Support NeoGAF

[Spman2099]

Patriarchy.

This may have been a joke post but it isn't wrong...

By the way, broadly speaking about how an entire gender acts or feels is a silly thing to do. I know some people feel like they are addressing some kind of fundamental truth when they do this, but that isn't what is happening at all.

 

[Morrigan Stark]

Women were afraid that they'd break their nails by playing too intensely. Of course that's not much of an issue nowadays, since women have grown much stronger nails in recent years.

rofl

 

[Two Words]

Becky's dad- "Girls don't play video games. Get a doll instead."

Becky's mom- "Girls don't play video games. I'll get you a nice dress instead."

Becky's brother- "No you can't play my games. Why? Because girls don't play games."

Becky's sister- "You really should focus on getting a make over instead of playing video games. Try being a girl for once."

Becky's friends- "No Becky, we don't want to play video games. Let's do girl things instead, like go to the mall. You really do need some more fashionable clothes anyways."


Why would it be surprising that Becky isn't as into video games as the average guy? Obviously, not every girl is Becky, but I do think this kind of attitude on girls at a young age affects what they invest their free time into.

 

[Maedhros]

Adam Ruins Everything: Why People Think Video Games Are Just For Boys

"Games are games"

I disagree.

 

[uncredited male]

My sister used to play a fair amount when we were young but as we got older she played less and less. I think the fact that I hogged the shit out of our consoles probably contributed to that.

To make up for it I got her adult self hooked on the Final Fantasy series and the LEGO games.

 

[Mesoian]

"Games are games"

I disagree.

I mean, games are games.

It's how we sell games and how we interact with games outside of playing games that's dramatically different.

 

[dave_d]

The problem with that Adam video is that some of us like me actually started gaming in the late 70's and early 80's and even then games were a boy thing. Actual the one big thing about a game like Pac-Man was "geez this is one that girls can enjoy". However most of the games I remember like Gorf, Galaxian, Asteroids, and Defender definitely appealed more to guys.

 

[dave_d]

BTW I bet that whole thing about there being more adult female gamers than teenage boy gamers is understandable when you consider that we're comparing one group that consists of people from 18-80 while the other is 13-19. With a range like that don't expect the adult female audience to be one group.

 

[Finaika]

Its Nintendo's fault.

 

[Arctick]

GameBoy

 

[Mirrintu]

I am curious what kinds of games you would like to see that would be targeted towards woman. As a woman I find their are a lot of games on the market that interest me (too many in fact) and I have never really felt like I was being excluded or misrepresented. I think games like Until Dawn are becoming more popular, and I would consider that to be targeted more at woman - I think a lot of the decision based games are. Personally Uncharted is one of my favourite gaming series. Shooting things is one of the reasons I got into gaming (who doesn't love shooting things?). Unless you are talking exclusively about the way they market them, and not in the games themselves? That may be a different story that I have never really paid attention to.

 

[Stackboy]

It's pretty 50/50 these days. Girls play shooters too you know.

 

[Kai Dracon]

I suspect there's a degree of ignorance in general about what kinds of games women would and do play because of assumptions about "what women want". To a degree, the problem isn't the product, but how the product has been framed as part of a narrative.

In other words, to create an example scenario:

1. There are many games in which things are shot.

2. Both boys and girls like shooting things.

3. However, because reasons, it is widely assumed that only boys like shooting things.

4. When gender balance in gaming is questioned, the immediate assumption is that this is purely a criticism of content; the kinds of games being made. Because of the belief the majority of existing games are suitable only for boys.

Sometimes even the people doing the questioning, both men and women, help perpetuate poor assumptions because they too have already bought into ideas like "only boys like shooty games".

I think in reality I think the majority of video games, even core-oriented AAA games, are not overly gendered at their core. At worst, many only have a thin crust of pandering to a presumed boys-only audience. And that has already begun to change rather noticeably. It's a minority of games which actually, intentionally, strive to live up to the "frat bro" stereotype of video games, but those few titles tend to be loud and stand out. They get all the attention.

The culture surrounding games is where most of the issues lay. Marketing is responsible in large part for strengthening cliches about gendered content even when the content itself wasn't overly biased in any direction. It's weird that some people don't think marketing creates culture, because that's why industries spend billions on it: to change minds, to carve out audiences by making people think a certain way. So that they will buy the right shit.

 

[Illucio]

Nintendo marketing the ROB had to choose between the girl and the boy aisle and people followed suit with the general market ever since.

Better question does ROB seem like more of a boy or more of a girl toy and why?

 

[Kai Dracon]

Nintendo marketing the ROB had to choose between the girl and the boy aisle and people followed suit with the general market ever since.

Better question does ROB seem like more of a boy or more of a girl toy and why?

The secret is that ROB is actually a "our new product isn't one of those video game consoles that stopped selling two years ago" kind of toy.

ROB himself, quite literally, swings both ways.

 

[M_A_C]

Because!

 

[SomedayTheFire]

This may have been a joke post but it isn't wrong...

By the way, broadly speaking about how an entire gender acts or feels is a silly thing to do. I know some people feel like they are addressing some kind of fundamental truth when they do this, but that isn't what is happening at all.

It wasn't a joke.

 

[lazygecko]

My own experience is that the most gender-disparate types of games out there are in fact not the typical tetesterone-filled bro action games, but rather strategy games. Whether that be RTS or stuff like Civilization and Sim City. Which is odd since there isn't really anything inherently "masculine" in the way these games are often presented and marketed. I've seen statistic backing this up as well, where those kinds of games are far below the likes of Call of Duty.

 

[Krabboss]

It probably has a lot to do with the people who made games predominantly being men. The question to ask is probably why programmers were mostly men (and the answer is sexism).

I remember reading an article written by a woman who worked in game dev in the 80s who said the gender split got worse in the 90s when gaming became even more of a boy's club. I could be totally remembering that wrong though, I read it years ago now.

 

[Herne]

It was boys and men who bought the early computers and early consoles - it was men who developed the early games, either in their rooms on the early home computers or at Atari. It was also men who consisted entirely of Nintendo's early development staff. Boys were more easily and readily attracted to home computers and consoles.

 

[PaulBizkit]

I am curious what kinds of games you would like to see that would be targeted towards woman. As a woman I find their are a lot of games on the market that interest me (too many in fact) and I have never really felt like I was being excluded or misrepresented. I think games like Until Dawn are becoming more popular, and I would consider that to be targeted more at woman - I think a lot of the decision based games are. Personally Uncharted is one of my favourite gaming series. Shooting things is one of the reasons I got into gaming (who doesn't love shooting things?). Unless you are talking exclusively about the way they market them, and not in the games themselves? That may be a different story that I have never really paid attention to.

It doesn't help that the most popular genre for the massive casual market is Sports. In my country, soccer is the first thing on every man's mind, so since soccer games are the main reason anybody would buy a console, women tend to think that the Playstation is "that thing that men obsess over and play soccer games with".

Other games that gets any kind of marketing are "cool tough guys" games like CoD, Assassin's Creed and Uncharted.
No sims, no tomb raider, no Life Is Strange, no Animal Crossing.

Is this male-oriented game marketing situation similar in other countries??

 

[Woo-Fu]

As somebody who has been around for all of it I can say that the various overlapping hobbies that surround videogaming have always been seen as something for boys, not so much girls. When you're brought up seeing certain activities as appropriate for boys and certain for girls you're likely to pass down similar ideas to your children. The parents that raised my generation would have thought you were crazy buying dolls for a boy or an erector set for a girl back when I was a kid.

Consequently it was boys who wanted soldering irons and breadboards. Boys who wanted early consoles/computers to fiddle around with. Girls simply had better things to do with their time, from their point of view. I can remember sitting in a lunchroom reading Omni next to girls who were reading Teen/Tiger Beat. It was just the way things were.

 

[djtiesto]

The Most Important Women in the History of Video Games

Article is definitely missing Rieko Kodama...

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

Wonder what happened around 2003 that saw such a massive drop? I went to school for CS from 99 - 03 and it was pretty bare even then (maybe 5% of my senior level classes were women).

 

[Kamina]

When i was a kid, 20+ years ago, videogames where usually stuff like Mario, Castlevania, Motal Kombat, Zelda, Metroid, Tetris and co.
Appart from Tetris and Mario, girls didnt like most of these games. My neightbor was a girl, and got me into Mario, but she never played anything appart from that. In school, during breaks when boys played gameboy, girls tended to mind their own buisnesses and were not interested in our games.

 

[gafneo]

GameBoy

Hey, maybe we get a pink console designed for girls. Call it Girlcube. Female protags in half the lanch line up. Villians and hench women, shopping sims with AAA Mary Kate game studios, Victoria Secret studios. Collectors edition comes with Kim K fragrance.

 

[Mirrintu]

It doesn't help that the most popular genre for the massive casual market is Sports. In my country, soccer is the first thing on every man's mind, so since soccer games are the main reason anybody would buy a console, women tend to think that the Playstation is "that thing that men obsess over and play soccer games with".

Other games that gets any kind of marketing are "cool tough guys" games like CoD, Assassin's Creed and Uncharted.
No sims, no tomb raider, no Life Is Strange, no Animal Crossing.

Is this male-oriented game marketing situation similar in other countries??

Personally I love those "cool tough guys" games more so than the other games you mentioned (though I have always been a big Tomb Raider fan). I could be wrong, since I don't have that much knowledge in marketing, but I imagine they are marketing based on what is selling? Men and women alike love games like COD, whereas something like Animal Crossing might have a more limited fan base?

Also when I think about gamers I don't think about sports games (I live in Canada). I have a friend that exclusively plays soccer games on his xbox and neither of us think of him as a gamer. I also rarely see a lot of advertisement for sports games, but I could be looking at it narrowly, I don't know!

Regardless, I feel my gaming needs are pretty adequately satisfied in the gaming world!

 

[Joejoe123]

I remember Roberta Williams being one of the first named game developers I ever knew about and adventure games being hugely popular on the PC for a long period of time.
Testosterone focused action games are a fairly recent development and don't entirely explain the lack of female involvement in the video game industry over its history.

 

[Abounder]

Man's world, from serving in combat to dominating games of skill like chess and other sports entertainment. Gaming's history always had a lot of overlap with other male dominated hobbies like simulators/wargaming/tabletop RPG/fantasy sports; and the industry figured out that dudes will buy $60 annualized versions of them

 

[KORNdoggy]

Yet you know as well as I do that the balls to the wall fast action gunplay is mainly to incite male testosterone.

you just touched on the answer yourself i think. you've associated a form of gameplay to a gender. which is a bit weird imo.

 

[Crimsonsky]

This goes along the same line as why don't more women choose STEM fields? I've never really understood why these questions come up. The answer is simple, it's not what the majority of them like. We don't complain that the majority of nurses are female. We don't complain that the fashion industry is heavily slanted toward females. We don't complain that the majority of construction work is males. The USA is a free country and when given absolute freedom females choose the fields they like. Not the ones we want them to like. That's a very important distinction. The same is true for gaming, and if you want to lump it in, American competitive sports as well. Just like most males don't choose fashion, and don't really understand what the hubbub is about, many females feel the same way about football. That's perfectly fine and understandable.

So the answer to your question is simple: By choice. We chose to become the audience, women chose different endeavors. The market formed around us, because that's what free markets do, they find an audience and cater to it. So you can listen to the doom and gloom until the end times, it won't change the fact that when given the freedom to choose, what we call "gaming"(although should probably be termed traditional gaming) is not what women want. Quick games on the phone during commutes, downtime and/or breaks though? Whole different story.

In short, they just aren't into it. That's not a problem, much like which gender chooses which job more, it's a non issue. Gaming doesn't do anything to actively discourage females, and almost every effort made to entice them into playing has been marginally successful at best. Gaming is a business and you can't ask them to continue trying to support an audience that just isn't very interested in what they are offering. Mass effect is a perfect example of this, many males will argue Femshep is the better Shepard, yet only about 18% of the playerbase even tried femshep and that includes the males. From a business standpoint, was it worth it to have femshep in there? Probably not, yet they did it anyway. Kudos to Bioware for the effort, I certainly appreciate it, but if a game comes out that doesn't, I certainly understand why.

Women will like what they want to like, not what we want them to like. All of us(well all of us who are sane) would welcome them into gaming, but if it's just not their thing it is what it is.

 

[KORNdoggy]

The USA is a free country and when given absolute freedom females choose the fields they like. Not the ones we want them to like.

i'd argue that society has shaped their desires though. and that's true everywhere. it's common for parents to slap a doll out of their sons hands and replace it with toys they "should" be playing with, cars, guns, footballs etc. the issue doesn't start and end with gaming. it's an argument that goes way further back and effects almost everything.

i mean we have chocolate bars here in the UK that are aimed at men...fucking chocolate! lol

 

[2+2=5]

Adam Ruins Everything: Why People Think Video Games Are Just For Boys

While Nintendo may have made things worse, electronics and technology were(are?) mostly male stuff too.

 

[cantona222]

I agree. Also Video games consoles are not for kids anymore. My 33 year old cousin wanted me to recommend a game to buy for his nephews on the PS4 (6-9 years old). The only games came to mind are the LEGO games (which are OK). There are not any good options for this age group.

Such issue did not exist in the NES or SNES/Genesis eras.

 

[autoduelist]

Media is often gendered for complex reasons.

The book industry courts women because women buy/read far more than men.

Maybe it's a case of chicken/egg [games aimed at boys, so boys play games] or, maybe we're just [on the large scale, obviously many exceptions] wired differently.

 

[Spman2099]

Media is often gendered for complex reasons.

The book industry courts women because women buy/read far more than men.

Maybe it's a case of chicken/egg [games aimed at boys, so boys play games] or, maybe we're just [on the large scale, obviously many exceptions] wired differently.

I assure you, women are not "wired differently". Our brains work the same. What women and men like, what is seen to differentiate the genders, changes frequently. Not just with different regions of the world, but throughout history as well. There is a reason why we can't seem to locate the specific traits of the elusive female mind. It is because there are no specific traits or preferences to locate.

The twist is that we are all human and we tend to be remarkably similar. The primary difference is how society dictates behavior. However, the more aware of that we become the less it impacts us.

 

[Loona]

It never ceases to amaze me that video games are a recurring element of a 25-year-old female-centric franchise:

(not to mention the role of games in Codename Sailor V even before that...)

yet even to this day there's talk of games being a guy thing... somewhere along the line things took a weird turn either in spontaneous attitudes, or at least perceptions... or maybe it just takes a really long time for this sort of thing to reach a reasonable equilibrium, if ever?...

 

[Silent Chief]

You could be having the same discussion about soap operas.

I haven't seen a boy who doesn't like videogames.
One of my 3 daughters is a gamer, the others are casuals, at best.
They've all had access to dozens of games that aren't men focused.
The Sims, dancing games, RPGs, adventure games with female protagonists, drawing games, minecraft, whatever.