Talking With the Women Working In Games 88
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.
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Billy Crystal put it best (Score:5, Funny)
"Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place."
Probably the most insightful quote (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Probably the most insightful quote (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Ever noticed how every man who takes his shirt off in a film has an all over tan and a six pack?
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Although seriously, I did actually discover a couple weeks ago that hauling a 24lb 50cal rifle, a Thompson, and a PS90 at the same time, while carrying a box of various parts, wasn't exactly feasible. I think I coulda handled it if they were all on carry straps instead of in bulky gun cases, though.
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It was linked from Pandagon. [pandagon.net]
Re:Probably the most insightful quote (Score:4, Funny)
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Is this [penny-arcade.com] the comic you have in mind?
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I guess you must have missed Samus.
LK
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There were female protagonists a
Downhill? what downhill? (Score:2)
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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.
I can't really think of any games that did this. The only thing I can think of were games where the man was the big burly guy (e.g. has strength/const) and the woman is the nimble, agile fighter/rogue (e.g. more agi/int or something). It's quite stereotypical but then at the same time they could have put in a nimble, agile guy and a big burly woman. Unfortunately that doesn't fit with our preconceptions much, and it is to these preconceptions that games will cater.
Anyway some examples would be good, can't
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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 leavi
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Says a person posting to Slashdot at 12:38PM on a Wednesday.
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Which would be relevant if I had said, "They're definitely posting from work!"
One point to consider (Score:2)
I wont dispute the idea that someone working outside the home to earn money may be doing a great deal more total work than someone staying home and raising the kids / doing standard housework. It is a very reasonable point, and one worth discussing.
But your supporting arguments do not quite account for one thing.
Someone who chooses to make a career out of housekeeping / raising children essentially finds themselves in a job where there are never truly days off
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Pfft. If only women had this option in most fields. The truth of the matter is that taking some time off to have children looks as bad on her resume as taking the same period of unemployment looks like on yours, children or not. And while your family is looked on as a positive quality by your employers - it connotes stability, maturity
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Most of the time it's shorter for men than for women.
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No, that's a stereotype. I'm potentially as smart and sensitive as any woman. Some women, at some points in their lives, in some contexts are more sexually motivated than me. Some men are, in some contexts are less sexually motivated than me. Nothing to do with my sex.
I program games for a living (Score:1, Informative)
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I'm really having a hard time getting what the big deal about this is. I work at a fairly large studio (100-200 people on staff), and my impression has always been that the producer has two main reponsibilities:
1. Manage the leads: resolve conflicts, deal with staffing, and keep everyone on the same game vision;
2. Deal with the outside world: champion the game and sell it to the studio heads or publ
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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 th
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Actually, I have no idea what she even looks like, I just looked her up in IMDB since everyone seemed to be talking about her lately.
Elspeth Tory interview (Score:5, Interesting)
This was my favorite question and answer:
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.
Confusing title ... (Score:2)
I was thinking, "Wow, using video games to make geeks better at chatting up the honeys", now that's progress -- like behavior therapy for autistic kids or something.
Turns out, it's "Talking with 'the Women Working In Games' ", and that's not nearly as cool as I first thought.
Cheers
Meh. (Score:3, Insightful)
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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
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Here's a couple of my own stories from the trenches:
1) My company sticks me on the booth at a trade show to demo the product that I have spent the last 6 months working on. There were nulerous men that would ask me for a description of how a feature worked, and when I told them, they'd simply say 'nah, it doesn't work like that. If you understood the technology, you would know that that's impossible'. The funny thing was that some would still insist that my description was wrong e
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Re:Meh. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Ah, yes, this is one of the reasons I don't miss E3 at all. I'll never forget standing in front of my game, and having slack-jawed idiots come try to chat me up, and then NOT BELIEVE ME when I told them I was the lead programmer on the game I was showing off. Year after year, I still hear lunk-headed idiots hauling out the same old tropes about women not being able to code, and women gamers being attention whores, and women not being interested in games due to various half-baked evolutionary psychology theories, over and over and over again. Seriously, it gets old.
Well for me it's (hopefully) not about "women just not being good at games", it's that every time I meet a girl who's somehow into technology it's a surprise to me. Go back about 7-10 years and the number of girls playing video games was incredibly low. The number of women in technology is not that very high. The number of women studying CS with me was less than 10% of the total. So yeah, my head turns when I see a lead designer on a game is a woman or women playing games, just because it used to be so inc
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Bah!
Library not found (Score:2)
Please don't use a term without defining it first:
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman [wikipedia.org]
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no manual entry for woman
$
Dammit!
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Anyway, go to any store that sells games (not now though). Do you REALLY see women spending a lot of time in those sections / stores?
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Only if they are dragged their by their boyfriends/brothers/male friends.
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My fiance may love Final Fantasy, but thankfully she isn't one of those beasts.
Of course. We're past the technology bottleneck. (Score:2)
We'll see more women in game leadership positions. Games today are about artwork, social dynamics, and world design. The underlying technology isn't the limiting factor any more.
Ten years ago, consumer-grade graphics hardware was weak, frame rates were slow, people were struggling to get physics engines to work at all, network gaming was flakey, and attempts to build big worlds were choking on scaling problems. Now, that stuff just works.
Re:Of course. We're past the technology bottleneck (Score:2)
We'll see more women in game leadership positions. Games today are about artwork, social dynamics, and world design. The underlying technology isn't the limiting factor any more.
Then up and quit, bugger off to Naughty Dog, and leave us broken, shattered husks of our former selves...
Curse you, Amy Henning.
Re:Of course. We're past the technology bottleneck (Score:1)
We'll see more women in game leadership positions. Games today are about artwork, social dynamics, and world design. The underlying technology isn't the limiting factor any more. Ten years ago, consumer-grade graphics hardware was weak, frame rates were slow, people were struggling to get physics engines to work at all, network gaming was flakey, and attempts to build big worlds were choking on scaling problems. Now, that stuff just works.
The implications being that women are naturally better and more interested in art and social dynamics, while men are the people to deal with the real engineering?
You do realize that's what you just said, don't you? That men busted through all those tough engineering problems, and now the women can come in and improve the art and interpersonal experience.
Doesn't that sort of validate all the griping about women being stereotyped in engineering?
I'm going to assume that you're a cool person who doesn'
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Feedback (Score:3, Insightful)
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..
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As to women in gaming, I'v
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IIRC, that particular puzzle is somewhat random so keeping notes between games will actually screw you over there.
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That was Colossal Cave, aka Adventure.
Speaking only for the 1977 version on a DEC-20, it was fixed, just complex. We (well, two other guys in the group) mapped it over the course of two weekends. Of course, the pirate could make mapping hell by moving stuff (items dropped to ID the room) around randomly.
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wrong? (Score:2)
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Teenagers play games. Later in life, though, if all your friends are watching soap operas or reality TV and not playing games, you'd have to be fairly hardcore to keep playing games (either that or get new friends...which if you do that
how has nobody called bullshit on this yet? (Score:1)
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Though perhaps that's more of a personality.
Does "brains are wired different" count as an answer?
Look no further (Score:4, Funny)
the reason gamers are skewed toward male is because women are too busy doing housework?
No, the real reason why lies in the content of the games. Let's take a few example games, say, Call of Duty 4, Kane & Lynch, and GTA San Andreas. These games feature cars, helicopters, fire weapons of all sorts, and killing tens of people every couple of minutes. Make no mistake about it, these features on their own aren't what turns women away from such games, no, the real problem is not what is in these games, but what's not in them. Namely, ponies.
When is the last time you've seen a pony in a game? Where are the scenes of combat against pony-riding RPG-totting Iraqi insurgents? Where are the cops who protect themselves from your bullets behind ponies? Where can you jack a mother fucker for his pony and run away with it with the mounties on, literally speaking, your tail? Not in any of the games mentioned, and that's why so many members of the female population prefer to watch cheesy movies that reminds them of the pony their father never offered them for their sixth birthday than to play the games we like to play.