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.

Elspeth Tory interview

[hansamurai]

I read the Elspeth Tory interview this morning and found it incredibly interesting. I was sort of following Assassin's Creed during development and anyone familiar with that game is also familiar with Jade Raymond. It took me a while to figure out that Jade was actually working on the game and was not just some pretty-face put there by Ubisoft to play it and pose for pictures. Ubisoft basically whored out their Lead Producer on one of their premier titles to sell the game, and I guess it worked... but they're experiencing some backlash now from industry professionals.

This was my favorite question and answer:

Multiplayer: When disparaging stuff comes out on the Internet, what advice do you have for women dealing with that type of scrutiny?

Tory: Don't read the forums! [Laughs] Don't read the forums. That's what I was told by some people and I stopped doing that, so that's good. That's helping. And try and focus on the positive aspect of what you do and the end result. I think it's tough to know what to do. Do you react against it? Do you sort of say things verbally? Again, I think it's more about visibility. So if people are having issues, well then we're just going to go out there and make more games that are kick-ass and more games where there is a woman running it and more games where we're doing a great job. I think it's just going to have to eventually erode. It'll just eventually come to an end, and it'll be completely normal to have high-profile women on big projects.

Guess we won't be seeing posts from Elspeth and Jade here... But I hope they keep making games, we need some diversity in the industry in all aspects of development and productions. I'm playing Assassin's Creed myself right now and though it has many flaws, I'm still enjoying it.

Re:Probably the most insightful quote

[Gravatron]

If you think guys are seeing the same stereotype of our gender as the girls are of theirs, your not looking at the games themselves. Guys are always these large, muscled, fearless guys who can carve though an army without breaking a sweat.

It has gotten better in recent years though, and there have been notible exceptions. Take the recent ps3 game Uncharted. The male lead is very much an everyman, not too muscled, looks and acts like he's in over his head alot of times. The female lead is a small breasted woman in capri pants and a layed tanktop. I was actualy thankful for this, as it was nice to have hero's in an action game you could actualy relate to.

Re:Probably the most insightful quote

[brandorf]

There is a huge difference between displaying a sexy female avatar, and a female avatar that is ready for sex. Many times female avatars are displayed with full, red lips, hooded eyes, slightly parted lips, and the like. These and the like are all signs of female sexual arousal. The equivalent for a male avatar is obvious: a huge boner. The point of this is is that the majority of male players would feel slightly uncomfortable playing a game where the male lead was hypersexualized in this way, and the inverse is also true for female characters. We are only now starting to see this in modern games, compare Lara Croft at inception to how she looks now, not only are her proportions less exaggerated, she no longer looks ready to jump in the sack.