently that word originated from know-it-all men who acted as if being male made them the authority on any given subject (even if the woman actually happened to be a genuine expert); now it's just a word that feminists use as shorthand for "be quiet, you're a man, your opinion on this subject isn't valid, PS I feel victimized by you correcting me". It more often happens if the man writes with some level of eloquence or with punctuation, from my observation it usually just means you raised a good point and you raised it politely.


Edit: yep, that's in there. Who'da thunk? That little trendy phrase always comes out in place of any actual debate.

[randombs]

Mansplaining. I love it

As for that article, are there LoU spoilers in it? I want to read it but am still near the beginning of the game.

[Resonance]

Yes there are spoilers. They are also in the comments.

[randombs]

Thanks!

I'll keep off of it, then.

[Asura]

On the whole, women and girls were not interested in video gaming until recently.

I know it's hard to believe, but this is not true. Many people believe it, but it's just not the case.

According to a U.S. national survey done in 2004 by the Entertainment Software Association, 25 percent of console players and 39 percent of PC game players were women.

Although boys and male adolescents appear as regular gamers in self-report investigations of the frequency of gaming in schoolchildren, even studies from the early and mid 1990s suggest that a large percentage of females report playing computer games for approximately 1-2 hours a week. For example, Funk [16] found that 75% of females, compared with 90% of males played computer games in the home and Colwell
et al. [9] showed that 88% of the 12-14 year old females surveyed played computer games on a regular basis. Similarly, contemporary research reported by Interactive Digital Software Association. (IDSA) [27] suggests that 43% of US gamers are female

That second one is from this paper: http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uplo...5164.00312.pdf

Also, the studies it quotes are from the 90s (I remember them being on the news at the time, and even then, people were saying "nah that can't be true"). Also worth remembering that the "mobile, casual" space of gaming didn't really exist then (today, when people talk about the 50/50 gender spit in gaming, it's easy to say that many of those women are playing 2 Facebook games and not much else to dismiss it).

Going back to the genesis of gaming; Pong, Pac-Man, the golden age of arcades, gaming was very gender-neutral. Pong, at the end-of-the-day, is digitised air hockey, and appealed to both genders equally. Early video games were as popular with women as with men.

The difference comes with computers and some of the stuff that surrounded them. Those women who would've got into gaming and computing at the time were often victims of social pressure (from other women, as well as men) to not take that interest further, as it was heavily focused on computer assembly (an important part of computing at the time) which wasn't so much seen as masculine but rather un-feminine.

Fast-forward a few years, and the industry hit on a formula for selling video games to a specific demographic - males aged 12-18, which eventually widened to 18-and-up, and they stuck to it fairly well, with the only games that were particularly gender-neutral being those for younger children.

Throughout the history of gaming, there have been prolific female contributors to the field who've worked at various levels. Just to pluck one example out of the air, at one point, the UK's highest-paid woman was the CEO of Gremlin Interactive. Often the contribution of these women was glossed over, though, because it was advantageous for companies to maintain the male-dominated image for their own PR.

We're now in a very different situation, where we have women who've grown up in a different social climate, who have a greater freedom to be the people they want to be. Many of them are into video games, but are put off because arguably the biggest entertainment industry is still very much pitched toward men (except on iOS).

This leads onto the comment about romance novels - you know that the romance novel industry IS well-staffed with men, right? You think those authors with female names are all actually women? Plus plenty work in publishing. Also, you're right in that if romance novels were as massive as the video games industry, people would probably scrutinise them more - but they aren't.

If you're a guy and you've grown up with the women in your life rolling their eyes at your silly, childish hobby, you're not going to react well when they later change their minds and say "we want to be a part of this but we don't like the way we're represented".

The women doing that, though, aren't the ones who rolled their eyes at you. They tend to be under-30, and have only really known "modern" video games in their lifetime (I don't mean they're not into retro; naturally some are! Just the SNES wasn't contemporary at any point in their life).

I'm not trying to claim that videogame development has always been split evenly among the genders; all I'm trying to say is that there have been a good proportion of female gamers and game developers for as long as the industry has been an industry, and this isn't about some woman, who's hated video games all her life, turning round and now trying to spoil your fun, now that they're "kind of a big deal". It's a totally different, nuanced situation.

Instead, it's about accepting that if the industry wants to grow, it needs to try and be more inclusive and appeal to new consumers. There's no reason to stop making BulletShootSexBMXVengeance 5, or whatever - just that doesn't have to be the mainstay of the industry.

Charlie Brooker put it really well - "there are still too many games where you play as a 20-something bloke with with a dick, a gun, and ****-all else of interest".

[nakamura]

While I think games are wonderfully clich?d and do feature the same sterotypical women, what does this fremfreq woman actually want? The complete removal of all negative displays against women in games?

[teddymeow]

I'd rather read nice things like this:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/day-o...-made?s=mobile

Haha!! That Rock picture is epic.

I also found 16 & 24 rather chuckle worthy.

[Lyris]

Very interesting point about "male gaming" being tied to hardware maintenance, thanks!

I know it's hard to believe, but this is not true. Many people believe it, but it's just not the case.

I stand corrected, all I can really say is that this was the case with me (anecdotal evidence isn't evidence, of course).

[Asura]

Very interesting point about "male gaming" being tied to hardware maintenance, thanks!

I stand corrected, all I can really say is that this was the case with me (anecdotal evidence isn't evidence, of course).

This was the case with most of us (myself included) until I did some research on it for reasons I don't recall back in around 2005. There's a reason that paper linked is called "the invisible female gamer", or something like that. It's not an unreasonable thing to think, despite not being true.

Perception is a funny thing. There's a really good article doing the rounds online about how most "medieval fantasy" movies tend to only feature white characters, usually on the creative logic that they're set in a fantasy version of medieval England, where the population was entirely white. Many people in the UK would probably think this reasonable, as we've always grown up with this image of middle-ages England being like this, whereas in reality, it's false.

https://www.press.jhu.edu/timeline/sel/Bartels_2006.pdf

This is one isolated example, but it's about Queen Elizabeth I writing a letter asking whether it would be possible deport the black population of the UK, suggesting they're responsible for crimes. It suggests that even those of high society were aware, daily, of a reasonable proportion of black people in British society as early as 1600. That's a fair bit after the medieval era, but even if you go further back, there are loads of examples which depict the same thing; that if you think you could go back in time and eventually find an era where England was not a multi-racial nation, you're probably wrong (it's just the relative quantities that have changed).

It might seem unrelated, but it's all part of the same thing - it's very easy to think of something as a self-evident truth, but for it to be false. It happens all the time.

[saif]

Nice background Asura. I am always wary of "common sense". Common sense is to say the earth is flat - you can rarely see the horizon. Lyris, you are quite right! The plural of anecdote isn't data ;-)

The people that mocked/were surprised by my gaming as a youth were older women, and older men. There was never really a gender split, and almost all women I know played games when I was young - the difference is that they did not talk about it all the time and had to pretend otherwise. In fact, in many ways they liked it in spite of how it would not allow them to be so open about it.

[Guts]

I'd be more worried about the casual portraying of men in video games as soulless cannon-fodder than the occasional portrayal of violence towards women. Or are these feminists saying that games should portray only violence against males, meaning that women are so inferior that they cannot handle fictional violence against female characters? Because to me, that is way more sexist than showing a female prostitute get beaten in a video game.

[Profit]

Overall men tend to be more offended when their heterosexuality is questioned, hence we do not see sexual objectification of male characters as much. Even feminising male characters draws as much critical remarks as the promotion of feminism in games.