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[Pudge]

I really hope that most gamers don't desire a 17 year old cheerleader, much less have sweaty fever dreams about them.

 

[Nanashrew]

will read the full article later, but what you have quoted here is simply not for everyone out there. not every girl thinks the same.

i hate this "perception" of "oh, we have to appeal to girls" or "we shouldnt be sexists in videogames" bla bla bla.

games should just be games. they should tell a story or offer a certain type of gameplay to a certain audience.

i never heard of the movies industry that they, as a collective tried to appeal the deaf and blind people. or a certain type of no movies-watching folks.

of people are interested, they will watch/play. the problem of gamers is, that there are people out there who are simply basement dwellers who try to be "masterrace".
when i was a kid, there were 2 girls in kindergarten who swapped gameboy games. none of us had problems with it.

i think this whole discussion came up with the internet. my two little sisters have played games too, but they simply have other interests these days.

i see games as watching movies or reading books. games shouldnt try to appeal a certain audience, it should be the other way around. i know tons of girls who are into the expendables or fast and furious movies, so i dont get this whole discussion.

What the hell is wrong with you? Why are you comparing women to the blind and deaf?

 

[AlucardGV]

I really hope that most gamers don't desire a 17 year old cheerleader, much less have sweaty fever dreams about them.

most are into murder and war, you can have sweet dreams now

 

[Pudge]

most are into murder and war, you can have sweet dreams now

Sounds good, just add in some neon and sweet backing music.

 

[Sakujou]

What the hell is wrong with you? Why are you comparing women to the blind and deaf?

sry, i dont wanted to be offending to anyone. its just mindboggling how the western devs try so hard to meet expectations to appeal to a certain audience. they try to be correct and whatever. have a look at japanese videogames.
super mario bros. 2 had a transexual character hidden in the game.
this shouldnt be offending, this should make people more open to new or unusual things.

i want to make this clear,
things like
"A mystery thriller like Her Story, a narrative exploration game like Gone Home, bestselling titles like Animal Crossing and The Sims, all manner of virtual pet sites: Not real games! Walking simulators! Boring! Easy! Dealing with women’s emotions, not having guns, or simply being enjoyed by women en masse—all of these qualities act as disqualifiers."
its people who try to tell this kind of stuff disqualifying themselves.
there are certain genre, certain people will play. everyone can play whatever they want to.

the majority of games played on smartphones is targetted at older folks. older women enjoy farming games on tablets, so what? they certainly do not brag about that on the internet.

its a society's problem that young boys are offending girls if they are playing the wrong genre.

iam glad that i didnt grew up in that kind of environment.

 

[Corpekata]

Almost all movie theater chains have at least a couple rooms in each theater dedicated to the deaf and blind actually. They give you devices to watch/hear the movie without disturbing other patrons.

Here's AMC's page on it, for instance https://www.amctheatres.com/assistive-moviegoing

 

[Nanashrew]

Almost all movie theater chains have at least a couple rooms in each theater dedicated to the deaf and blind actually. They give you devices to watch/hear the movie without disturbing other patrons.

Here's AMC's page on it, for instance https://www.amctheatres.com/assistive-moviegoing

This is cool, I actually didn't know about this!

 

[Gentleman Jack]

i never heard of the movies industry that they, as a collective tried to appeal the deaf and blind people.

Being a woman is not a disability. Get some fucking perspective.

 

[Sakujou]

Being a woman is not a disability. Get some fucking perspective.

i never said that. i only judge people who try to put up such things.
and as i wrote in another post, i am sorry for making such a comparison for making my point clear.

 

[TetraGenesis]

will read the full article later, but what you have quoted here is simply not for everyone out there. not every girl thinks the same.

i hate this "perception" of "oh, we have to appeal to girls" or "we shouldnt be sexists in videogames" bla bla bla.

games should just be games. they should tell a story or offer a certain type of gameplay to a certain audience.

i never heard of the movies industry that they, as a collective tried to appeal the deaf and blind people. or a certain type of no movies-watching folks.

of people are interested, they will watch/play. the problem of gamers is, that there are people out there who are simply basement dwellers who try to be "masterrace".
when i was a kid, there were 2 girls in kindergarten who swapped gameboy games. none of us had problems with it.

i think this whole discussion came up with the internet. my two little sisters have played games too, but they simply have other interests these days.

i see games as watching movies or reading books. games shouldnt try to appeal a certain audience, it should be the other way around. i know tons of girls who are into the expendables or fast and furious movies, so i dont get this whole discussion.

You haven't been banned for this? Consider yourself lucky.

You've got a lot of growing to do, man.

 

[Order]

will read the full article later, but what you have quoted here is simply not for everyone out there. not every girl thinks the same.

i hate this "perception" of "oh, we have to appeal to girls" or "we shouldnt be sexists in videogames" bla bla bla.

games should just be games. they should tell a story or offer a certain type of gameplay to a certain audience.

i never heard of the movies industry that they, as a collective tried to appeal the deaf and blind people. or a certain type of no movies-watching folks.

of people are interested, they will watch/play. the problem of gamers is, that there are people out there who are simply basement dwellers who try to be "masterrace".
when i was a kid, there were 2 girls in kindergarten who swapped gameboy games. none of us had problems with it.

i think this whole discussion came up with the internet. my two little sisters have played games too, but they simply have other interests these days.

i see games as watching movies or reading books. games shouldnt try to appeal a certain audience, it should be the other way around. i know tons of girls who are into the expendables or fast and furious movies, so i dont get this whole discussion.

Fuck anyone who thinks like this.

 

[May16]

My sister (23) always feels uncomfortable in Game Stop.

She likes games like GTA and Zelda, but shopping in a game store, the workers try to awkwardly flirt with her or steer her towards games like Wii Fit which she has no interest in, so she doesn't go the game store anymore and just buys everything online.

She also doesn't dare use a headset when playing games online. Which is pretty sad that she feels she can't do that.

It was like that for my sister too, who worked for GameStop in her mid 20's. She quit after like 3 months because it was that same stuff, constantly, from coworkers and customers.

A customer even asked her to ask for the other guy in the back to come up to the counter...so that this customer could ask that guy for information about a game (which is right on the computer anyway).

She got in thinking it was a dream job for a part timer finishing up college. Nope.

 

[SuperEpicGuy]

That's absolutely disgusting on the part of the Gamestop employees. Both in terms of the ethics of hitting on a customer, but also breaking the first rule of sales as set forth by Harry Selfridge. The customer should always be made to feel welcome and comfortable in the store.

Harry who? Doubt anyone could give a damn about some random guy's rules, let alone gamestop employees. But still, they shouldn't have done that.

 

[Terrell]

I think the "games aren't for girls" attitude is kind of a hangover from a time when that was much truer than it is now. That idea is going to be hard to dispel, regardless of how much the games themselves have changed over the years.

Until we manage to unstick it, girls are going to continue to drift away from gaming as they get older for fear of ridicule from their peers. The further they drift, the more their perception of games will be shaped by the titles with the most visible and expensive advertising, rather than the many fantastic games that don't skew towards traditionally male interests. And so the whole thing loops on and on.

Marketing doesn't illustrate the change, so while the industry is changing, the marketing not reflecting that means that people who are put off by the current marketing message don't even consider approaching them.

That doesn't even just apply to women. There are plenty of men in their 20s who look at games with derision, and for the same reasons: it feels to them like it appeals to the most puerile and culturally-irrelevant "boys club" mentality that holds no appeal with a sizeable chunk of males in that age bracket. They see it as "this is a thing for people who never grow out of the teenage boy mindset", or more simply "for man-child". There are also those who prefer to enjoy gender-neutral hobbies because they enjoy the company of women and don't see video games that way, also much like these women in the article.

So an important thing to realize when discussing this is that, while it effects women the most, it doesn't ONLY affect women. MANY parts of the population are affected by this phenomenon, but since gender is the widest bracket, it deserves the highest consideration.

I see this mentioned often, but I don't think it's true. Here are Atari commercials from the 70's

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KVgvtwOe_g

You'll notice something that they pretty much all have in common is that they feature boys or men playing games. Rarely were girls or women featured in those commercials. That alone would create a perception of who they're designed for. It's the same theme that you'll find with 80's gaming commercials. Or what about Nintendo calling their most popular device the Gameboy? Gaming has always been pushed toward males.

I can attest that it was much easier to find a woman or girl who would play video games without feeling or being subjected to judgement or curious side-eye in the early 80s than it was to find one who would even by the late 80s, and the introduction of a more aggressively male marketing strategy was the primary reason.

There was a difference between "commercials only featuring men", which was an unfortunate staple of pre-80s advertising, and advertising that actually targeted men exclusively.

The proportion of game players who are women is higher for adults than children.

Based on the numbers in the ESA survey, 59% of under 18s who play games are men, while the split among adults is 50/50

So, this article is a little strange to me. It's concluded with a big list of things women want from games, and seems to ignore that there are a ton of games that deliver on that, more being made and lots of lots of women playing them.

If marketing doesn't change to indicate that, they'll never know that's the case. And the statistics are questionable without fully detailing what constitutes a "gamer" in those statistics, which the ESA report you linked does not detail with the data (if it's hidden in the PDF fine print, I couldn't see it). They could be playing fast and loose with the data to indicate there isn't a gender gap (which wouldn't look good for the industry), which I'm sure has been discussed elsewhere.

From the outside looking in, no one would know anything has changed. And of the women that ARE playing, we have data but no impressions from them about how they view the industry. Because even if they're a "gamer" for playing Candy Crush, they could see the console and PC market exactly the same way as the women in the article do, which still makes it troubling, since no part of this industry should merely be shunting customers to another.

 

[SolidSnakex]

I can attest that it was much easier to find a woman who would play video games without judgement in the early 80s than it was to find one who would even by the late 80s, and the introduction of a more aggressively male marketing strategy was the primary reason.

There was a difference between "commercials only featuring men", which was an unfortunate staple of pre-80s advertising, and advertising that actually targeted men exclusively.

But is that because marketing was different then, or a result of the internet really becoming widespread after that? That alone changed things a lot as you were no longer just seeing what you and your friends were doing and thinking, but rather what the world was thought of things. So while your group of friends may have included girls that played, when you went online the gaming sites and forums just featured mostly guys talking about them. Thinking back to the 90's and a site like IGN, I can't remember any women working there. It was entirely male dominated, at least in terms of the major faces of the site like Matt, Peer, Doug, Jay etc. The internet certainly played a major role in shaping how things currently are in the industry.

 

[Terrell]

But is that because marketing was different then, or a result of the internet really becoming widespread after that? That alone changed things a lot as you were no longer just seeing what you and your friends were doing and thinking, but rather what the world was thought of things. So while your group of friends may have included girls that played, when you went online the gaming sites and forums just featured mostly guys talking about them. Thinking back to the 90's and a site like IGN, I can't remember any women working there. It was entirely male dominated, at least in terms of the major faces of the site like Matt, Peer, Doug, Jay etc. The internet certainly played a major role in shaping how things currently are in the industry.

The change occurred before the internet was even a thing, as I stated, in the late 80s, and I got to watch the evolution. I was alive to personally witness plenty of girls in arcades on a regular basis; my mother, aunt and cousins playing Coleco; my grandmother - who lived alone - owning an Atari 2600... it was legitimately a different time for gaming and several people can attest to that, before watching it slowly become more boys-oriented as the marketing in magazines and TV became aggressively male-centric, even when the content didn't necessarily follow suit. You can even witness it in popular culture of the era, like movies and television, rather than just the advertising.

The only thing the internet did was compound an existing problem. Because, lest we forget, the internet and computers were also male-dominated technologies in personal recreation until the late 90s/early 2000s at the earliest.

 

[RedSwirl]

Article makes a good point about the advertising. All these so-called forward-looking indie games that are getting accolades are probably completely unknown to the public at large. Most people who don't follow gaming websites or log into XBL and Steam every day probably don't know about Life is Strange or even Cities Skylines. They know about Game of War, Call of Duty, and possibly Assassin's Creed.

Another big issue I've been thinking about for a while: Steam itself is not advertised to the general public at all, at least not in the US from what I can see. It has become very popular with PC gamers and is known to a lot of console gamers, but I've never seen any actual advertisement of Steam outside of Steam itself. Maybe some of the more popular games that require Steam on PC just become vectors for it and I haven't been watching. Maybe enough mainstream people decided to get Call of Duty or Skyrim on PC and were exposed to Steam that way, or maybe it happened when they tried to download DOTA 2. Either way, I have seen no outreach of Steam to people not already playing video games, despite how many family-friendly games there actually are on Steam.

All the sectors that actually do deliberately outreach to people not already playing consoles or logging into Steam are, as the article says, "disqualified."

 

[Terrell]

Article makes a good point about the advertising. All these so-called forward-looking indie games that are getting accolades are probably completely unknown to the public at large. Most people who don't follow gaming websites or log into XBL and Steam every day probably don't know about Life is Strange or even Cities Skylines. They know about Game of War, Call of Duty, and possibly Assassin's Creed.

Another big issue I've been thinking about for a while: Steam itself is not advertised to the general public at all, at least not in the US from what I can see. It has become very popular with PC gamers and is known to a lot of console gamers, but I've never seen any actual advertisement of Steam outside of Steam itself. Maybe some of the more popular games that require Steam on PC just become vectors for it and I haven't been watching. Maybe enough mainstream people decided to get Call of Duty or Skyrim on PC and were exposed to Steam that way, or maybe it happened when they tried to download DOTA 2. Either way, I have seen no outreach of Steam to people not already playing video games, despite how many family-friendly games there actually are on Steam.

All the sectors that actually do deliberately outreach to people not already playing consoles or logging into Steam are, as the article says, "disqualified."

Yep. Advertising and marketing is the strongest barrier to any change that the market will see out of all the items listed in the article. And so long as marketing teams remain terrified of alienating the "core consumer", it never will. And in the case of "focus testing" having an effect on how some games are even given the green light to be made, it also limits the growth of more inclusive games, as well.

I see a lot of accusations on this board of things like Nintendo Directs "preaching to the choir", but at the very least it's something that's remotely accessible to people who are active on YouTube so long as someone has or had even a remote bit of interest in Nintendo as a whole. It's not a guarantee that the message reaches the wider market, but it's better than nothing.

Whereas Steam, as you mentioned, has never had a "Wii moment" to even hope to capture the wider market's attention and is thus left only inductees into the hardcore market to grow its business primarily, which does nothing to change the situation.