Talking With the Women Working In Games

MTV's Multiplayer blog is working, all this week, on a series of interviews called Women Working in Games. They've already had great discussions with Ubisoft's Elspeth Tory on the Ubisoft/SomethingAwful thing, and X-Play's Morgan Webb about her work on cable television. They've also spoken with GameGirlAdvance's Jane Pinckard about the differences between men and women and the games they play. "I also think that women have traditionally been at the forefront of this, because they're burdened with more than their fair share of house work and childcare, usually. That's just statistical. And so they're going to have less leisure time for games. Now men are sort of catching up. But I think women have always been less free to play games the way that men have. So maybe that's why women play casual games or they play more casually. And they just don't want the same kind of game that requires 20, 40 hours of play. I think that's totally right." Tomorrow they're speaking with Brenda Brathwaite, a designer and author of the book Sex in Games.

Meh.

[morari]

I am perpetually bored by the hype that everyone puts behind women and gaming. Humans are humans and females can be just as likely involved in a videogame as males can. This has always struck me as one of those "equal but still special" things that so-called minorities like to flaunt. Now don't take that as misogynic, because it's just the opposite. Women shouldn't promote being pointed out, as they are merely people doing a job that people are expected to do (as opposed to monkeys or something).

Probably the most insightful quote

[Moraelin]

In a messed up way, that's probably the most concise and insightful explanation.

See, back when games were abstract, like Pong and Pac-Man, we already know that they drew about 50-50 crowds. Just as many women were into those games as men were.

Then gradually the industry became a boys' club. Male nerds began using the extra polygons and pixels to catter to other male nerds' needs, and often it was just the publisher's heavy handed intervention that stopped it from becoming all out porn. (Read Bartle's surrealistic "I was young, I needed the money", if you don't believe me. The surrealistic story of his trying to make a cybersex MUD, in spite of the management's keeping telling him not to, and that they'll never find a publisher for that.)

Women in games became helpless princesses to be rescued, rewards for the brave knight, erotic objects, and other such roles.

As an illustration of how far downhill that went, when Tomb Raider decided to have a woman as the main character (IIRC because a guy there thought it would be more fun to stare at a woman's arse in third person, than at a guy's arse), it was something almost revolutionary. It had become that much taken for granted that the player or the hero must be a guy, and the women are just the rewards he gets. And even that franchise eventually became an excuse to show Lara's... assets.

A lot more took the same route and assumed that any female char _must_ be played by a guy, and/or for the benefit of other guys. So, you know, a female knight can't possibly fear a sword to the gut or a severed femoral artery. (The effect of which on your blood content is not unlike cutting the bottom off a cup.) Of _course_ they'll go into battle wearing just a chainmail bikini ;)

A lot of games which grudgingly offered women as playable characters, gimped their stats in various ways. Just because, you know, in a game where you shoot fireballs, ride dragons, and generally rape the laws of physics, chemistry and biology with a vengeance, it would be _so_ unrealistic if a woman (even a rare, exceptional, non-typical one) could possibly have the same strength or constitution as a guy.

And, gee, who would have guessed? Eventually that ratio between male and female players wasn't anywhere near 50-50 any more.

Maybe that quote hits the nail on the head. Maybe women do need a reason to play an inflatable sex doll.

Actually, would the males play such a character if it were male? I know quite a bunch of us had an aversion to playing Voldo in Soul Calibur. (For those who don't know the chap, he was dressed in a BDSM outfit, and with arse-less leather pants.) And that's still one notch above the portrayal of women in some games.

Mind you, it's getting better, but just saying... maybe that quote does condense a lot of wisdom in a very concise form.

Re:Billy Crystal put it best

[Anonymous Coward]

Burdened? More than their fair share of housework?

If I'm bringing home most of the money, doing most of the earner-work and spending more of my life working, then don't cry to me about fair shares of housework. I'm not saying housework is easy or being a mother is easy, but if someone else is doing 70% of the earning work outside of the house at a job and doing it until they die (not like we get months off to have children or have the option of leaving our career for a few years, then going back, then leaving again, then going back as whimsy strikes us) then your fair share of stuff is doing most of the housework and child care.

The guy might as well be complaining about doing "more than his fair share of the bread-earning-work". Why should someone have to do 70% or 100% of the outside-the-house work AND 50% of the domestic work? That's BS, regardless of which sex is doing which role.

Feedback

[turtledawn]

What a ridiculous feedback loop. Reading that multiplayerblog interview was like watching two chickens puff themselves up before getting into a territorial squabble, or perhaps two drunks working themselves up to jump some third person who made a joke at their expense..

I don't know about you, but my mother had plenty of free time and a clean house. She did that by making sure her kids knew to pick up after themselves! She got me into computer gaming, actually- I'd sit and take notes for her as she played Legacy of the Ancients on the C64. We spent way more than any 40 hours on that damned game.

Women don't have time or inclination to sit and play games for hours, huh, but they'll watch years worth of senseless daytime TV and can tell you who slept with who and what character is supposed to be dead... sometimes I'm rather ashamed of the group with whom I share chromosomes..

Re:Any pics?

[vonPoonBurGer]

They don't talk to her for this piece I think (the corporate proxy won't let me confirm that), but all the guys here in the office were talking in hushed and awed tones about Jade Raymond a few weeks back. She's the producer for Assassin's Creed, and she was on one of the local news stations here in Montreal talking about the project. There are a lot of pictures of her on a fansite, which I won't link here. You can Google it easily enough if you're so inclined. Now, how utterly creepy is it that fans have put together an unofficial home page for her as a gathering point for videos and stills gathered from press events and interviews? Don't get me wrong, she's smokin' hot and all, but it's obvious to me that the vast majority of women wouldn't want to put up with that kind of attention in order to pursue a career in games. Heck, the vast majority of women wouldn't want to have to put up with that kind of attention to go buy a game, and that's exactly the kind of attention they're likely to get from the average male nerd GameStop employee. The fact that women are currently the minority in gaming should surprise absolutely no one, and the nature of the games themselves is only partly to blame.

Re:Meh.

[Anonymous Coward]

See, its not us women making the big deal - its the men who look down upon women and think we *do* have less talent than men. As a resut we are forced to near claw our way to positions that many men just "get" by virtue of being male.

I actually tried an experiment, because I have a name that can be shortened to a unisex one - I am a rather talented programmer/sysadmin type - one with a "name" as it were. If I post resumes in non-open source job communities (where my name is less known), I get more responses to the unisex version of my name than the patently feminine one - and my resume is not altered besides name. In some cases I sent it to the same place - and the "male" sounding one was the one responded to, *and* they addressed me by male appelations: "Sir"

This is itself makes it pretty obvious to me that us women have a lot more obstacles to overcome than men. Maybe not with people like you, but not everyonke in this industry has such an enlightened perspective as you do.

Re:Meh.

[NeutronCowboy]

Here's why there's still so much "hype": it's because a lot of men actually believe that women aren't as good as men at doing whatever job it is that they're doing. And a lot of these men are working in the videogame industry. As a result, it IS a big deal if a women gets to a position of power in the videogame industry. I'd love to see the day where no one bats an eye when they see a women working as a dev, producer or other significant position. In the meantime, I have to listen to endless stories of groping, stalking, mistaken-for-booth-babe and just general disbelief that a woman could possibly do that job well.

Re:I program games for a living

[hackerjoe]

Sure. The point is that Jade isn't putting herself forth as a sex symbol, Ubisoft isn't either, it's the media and fan response that's doing that. Predictably, maybe, but I can't hold Ubisoft so responsible for something they didn't actually do themselves.

When people complain about how much media attention she's getting, they're mostly responding to the phenomenon and the interpretation of what Ubisoft PR did and not what they actually did, which was put someone who should be well-qualified to talk about the game and represent the developers and who had good experience doing publicity in the position of doing publicity. Shock! Horror!

Part of the response seems to be that people didn't at first believe that she could possibly be qualified for her job, and instead assumed she was put in that position just so she could do PR as a pretty face... which is the absolutely shaming part of this whole thing.