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How did boys/men become a core target audience for gaming?

Bedlam

Member
They totally can. But that doesn't change the fact that, at the end of the day, every single piece of marketing for that game is going to be geared at 12-28 year old boys.

If there are girls and women who enjoy those games, from a pure marketing standpoint, it is nothing more than a happy coincidence. But 90% of the time, women aren't even a consideration when it comes time to sell your game.
Let's put the marketing aside ... I somehow doubt that games like Gears appeal to girls to the same degree as boys. It's not purely a marketing problem.
 

TSM

Member
What's funny is that the situation has drastically changed in the mobile era, but since mobile gaming as a whole is considered lesser people have trouble seeing it. Women aren't playing 'real' games or something. I'm not sure why people expect women to join in the male dominated home console space when their needs appear to be served adequately by the mobile space. We are heading towards parity of a sorts even if gender representation isn't evenly distributed on all platforms.
 

Dio

Banned
Some would tell you it's Sony's fault with the PS1 marketing blitz. They attempted to completely reinvent gaming as being the 'cool thing' and targeted their stuff straight at guys and young boys.

I mean, I don't think that's everything, but a lot of people attribute that as at least one factor.
 

Kilau

Gold Member
What about arcades? I remember a few that had a bad "rep" lol, almost like a sleezy bar versus the more family minded ones you could take your younger sister in.
 

This is a good video, but it's putting too much on the "Nintendo decided to market to boys" as if it was a coin flip and they randomly chose boys instead of girls.

There isn't a lot of accessible historical data to comb through because it was still a niche industry in the 70s and 80s, but by 1982, there were two sociological studies that found that videogame arcades and videogame industry favored males over females by about 80/20 and 70/30.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0022-3840.1983.1701_93.x/abstract

https://www.worldcat.org/search?fq=x0:jrnl&q=n2:0033-2941

For some perspective, the 70% male and 30% female split is far more than it is today and throughout much of the last 15 years, where the industry is generally a 55/45 M/F split in the US (give or take).

The videogame crash that forced Nintendo to market the NES as a toy, rather than a pricey entertainment or technology device, contributed to the male stigma of gaming, but Nintendo made that choice because males played more videogames than females well before the NES was released in the United States.
 

Nirolak

Mrgrgr
In general, it was seen as much easier to sell technological toys to boys in the era when video game consoles started.

Similarly, 18-35 year old males were still seen as the primary spending demographic for luxury goods in 2006, so last generation targeted them heavily.

However, you will notice that Western publishers are starting to go in heavily on trying to appeal more to both women and minorities with their products, even if they're first person shooters, because the market is seen quite differently. You even see ultra large action adventure film franchises like Star Wars are being heavily targeted at women now, whereas there was a total of two women in the first movie, one of whom was on screen for a few seconds.
 

nOoblet16

Member
So here's my theory, it's primarily because when it came to toys Girls would get Dolls while boys would get cars.

We just ended up being better at making electric powered toy cars than we did at Dolls, which lead to boys being targeted for any electrical toy. Video games in particular were considered toys in the early days...electrical toys specifically and that meant it became a boys thing. There's also the fact that girls mature quicker and as such they didn't want to associate with "toys" when they grew up further disconnecting then from the medium.

Over time these guys who play games would get interested in the industry and make games, the games they made targeted audience similar to themselves...which happened to be boys. As such it became a guy thing.


It's a bit different now though because video games are not considered toys by everyone now and people give slightly less of a shit about what's a boys thing and what's a girls thing.
 

Raist

Banned
They totally can. But that doesn't change the fact that, at the end of the day, every single piece of marketing for those games is going to be geared at 12-28 year old boys.

If there are girls and women who enjoy those games, from a pure marketing standpoint, it is nothing more than a happy coincidence. But 90% of the time, women aren't even a consideration when it comes time to sell your game.

It's one of the big lessons the industry is going to have to learn. Just having a female protag doesn't mean the game is geared towards women or has female appeal.

OK so, how is this targeting men specifically:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0eUCEQKpLI

Conversely, what would a women-focused shooter marketing campaign look like?
Like, sell me a pitch. Your job is to sell CoD to women.
 

emb

Member
They totally can. But that doesn't change the fact that, at the end of the day, every single piece of marketing for those games is going to be geared at 12-28 year old boys.

If there are girls and women who enjoy those games, from a pure marketing standpoint, it is nothing more than a happy coincidence. But 90% of the time, women aren't even a consideration when it comes time to sell your game.

It's one of the big lessons the industry is going to have to learn. Just having a female protag doesn't mean the game is geared towards women or has female appeal.
That raises the additional question though, outside of the obvious sex appeal angle, what makes the marketing specifically geared to boys?

Let's put the marketing aside ... I somehow doubt that games like Gears appeal to girls to the same degree as boys. It's not purely a marketing problem.
Agreed. And I think it's that the marketing is reflective of the game. "We know this game appeals to boys so we're marketing it to boys." Or further, "we made this game to be marketable to boys and we're going to market it that way."

Some of it can be pinned on most main characters being male probably. But it's an aggregate thing. A developer isn't wrong to use a male character, nor any one game maker do much to move the ratio closer to 50/50.
 

Mesoian

Member
What's funny is that the situation has drastically changed in the mobile era, but since mobile gaming as a whole is considered lesser people have trouble seeing it. Women aren't playing 'real' games or something. I'm not sure why people expect women to join in the male dominated home console space when their needs appear to be served adequately by the mobile space. We are heading towards parity of a sorts even if gender representation isn't evenly distributed on all platforms.

The most interesting thing about mobile is that before these games started making millions of dollars a day and the female demographic started flocking to them, the majority of the advertising for these games was fairly innocuous and unpointed. Now that they've hit the big time, the television ads are all super testosterone charged, Arnold banging down doors while a nearly topless Kate Upton leads knights into battle; the only middle ground being things like clash of clans which simply aim at young boys instead of teenaged or twenty something year olds.
 
Video games pre Playstation 2 was a nerdy activity. It was something nerds and geeks did who were also into building computers and playing dungeons and dragons and reading comic books. And in all of these activities it was dominated by males. Face it, up until recently boys and girls sections were separate because that was how genders was viewed.
Blaming all this on Nintendo is unfair. They are a symptom, not a root cause. Marketing and branding they hired were dictated by norms and values at the time.
 

prag16

Banned
Friend of mine showed me this a couple of days ago

That's pretty much the reason OP lol

I don't know, that video seems mostly reasonable, but also seems to make a few logical leaps.

Do we have any real proof that these millions of women playing shallow phone games are really insatiably itching for full scale console/PC experiences, but just don't really know it yet?

If there was really this vast totally untapped market, we don't think these huge profit hungry companies would be trying to capitalize?
 
Probably because the early IT industry was severely male-dominated. That's where the first game developers grew out of after all ... young men making the kinds of games they would want to play ... yadda yadda. This "dominance" has carried over to this day.

So no, boys/men haven't become the primary target audience - they always were.

And unfortunately, change takes time and it's also dependent on changes happening in the IT field in general.

Early IT industry had women programmers. The world's first programmer (1842-3) was Ada Lovelace, who came up with the algorithms for the Analytical Engine which was the theoretical foundation for the modern computer.

ada-lovelace.jpg


History of the Computer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPDy2y4AjSo&t=9m40s

Grace Murray Hopper, grandmother of COBOL (1945)
149300-004-D49D0778.jpg


Pioneering Women in Computer Science: http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/csep590/06au/readings/p175-gurer.pdf

Her time is when "bugs" and "debugging" were coined, because an actual bug (moth) caused a relay to fail.

"third programmer on the world's first large-scale digital computer."​

While Hopper was working on the Mark II in the summer of 1945 under the command of Aiken, an unlucky moth caused a relay to fail. Hopper and the other programmers taped the deceased moth in the logbook with a note, "First actual case of bug being found," which is currently on display at the Naval Museum in Dahlgren, Virg Aiken had the habit of coming into the room and asking, "Are you making any numbers?" Now, during a slow time, the programmers could reply that they were "debugging" the computer, thus introducing this term into computing language.​

1946:
Jean Bartik and the ENIAC women: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPweFhhXFvY
marlyn_wescoff_meltzer.png

In 1946 six brilliant young women (Betty Snyder Holberton, Jean Jennings Barik, Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum and Frances Bilas Spence) programmed the first all-electronic, programmable computer, the ENIAC, a project run by the U.S. Army in Philadelphia as part of a secret World War II project. They learned to program without programming languages or tools (for none existed)—only logical diagrams. By the time they were finished, ENIAC ran a ballistics trajectory perfectly! Yet when the ENIAC was unveiled to the press and the public in 1946, the women were never introduced… and their story was lost for decades.

Some of the first videogames had prominent women behind them. The Adam Ruins Everything video above covers them. Atari's Carol Shaw (3D Tic Tac Toe in 1980), Centipede creator Donna Bailey, and of course Roberta Williams for adventure games (1984). If it weren't for Roberta, we wouldn't have storytelling in videogames.

The Most Important Women in the History of Video Games
 
It's one of the big lessons the industry is going to have to learn. Just having a female protag doesn't mean the game is geared towards women or has female appeal.

It's a tough nut to crack because some genres, just like movies, aren't going to lend themselves well to mass appeal. Devs will need to choose their target and as a result will limit their market. Targeting a mass audience or just a female one with an FPS, for example, would not only be relatively difficult but also a huge fiscal gamble. Luckily, for games such as Garden Warfare, it has made some headway.
 

Mesoian

Member
OK so, how is this targeting men specifically:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0eUCEQKpLI

Conversely, what would a women-focused shooter marketing campaign look like?
Like, sell me a pitch. Your job is to sell CoD to women.

If I were going to sell CoD to women, I'd focus less on how large of a bodycount I can squeeze into 30 seconds and perhaps talk a little bit more about the characters or the situation within. Less Huu-rah, more actual character motivation. Even this uncharted ad, which when divorced from the trailer it comes from seems incredibly ineffective, focuses on the fact that Drake has just killed a dozen people.

Let's step away from ads for men or ads for women and talk about ads for everyone.

Pokemon - an ad that focuses on greatness, regardless of your world position
Street Fighter 5- an Ad that focuses on community and inclusion
Overwatch - an ad that focuses on characters and motivations instead of how much raw damage the characters can do. To the question of how you sell CoD to women? This is how.

It's not hard to do this stuff right, it's just easier to stay set in your ways and do it wrong the same way you always have. A lot of explosions played over a cover of an old song will still play in this world, but it's still only going to hit a specific, but dedicated and interested, demographic of gamers.
 
EARLY IT industry was WOMAN DOMINANT because the first programmers were women because Typing (as in "being skilled with a typewriter) was mainly a female centered skill because of assistant jobs being a women centered jobs. It started change to male dominated field when it started to become important and give more money.

Also, pre-NES games were made from an already Male dominant field of IT and were made for both boys and girls

This isn't true. The "early IT industry" was never woman dominant, but it did have a larger representation of woman than today's industry. But even at it's height, the computing industry was still roughly split 60% men to 40% women. This is the number that Walter Isaacson cites in his new book on the early computing industry ("The Innovators"), but he goes into depth on early female innovates like Grace Hopper who have been sadly forgotten in favor of other male innovators.

A significant contributor to why technology swayed even further to men was the military. The military was (and is) a male-dominated sector and technological development in the 50s and 60s was contributed to significantly by military projects. As American, British, French, and Russian male soldiers returned home from the Front, they assumed technical roles in the military, which drove technological development in those regions, spurred companies funded largely or partially by military-backed projects, that then hired experience male veterans for those roles.

By the time that Silicon Valley had emerged as a place of innovation, the tech industry had become decisively male-dominated.
 

Palculator

Unconfirmed Member
The most interesting thing about mobile is that before these games started making millions of dollars a day and the female demographic started flocking to them, the majority of the advertising for these games was fairly innocuous and unpointed. Now that they've hit the big time, the television ads are all super testosterone charged, Arnold banging down doors while a nearly topless Kate Upton leads knights into battle; the only middle ground being things like clash of clans which simply aim at young boys instead of teenaged or twenty something year olds.
Are there statistics regarding the playerbase of these mobile games to see the impact of said 'testosterone charged' advertising?

Speaking of which, I remember finding these statistics on the subject matter interesting back when I first stumbled upon them either through NeoGAF or Reddit (can't remember) around the time of their publication. Yet I rarely see them cited in discussions such as this one. Have they been somehow discredited and are not trustworthy? The main problem I'm seeing is that the article doesn't go into the methodology of how that data was even obtained and the source they are citing -- EEDAR -- lock that either behind an account or a paywall, neither of which I'm going to bother with right now. If anyone knows why this relatively recent data frequently gets overlooked, I'd love to hear it.
 

Aurongel

Member
Probably because the early IT industry was severely male-dominated. That's where the first game developers grew out of after all ... young men making the kinds of games they would want to play ... yadda yadda. This "dominance" has carried over to this day.

So no, boys/men haven't become the primary target audience - they always were.

And unfortunately, change takes time and it's also dependent on changes happening in the IT field in general.

Current IT is a boys club largely, early IT was driven in large part (though not entirely) by women. Following World War II, the best typists in the country were all women, which is why so many early computer languages used dumb shorthand for everything (the men made the most typos). The underepresentation of women in modern Computer Science is driven by social norms constructed around it and not by the industry itself.

Women are chased away from Computer Science for many of the same reasons they're chased away from engineering. The idea that women were never interested in the field to begin with is at best uninformed and at worst a revisionist lie.

XKCD sums this thread up the best:

4686348206_6fd48b6121_o.png
 

Harlequin

Member
Let's put the marketing aside ... I somehow doubt that games like Gears appeal to girls to the same degree as boys. It's not purely a marketing problem.

Of course, it is. Marketing is why games like Gears dominate the gaming landscape and get greenlit in the first place. I don't think many of the games that are considered the biggest and best in today's AAA video game market would have even been made if the medium as a whole were marketed mainly towards stereotypical girls and women.
 

Dylan

Member
As has already been stated, there are a number of different reasons that contribute.

An evolutionary perspective might suggest that males might get more satisfaction from certain aspects of gaming that are inherently easier to program.

For example, the seek & destroy gameplay loop of action games, which one could argue is more baked into the male brain, seems easier to simulate in a video game than say, the nuance of social communication, which can be argued, is a more attractive challenge to a female. These communication-based games also run into the challenge of being extremely difficult to localize across languages and cultures.

For business reasons, those games which sell well to boys get made and remade ad nauseum, probably because those were probably the easiest to figure out mechanically/computationally in the early days of development.

However, there are tons of examples of developers getting the less stimulus/response gameplay mechanics right, and those have been the types of games that sell extremely well to girls.

(Note that I am NOT saying that either type of game isn't also appreciated by both genders, just that there might be a preference in terms of sheer numbers)
 
Let's put the marketing aside ... I somehow doubt that games like Gears appeal to girls to the same degree as boys. It's not purely a marketing problem.
If Call Of Duty appeals to girls, then I don't see Gears Of War being far off.

"According to their study, girls don't just play games, they are prolific gamers; although many of them have developed a negative association with that specific term. Of the girls in the study, 26% played first person shooters, 36% played RPGs, and 15% played MOBAs. In all, more than 80% played at least one type of game, with many of them playing several. These are genres that are typically considered the preserve of the male 'core' gamer, but as Wiseman quipped, 'we have girls who like blowing shit up.'"

"This is October 18th [a summit in a Pennsylvania school], 700 girls, 7th grade, I put up a slide of Call of Duty. And the girls went bananas! They were high-fiving, they were yelling, they were totally happy! They were doing what I usually see with boys. They were recognising imagery that they really like...I wish I had recorded this."
gdc_vault_girls_what_games_do_you_play_gaming_habi_by_digi_matrix-da20gxc.png

GDC Vault video - "Curiosity, Courage and Camouflage: Revealing the Gaming Habits of Teen Girls" : click on 'Girls, What Games Do You Play' (9:12). Whole presentation is worth watching.
 
The stigma will disappear by itself I think. I mean, just look at the industry right now, has it ever been this diverse before? Gaming industry does suffer from an imbalance still though, but as more and more women and minorities come into the fold, it'll keep getting better in a natural way. Indies are helping a lot with that too I feel.
 

Mesoian

Member
Are there statistics regarding the playerbase of these mobile games to see the impact of said 'testosterone charged' advertising?

Speaking of which, I remember finding these statistics on the subject matter interesting back when I first stumbled upon them either through NeoGAF or Reddit (can't remember) around the time of their publication. Yet I rarely see them cited in discussions such as this one. Have they been somehow discredited and are not trustworthy? The main problem I'm seeing is that the article doesn't go into the methodology of how that data was even obtained and the source they are citing -- EEDAR -- lock that either behind an account or a paywall, neither of which I'm going to bother with right now. If anyone knows why this relatively recent data frequently gets overlooked, I'd love to hear it.

Likely not, as most companies rarely engage with the research necessary to see whether or not an ad was successful. IMO - most of these ads were trophies celebrating the wild success of these games in a time where it felt like the mobile f2p bubble was on the verge of bursting and their long term effects were never considered. However, there is some independent research on these ads (I did a lot of it myself), but unfortunately, I can't assert the affects beyond personal opinion until I get more permission from the companies themselves, something I will likely actually never get.

But those ads did well. CRAZY well.

As for the EEDAR studies, it took them too long to get back to people about the actual numbers in their studies so their findings were generally overshadowed by stuff like audience or study type bias. I believe they did come out later with their full results, but by then, there were more comprehensive studies with similar results and better numbers that had come out that people began to cite.

But then, most people are pretty quiet when it comes to presenting statistics because no one wants to deal with the scrutiny.
 

Palculator

Unconfirmed Member
Yo, Messofanego, you're one who could know: Any ideas regarding the latter part of my recent post?

Nevermind -- got a helpful answer.
As for the EEDAR studies, it took them too long to get back to people about the actual numbers in their studies so their findings were generally overshadowed by stuff like audience or study type bias. I believe they did come out later with their full results, but by then, there were more comprehensive studies with similar results and better numbers that had come out that people began to cite.

But then, most people are pretty quiet when it comes to presenting statistics because no one wants to deal with the scrutiny.
I see, thanks. For sake of completion, do you have the more comprehensive data that corroborate the results?
 

True Fire

Member
Nerd culture has always been made up of socially awkward men who are hostile towards women. 60% of women in tech have been sexually assaulted. Microsoft just threw a party with erotic schoolgirl dancers, and a bunch of NeoGAF users came to their defense because they didn't understand what was wrong about it. It's no surprise that women would stay the fuck away from tech companies and video games in general.
 

L Thammy

Member
I've still heard women spouting the "only boys play video games" line in recent years, so I tend to think that it's part of a broader cultural issue.
 
In the Atari era, women were targeted just as much as men. Home console, arcade, and computer games were targeted at adults and families. When Nintendo tried to revive games in the US after the crash, they did it by selling the console as a toy - that's why they had R.O.B. the robot and the Zapper gun. It's how they persuaded stores to sell video games once more. Unfortunately, at the time toy aisles in stores were separated into girls and boys sections, there was no "for everyone" part. Nintendo chose the boy side of the aisle. After a few years of that, they did studies to see who was playing the most games to see who they should target games for, and guess what, it was the boys whose toy section had Nintendos in it.
 

Mesoian

Member
Nerd culture has always been made up of socially awkward men who are hostile towards women. 60% of women in tech have been sexually assaulted. Microsoft just threw a party with erotic schoolgirl dancers, and a bunch of NeoGAF users came to their defense because they didn't understand what was wrong about it. It's no surprise that women would stay the fuck away from tech companies and video games in general.

Well....while true, it's not that women stop playing games because of this behavior, they just stop publicly celebrating it in the same way that men do. Gaming tends to be something that you do quietly when anytime you talk about it, you're you're accosted. Mario's inseam length and all that.
 
I don't know, that video seems mostly reasonable, but also seems to make a few logical leaps.

Do we have any real proof that these millions of women playing shallow phone games are really insatiably itching for full scale console/PC experiences, but just don't really know it yet?

If there was really this vast totally untapped market, we don't think these huge profit hungry companies would be trying to capitalize?

40% of console players are female (used to be 10% in 1999), they play similar genres, and they make similar amounts of time investments.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-10-30-platform-not-gender-drives-gamer-differences-eedar

http://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/ESA-Essential-Facts-2015.pdf


Women are a huge untapped market, catering to all genders (rather than just to males with bad stereotypes) is only beneficial for business growth in the industry.
 

Kyzer

Banned
It's not complicated or mysterious at all. You can't look at the 1980s with 2016 logic.

There were defined gender roles and expectations and onward that pretty much made gaming a boys thing. There have always been girl gamers but overall it was just not a thing girls were into
 
In the Atari era, women were targeted just as much as men. Home console, arcade, and computer games were targeted at adults and families. When Nintendo tried to revive games in the US after the crash, they did it by selling the console as a toy - that's why they had R.O.B. the robot and the Zapper gun. It's how they persuaded stores to sell video games once more. Unfortunately, at the time toy aisles in stores were separated into girls and boys sections, there was no "for everyone" part. Nintendo chose the boy side of the aisle. After a few years of that, they did studies to see who was playing games to see who they should target games for, and guess what, it was the boys whose toy section had Nintendos in it.

Yeah, a friend of mine argued that too, that video games were a gendered toy.

I sort of think a lot of it though has been because traditionally men/boys have been allowed more agency to pursue their own interests, even if there was social stigma attached to, while girls upbringings were more tightly regimented; even if their parents weren't particularly conservative, for a variety of the reasons they had/have less opportunities to develop and pursue their own interests than boy did/do.
 

Morrigan Stark

Arrogant Smirk
Probably because the early IT industry was severely male-dominated.
Not quite. It wasn't male dominated at first, but came so later.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding

94s0IKr.png


So no, boys/men haven't become the primary target audience - they always were.
Not true. I suggest you read some of the articles and videos posted in this thread.

Early IT industry had women programmers. The world's first programmer (1842-3) was Ada Lovelace, who came up with the algorithms for the Analytical Engine which was the theoretical foundation for the modern computer.

*snip*
Thank you for this. :)
 

Bedlam

Member
Early IT industry had women programmers. The world's first programmer (1842-3) was Ada Lovelace, who came up with the algorithms for the Analytical Engine which was the theoretical foundation for the modern computer.

ada-lovelace.jpg


History of the Computer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPDy2y4AjSo&t=9m40s

Grace Murray Hopper, grandmother of COBOL (1945)
149300-004-D49D0778.jpg


Pioneering Women in Computer Science: http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/csep590/06au/readings/p175-gurer.pdf

Her time is when "bugs" and "debugging" were coined, because an actual bug (moth) caused a relay to fail.

"third programmer on the world's first large-scale digital computer."​

While Hopper was working on the Mark II in the summer of 1945 under the command of Aiken, an unlucky moth caused a relay to fail. Hopper and the other programmers taped the deceased moth in the logbook with a note, "First actual case of bug being found," which is currently on display at the Naval Museum in Dahlgren, Virg Aiken had the habit of coming into the room and asking, "Are you making any numbers?" Now, during a slow time, the programmers could reply that they were "debugging" the computer, thus introducing this term into computing language.​

1946:
Jean Bartik and the ENIAC women: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPweFhhXFvY
marlyn_wescoff_meltzer.png


In 1946 six brilliant young women (Betty Snyder Holberton, Jean Jennings Barik, Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum and Frances Bilas Spence) programmed the first all-electronic, programmable computer, the ENIAC, a project run by the U.S. Army in Philadelphia as part of a secret World War II project. They learned to program without programming languages or tools (for none existed)—only logical diagrams. By the time they were finished, ENIAC ran a ballistics trajectory perfectly! Yet when the ENIAC was unveiled to the press and the public in 1946, the women were never introduced… and their story was lost for decades.

Some of the first videogames had prominent women behind them. The Adam Ruins Everything video above covers them. Atari's Carol Shaw (3D Tic Tac Toe in 1980), Centipede creator Donna Bailey, and of course Roberta Williams for adventure games (1984). If it weren't for Roberta, we wouldn't have storytelling in videogames.

The Most Important Women in the History of Video Games
I could look up and cite you dozens of male names who invented programming languages etc. I also knew the name Roberta Williams would be mentioned in this thread. Citing examples of big achievements in IT by women is great and all but it also doesn't refute the claim that the field was always male-dominated. No one said it was exclusively men - that'd be the claim your post actually targets.

This isn't true. The "early IT industry" was never woman dominant, but it did have a larger representation of woman than today's industry. But even at it's height, the computing industry was still roughly split 60% men to 40% women. This is the number that Walter Isaacson cites in his new book on the early computing industry ("The Innovators"), but he goes into depth on early female innovates like Grace Hopper who have been sadly forgotten in favor of other male innovators.

A significant contributor to why technology swayed even further to men was the military. The military was (and is) a male-dominated sector and technological development in the 50s and 60s was contributed to significantly by military projects. As American, British, French, and Russian male soldiers returned home from the Front, they assumed technical roles in the military, which drove technological development in those regions, spurred companies funded largely or partially by military-backed projects, that then hired experience male veterans for those roles.

By the time that Silicon Valley had emerged as a place of innovation, the tech industry had become decisively male-dominated.
.

Not quite. It wasn't male dominated at first, but came so later.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding

94s0IKr.png
So about 1/10 (later 3/10 at best) workers in IT was female when videogames came into being and started to become part of popular culture. Proving my point, basically.

Not true. I suggest you read some of the articles and videos posted in this thread.
As I said earlier, I've read a couple of books about the history of videogames for my thesis. Not a single time during my research was I not under the impression that IT has always been a largely male-dominated field.
 
I guess the best way to say it is that the industry noted that boys/men had potential for market focus and took it to ridiculous extremes.

I could look up and cite you dozens of male names who invented programming languages etc. I also knew the name Roberta Williams would be mentioned in this thread. Citing examples of big achievements in IT by women is great and all but it also doesn't refute the claim that the field was always male-dominated. No one said it was exclusively men - that'd be the claim your post actually targets.

.

The dominance comes not from a greater level of interest from men, but a greater level of discouragement against women from being interested.
 
I've still heard women spouting the "only boys play video games" line in recent years, so I tend to think that it's part of a broader cultural issue.
People parrot a lot of things they hear from advertising for so long that they start believing it. Advertising has amazing psychological power to create long-standing myths.
 

Dylan

Member
It's not complicated or mysterious at all. You can't look at the 1980s with 2016 logic.

There were defined gender roles and expectations and onward that pretty much made gaming a boys thing. There have always been girl gamers but overall it was just not a thing girls were into

This checks out.

I grew up in the 80's with two sisters, and we all had equal access to gaming (Colecovision, NES).

We all enjoyed gaming, however, while I would happily spend hours and hours of my life playing mario, zelda, punch out, etc, my sisters chose to spend much more of their time doing girl activities, such as playing competitive hockey and football.
 

Mesoian

Member
People parrot a lot of things they hear from advertising for so long that they start believing it. Advertising has amazing psychological power to create long-standing myths.

yurp. Tell people something enough times and they'll start to believe it.
 

U2NUMB

Member
If Call Of Duty appeals to girls, then I don't see Gears Of War being far off.

"According to their study, girls don't just play games, they are prolific gamers; although many of them have developed a negative association with that specific term. Of the girls in the study, 26% played first person shooters, 36% played RPGs, and 15% played MOBAs. In all, more than 80% played at least one type of game, with many of them playing several. These are genres that are typically considered the preserve of the male 'core' gamer, but as Wiseman quipped, 'we have girls who like blowing shit up.'"

"This is October 18th [a summit in a Pennsylvania school], 700 girls, 7th grade, I put up a slide of Call of Duty. And the girls went bananas! They were high-fiving, they were yelling, they were totally happy! They were doing what I usually see with boys. They were recognising imagery that they really like...I wish I had recorded this."
gdc_vault_girls_what_games_do_you_play_gaming_habi_by_digi_matrix-da20gxc.png

GDC Vault video - "Curiosity, Courage and Camouflage: Revealing the Gaming Habits of Teen Girls" : click on 'Girls, What Games Do You Play' (9:12). Whole presentation is worth watching.

This looks super interesting. Thanks for posting.. will watch tonight!
 
People parrot a lot of things they hear from advertising for so long that they start believing it. Advertising has amazing psychological power to create long-standing myths.
Yeah, a lot of people still get amazed when you tell them that young boys aren't the biggest video game demographic anymore, that there are more women over 18 playing games than boys under 18, and that the average gamer is in their 30's.
 
People parrot a lot of things they hear from advertising for so long that they start believing it. Advertising has amazing psychological power to create long-standing myths.

I'm kind of wary of the idea that advertising is the foundational root of gendered products, but I do think there's sort of a feedback loop where advertisers market to pre-existing identities, and in the process of marketing to those identities end up reinforcing them.
 

Palculator

Unconfirmed Member
This is the one I see cited the most. They did one in 2014 that had the same problems as the EEDAR study, but this one had the full package at release.
Thanks! Will read it in more detail later. Regarding the scrutiny statistics are met with you mentioned: Yeah, that happens and armchair statisticians can be pretty annoying, but it's also vital to question data and how they're obtained. I find without data, discussions like these usually boil down to people invoking their subjective perceptions of gender, what appeals to them and what appeal a game has (like the thought that Gears couldn't appeal to women) such that it just becomes a tiresome back and forth with no consensus in sight because each argument is based on subjective perception the opposition might not share. Part of the reason I only joined the convo once I saw something data would be interesting for.
 

Mesoian

Member
Thanks! Will read it in more detail later. Regarding the scrutiny statistics are met with you mentioned: Yeah, that happens and armchair statisticians can be pretty annoying, but it's also a vital part to question data. And I find without data, discussions like these usually boil down to people invoking their subjective perceptions of both gender, what appeals to them and what appeal a game has (like the thought that Gears couldn't appeal to women) such that it just becomes a tiresome back and forth with no consensus in sight becaue each argument is based on subjective perception. Part of the reason I only joined the convo once I saw something data would be interesting for.

I'm working on something. Might be a while though, my numbers are a bit shallow.
 
I don't feel like companies were committing some 'evil' by gendering game consoles; though obviously anyone who's flipped through any promo material of the 90s can see how obnoxious and lame 'attitude' bullshit was. I feel like it's been in the last several decades that we've really begun to realize that how we're socialized vis a vis gender identity has a lot to do with the desires and interests we come to hold.

I guess what I'm trying to say that I don't feel it was conspiratorial, just complacent, and I'm glad that gendered barriers to different interests are being torn down.
 

Flayer

Member
It's because more males tend to enjoy pointless competition more than females. It's not just video games, look at games that have been around for much longer than video games and don't have a physical aspect that gives an advantage to men (such as chess, snooker, darts, bowls etc) and you still see much higher male participation than female.
 

gafneo

Banned
If Call Of Duty appeals to girls, then I don't see Gears Of War being far off.

"According to their study, girls don't just play games, they are prolific gamers; although many of them have developed a negative association with that specific term. Of the girls in the study, 26% played first person shooters, 36% played RPGs, and 15% played MOBAs. In all, more than 80% played at least one type of game, with many of them playing several. These are genres that are typically considered the preserve of the male 'core' gamer, but as Wiseman quipped, 'we have girls who like blowing shit up.'"

"This is October 18th [a summit in a Pennsylvania school], 700 girls, 7th grade, I put up a slide of Call of Duty. And the girls went bananas! They were high-fiving, they were yelling, they were totally happy! They were doing what I usually see with boys. They were recognising imagery that they really like...I wish I had recorded this."
gdc_vault_girls_what_games_do_you_play_gaming_habi_by_digi_matrix-da20gxc.png

GDC Vault video - "Curiosity, Courage and Camouflage: Revealing the Gaming Habits of Teen Girls" : click on 'Girls, What Games Do You Play' (9:12). Whole presentation is worth watching.
Just look at the genre's we have to choose from. I think Moba is too odd to say. Why not just social arena? Girls want something with clean interfaces, real pics instead of cartoon or fantasy scifi. They want realistic graphics, no stiff looking npcs with repeated lines or annoying voices. That stuff is a real deal breaker. Girls like freedom to personalize. Immersive realism and easy of use is an attractive thing.
 
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