I'm reminded of a story from my high school days. After years of male dominance girls finally started to appear in the ranks of the marching band (unlike the stereotype, South African school and brass bands are usually a fairly rough crowd). The bandmaster once mused on this with me, reflecting on the girls that made it happen. Basically, it took a few tough girls who were willing to take the space with a take no prisoners attitude.

As much as gaming is a commercial culture, the inherent male cutlure won't change until women start getting agressive about seeing more of what they want in the industry. Don't expect the guys to change their ways - we are often blind to the persuits of others.

Posted by: Noogle on January 27, 2005 03:35 AM

My friend Sarah is an engineer here at EA, and works on Ultima Online. She's also very involved in the women-in-gaming and girls-in-math-and-science. She has a blog where she talks about this stuff.

One thing that comes to mind that she was telling me about when she first started doing outreach to middle- and high school girls interested in the math and sciences is that most of the women who get involved in this sort of thing are either educators or journalists. While this is all well and good, like Noogle says above, people need to know that trails are already being blazed in these industries. Unless you happen to live near Silicon Valley, it can look like it's just women on the outside trying to convince girls to be the first penguins in the water.

Posted by: ClockworkGrue on January 27, 2005 09:39 AM

Jane,

Personally, female gamers don't bother me any more than female teachers, astronauts, movie directors or anything else because, to put it bluntly, I am not an undersocialized, misogynist he-doofus.

The sexism in question is part and parcel of the "cool teen dude" moronification of the gaming scene that has been underway since (at least) the early '90s.

At this point, the "kool d00dz" hivemind is so well entrenched that women who hope to reform the gaming scene through argument, logic and appeals to "fairness" are shouting down a well. By now, pretty much every guy capable of appreciating your dilemma already does.

Also, let's face it, the kind of (young, male, stupid) gamers drawn to the hivemind FAR outnumber those of us who are aged/mature enough to know things can be otherwise. Game companies know that marketing to juvenile male sexism sells.

There is no alternative, methinks, to women simply entering the ranks of game creation and making changes by fiat.

All the email campaigns and public shaming you or I could muster don't equal the power of one highly-placed female game industry exec putting her foot down and saying, "Hey guys, about your proposed adverts... you know, the ones featuring huge-breasted women licking gun barrels?"

"Over my dead body. Go back and try again."

Posted by: BrainFromArous on January 27, 2005 09:57 AM

We won't get more women in the industry if things keep going the way they are. There's this endless cycle where games are made for boys, girls don't play games, don't get excited about them, then don't want to work on them. I think all the new university game development programs will just add to the fanboy-ness of it all.

I didn't want to make a really long post, so I got blogarific instead: Athena's Legacy

Posted by: Saralah on January 27, 2005 07:44 PM

As a guy, one of the weirdest things I've noticed is girls who love videogames, but don't really classify themselves as "gamers." And I'm not saying "they play Tetris every now and again." I have a female friend who plays Age of Empires 2 all the time - but since she doesn't like anything but historical strategy games, and thus doesn't consider herself a gamer. I know another girl who has played just about every adventure game under the sun, from Zork to King's Quest to Grim Fandango and on. But she's told me that "videogames" are guns and blood, while she enjoys interactive adventures. Etc, etc.

What I'm getting at is, much like comic books and pen & paper role-playing gmaes, people who enjoy the hobby and the hobbyists are two very different beasts. "Gamer" still has the old connotation of a male teenaged loser, who looks somewhat like a younger me but with better hair. And the "videogame" still has the connotation in common language of some fantasy/sci-fi super-violent, brainless shoot 'em up. I've noticed non-gamers who play videogames refer very specifically to the games they play and the genres they enjoy over the term "videogames."

The first step the game industry needs to take to get women is to adjust their advertising. If they want to continue selling sex, let's get a little beef-cake (while girls in games are always D-cups, men in games are always 6-packed hotties) in the media advertising for games.

Furthermore, the majority of women I know who play videogames enjoy games that involve some form of strategic thinking. Everything form Zuma to AOE to The Longest Journey seem to appeal to my female friends because there's a payoff for careful thinking and decisive action. I don't want to stereotype, as I know that there are all women Counter-Strike teams (although, the way the media sexualizes them is a subject that should be discussed at a later time), but I'd go so far as to say that women expect a better mental payoff in their games than men do.

(takes a breath after making no sense)

On a hopeful front, it appears that many women are working in the independent text-adventure field.

Posted by: Mike on January 27, 2005 10:18 PM

I think that the problem is everything that's already been mentioned and then a little bit more. There's a difference between understanding that women might a) want to play games and b) be put off by the existing culture/advertising/bloodfest/teenage hivemind, but something else entirely to change the games themselves.

Even if you're the gaming exec who decides that this huge untapped market needs, um, tapping, then what do you do? Who do you tell? The same development teams that are churning out the existing games, right?

I think there's a couple of ways that this will go. Either (like in the sailing world) someone will start a women-only games development company, take the market by storm, and develop a healthy pool of female developers for the existing companies to hire once they recover from their panic attacks. Or diversity initiatives within the existing companies will start hiring more women and with a bit of executive sponsorship something good might come of it.

Either that or we'll see something like a cooperative open-source gaming-for-girls development revolution which will take everyone by surprise (except of course all you lovely people reading my comment now) ;-)

I would agree with Noogle, though, that the first stage of any of these will be someone taking a stand -- starting the company, starting the diversity programme or going out and starting the open-source revolution. It's going to be interesting to see which, if any, of these plays out.

[PS. Why is the commenting form a different colour scheme to the rest of the site? ]

Posted by: Meri on January 29, 2005 04:29 AM

why aren't marketers/game developers doing something about it?
Marketers is the rub right there. Marketers often only implement their strategy around the existing numbers of a market. Sure, they'd like to ideally bring more customers into the fray, but not at the expense of the surefire sale. And that usually involves something disgusting like barely-anatomically correct boobs.

Is there something systemically wrong with the industry that prevents this very normal, not-that-hard-to-grasp feedback from reaching the people in charge?
The life of a game developer (and keep in mind, most of them are still males) involves living, breathing, and thinking games. I doubt that they even consider concerns such as "broadening my audience" while developing the game. The buck lies elsewhere, with the publishers.

Wouldn't you think that game developers would cease designing sexist rubbish if more of them were told "we can't publish this, we'll need you to go back and redo it"? But of course they wouldn't. They can count on an audience that will only think in terms of detail of pixellation, or worse.

As a general rule, I'm against market regulations, but sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't do us some good if, at least temporarily, someone else took control of the rating system and made it meaningful and its provisions enforceable, for once.

Is there some natural resistance on the part of game developers themselves?
See above.

Are artists somehow genetically incapable of designing breasts smaller than D cup?
Historically, no. The artistic ideals of what women should look like are usually uniform in any given time period, but they do change over the centuries. We just happen to be stuck in a period gravitating towards the ideal of the 20 inch waist and 44 inch bust. =[

Is all this talk of "what do women really want" merely lip service?
Isn't it always, though?

Moreover... The problem is not just about the lack of gender perspective in game development, it's also the fact that developers have moved away from making entertaining short games towards a more comprehensive goal of building virtual worlds.

Even as a geekish girl gamer (to this day, when I'm nearing my thirties), I've found myself forced to scale back on gaming. I don't buy a lot of games I would love to play these days, because simply put I'd have to justify setting aside a substantial amount of time in my day/week/month to play, and I'm finding it hard as it is to have enough time reconciling doing the non-gaming things I want do with doing the things I ought to do, or can't escape doing.

When you create games that require more than a couple of hours to finish, you're going to invariably end up restricting yourself to that audience that can spend every weeknight and weekend reliously playing them. And socially akward teenage boys (with the occasionally female counterpart) is probably it, insofar as that goes.

Posted by: turandot on January 30, 2005 11:52 AM

It's all about the money i think. Boys and boobs, blood and guns has provided companies with a lisence to print money in the past, and they are ever-so scared of having their product suck. which is ridiculous really, because you look at the top performing games, and they appeal to both sexes.
I thought that turandot's comment about the lenght of games was really interesting too. I would love to play WoW or one of those persistent world games... but i dont have the time... and you need to play for what... a bazillion hours before your character stops dying while attacking whatever rat is running around... and before you can even do anything half-way cool. There is no way i am having my Canadian Dollars turned into US Gaming Dollars and taken off my already stretched credit card.
That is a nice thing about the sims... you can leave it and come back and it's not like 40 other people have moved into the neighbourhood and now your house sucks, and you're no longer the mayor.

The whole treatment in-store is frustrating if you want to even look into getting a game.
I went over to EB a few weeks ago, and was poking around with my guy, and the little zit-faced 16 year old store boy comes over and starts asking HIM what game he is looking for. Let's examine this situation. I am the one with 3 games in my hand, reading the backs, he is standing around looking un-interested.
My guy says "I am not looking for a game"
clerk: "you're just browsing then?" (looking confused)
him: "no... she's looking for a game"
clerk: "oh..." *walks away*
WALKS AWAY?
TAKE MY MONEY!!
What is wrong with you.

For christ sake. I am 25, i am not going to make u tell me about Barbie's shopping mall madness or whatever other title's font is in pink.
Good god. No wonder girls get pissed. It would make me feel great to ransack an EB, because they'd never assume that me, a girl, would know what to do in there.

Posted by: Girl_from_Mars on February 1, 2005 06:57 AM

Try being a fem pushing 50, shopping for games for yourself. Or trying to read gaming mags. (Given the look and tone of the rag, I must be the entire token pre-menopausal readership of Computer Gaming World.) I've been doing adventure/RPGs since Zork on an Apple II. In spite of that I still feel like an alien. Complete with the third eye in the middle of the forehead.

I'm either stared at or invisible in stores, patronized and belittled when I mention gaming to guys, grit my teeth reading the mags, and am finding less and less out there to play that's of interest.

There have BEEN attempts to do girlgames. I've bought some for my daughters (Nancy Drew games were among te best); but they're so clearly girl-ghetto games that it's hard to get even gaming girls interested in them.

I agree with the above - give me a story beyond a list of fetch-mes. Give me puzzles to figure out (beyond that cliche click on this and turn out two adjacent lights nonsense). Give me feedback beyond achieving a higher body count or splat ratio. And tone down using sex to tart up the attention level or sell the thing because frankly at this point I'm sick of half-naked gun toting bimbos both on screen and in print. Do these things and stop advertising to the choir, and I assure you that fems of all ages will sniff after instead of at the genre.

Posted by: rotangus on February 1, 2005 02:11 PM