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.

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[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 ha

Billy Crystal put it best

[BadAnalogyGuy]

I think it is easy to explain why women aren't as "hardcore" when it comes to gaming as men are. Billy Crystal explained it all in two sentences.

"Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place."

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: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.

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[rhyder128k]

Oh for mod points...

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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[sanosuke76]

...you mean I'll break a sweat if I carve through an army? I thought we were all like the video game guys.

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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[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 i

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[brandorf]

Just as an afterthought, to see what a hypersexualized male avatar might be, take a look at some of Matt Dixon's art. Such as here (SFW): http://mattdixon.co.uk/g18.htm [mattdixon.co.uk]

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[jotok]

Hey, you might dig this. [mightyponygirl.com] Quite a few interesting conversations on this topic.

It was linked from Pandagon. [pandagon.net]

Re:Probably the most insightful quote

[Rei]

Great post. I'm reminded a bit of a Penny Arcade comic featuring a female knight dressed in the typical way you see female knights dressed in video games, out in the middle of some frozen tundra, wondering what on earth she was thinking when she picked that outfit. :)

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[Moraelin]

Heh. Yeah, I know what you mean. I know I was thinking exactly that when playing Legend Of Dragoon on the old Playstation. They had this party member who was an exotic dancer or such, and ran around in a tiny skirt and generally minimalistic outfit. So as my party was working its way through some frozen area (I can't remember which), I just felt... _sorry_ for her.

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[Von Helmet]

Is this [penny-arcade.com] the comic you have in mind?

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[Lord Kano]

Lara Croft changed things?

I guess you must have missed Samus.

LK

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[Das Modell]

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.

There were female protagonists a

Downhill? what downhill?

[master_p]

Games is male territory, Oprah is female territory. Let's not flatten everything, shall we?

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[PastaLover]

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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[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 leavi

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[rhyder128k]

Absolutely. Notice also that most of the comments supporting this very reasonable line of view are posted AC.

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[account_deleted]

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[trytoguess]

Perhaps the argument is that no matter what the financial situation is women statistically end up doing most of the housework/childcare. I not exactly sure if this is true (though it does fit with my personal experience), but there's no need to get into knee jerk defensivness.

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[Rei]

If I'm bringing home most of the money, doing most of the earner-work and spending more of my life working,

Says a person posting to Slashdot at 12:38PM on a Wednesday. ;)

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[account_deleted]

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[Rei]

Let me introduce you to a new concept, statistics. The overwhelming majority of Slashdot posters live in the US and Canada.

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[account_deleted]

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[Rei]

Which means there is a good chance that this person could be living there. But there is no definite information that is true.

Which would be relevant if I had said, "They're definitely posting from work!"

One point to consider

[LordZardoz]

There is one particular flaw in your reasoning.

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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[crashfrog]

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

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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[PastaLover]

I agree completely with the above. Also like to add that many countries in Europe have in recent years moved towards allowing a "parental leave" for fathers as well, removing one of those last sources of inequality in the workplace the GP was referring to. If a man and a woman have equal chance of going on leave when they have a child at least employers will start to judge them more by the same standards. (and not, how likely is she to have a child etc.)

Most of the time it's shorter for men than for women.

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[rhyder128k]

"Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place."

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me tell you, there are plenty of women in the industry. Secretaries, office managers, janitors, assistants, etc. There is no shortage of women in the workplace, evening in the gaming industry.

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[hansamurai]

But not many of them have been in high profile roles like Jade Raymond was for Assassin's Creed as Producer. Well, not only was she the Producer but she was basically the lead PR rep because of the way Ubisoft used her.

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[hackerjoe]

Well, not only was she the Producer but she was basically the lead PR rep because of the way Ubisoft used her.

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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[Brother Dysk]

The people making Jade Raymond into a sex symbol are the people gawking over some PR photos where she's basically standing with her team in jeans and a plain cotton top, probably the same clothes she wears to the office every day. WTF.

Not everyone fancies (or fantasizes about) porn stars or supermodels. Some blokes like the attractive average women (or men).

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[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 th

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[Brother Dysk]

I don't get how there's necessarily any correlation between people fawning enough over her (in her work clothes or whatever) enough to make "fansites" full of pictures of her, and people thinking she's unqualified. I reckon that, for a lot of people, the whole qualified techie (or psuedo-techie, being a production person, not an actual coder) angle just makes her even better.

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[sanosuke76]

Personally, I thought her uncompleted minor in military science was hot.

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

[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.

Confusing title ...

[gstoddart]

Man, I read "Talking With the Women Working In Games" to mean that they had simulated speaking with women, using a game engine, and that the simulation was successful.

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. :-P

Cheers

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).

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[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

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[AgentPaper]

Ironically, the same thing happens in nursing, which has hitherto been perceived as a female-biased profession. Both my mother and I have unisex given names, and both of us routinely receive professional mail and phone calls addressed with male honorifics. You'd think that the bias would be toward assuming that a nurse is a woman, but it isn't - every day brings at least one item addressed to "Mr. (name), R.N." Even other nurses, some of whom have daughters with either my name or hers, somehow manage to

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[demallien2]

Yeah, tell me about it!

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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[zerobarrier]

"claw our way to positions that many men just "get" by virtue of being male." That is the typical, naive opinion. Have you considered how much time a male may spend advancing his career (constantly researching new technologies, mastering said technologies, programming on the side, graduate school, ...)? Just because you didn't get a job offer doesn't mean you can play the gender card. Unfortunately, women sometimes do get turned down just because of their gender. However, after working in the industry

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[mishelley]

As a carrier of the double x chromosome I actually agree with this. I would hope that the quality of my work (whatever my chosen profession) would be my defining characteristic when my work was discussed and not what is between my legs.

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.

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[account_deleted]

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[Malkin]

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 th

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[PastaLover]

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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[zerobarrier]

Well said, morari. I too share the same school of thought. I'm sick of hearing sob stories, much like those contained in the replies to your post.

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[toiletsalmon]

Amen to that! It's mind boggling to me how many of these "Professional" game "Journalists" are spending so much time on this non-issue. Granted, I'm not saying that things are all roses for women in the game industry, but some of these "journalists" can't muster up enough of a vocabulary to intelligently describe a video game about shooting aliens. But I'm supposed to take these people seriously when they want to talk about "real" issues???

Bah!

Library not found

[why-is-it]

Please don't use a term without defining it first:

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman [wikipedia.org]

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[incripshin]

Thanks for the link. I tried looking for a man page first.

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[David Gould]

$ man woman
no manual entry for woman
$
Dammit!

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[account_deleted]

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[account_deleted]

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[plague3106]

I know who she is; she hosts a G4 show, and does some gamer related "commericals" on G4 as well. I was suprised she was actually a gamer though; I thought she was a model they hired to keep guys interested in the show, but didn't think she was actually interested in games.

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[Bandman]

The fact that you assumed that speaks volumes as to why she's overlooked the way she is.

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[plague3106]

Perhaps that's my experience (and others) that when talking to a hot chick and moving the topic to games, their eyes roll and they stop smiling.. :-)

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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[masdog]

Do you REALLY see women spending a lot of time in those sections / stores?

Only if they are dragged their by their boyfriends/brothers/male friends.

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[sanosuke76]

Clearly you haven't been exposed to the unwashed closet-yaoi-fangirl sect, which make these disturbingly excited noises whenever Dante or various Final Fantasy characters are mentioned. They are truly a fearsome sight to behold.

My fiance may love Final Fantasy, but thankfully she isn't one of those beasts.

Of course. We're past the technology bottleneck.

[Animats]

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

[geminidomino]

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.

And they will make us hang on their works with breathless anticipation, drawing us along for years upon years...

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

[Samgilljoy]

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'

Re:

[VAY]

Er - I think you'll find that most women do 2 - 6 hours of housework AS WELL AS a job.

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..

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[vranash]

Lol, that's kind of funny because me and my dad did something similiar on the c64 back when he was still into computers as something other than a career. I don't remember what the game was called but it was one of those text-based dungeon crawls. I just remember constantly getting to this one maze area and being unable to figure out what to trigger next (and with no save function you had to get up to that point each time, hard when you only had an hour or two before you got to bed.

As to women in gaming, I'v

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[JoshJ]

Offhand, I'd guess Zork. "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike."

IIRC, that particular puzzle is somewhat random so keeping notes between games will actually screw you over there.

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[vranash]

FYI, it wasn't Zork, but it was the same style game. Zork was actually one of those games I'd always wanted but never gotten :)

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[dwye]

Offhand, I'd guess Zork. "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike."

IIRC, that particular puzzle is somewhat random so keeping notes between games will actually screw you over there.

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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[Trespass]

Yep. It's demographic theology. A handwave.

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[CFTM]

When Mark Twain said there were three types of lies, I think he was on to something: "There are lies, damned lies and statistics"

wrong?

[Punto]

I'm sure the women that work in games are jugling their carrer and home life and it's so wonderful and empowering, but are the women who _play_ the games like that? I'm sure it's something like a 12-25 demographic that has as much time to waste as everyone else..

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[metroid composite]

12-25, sure (or more realistically 12-19 or so). Most studies show that many girls stop playing games, whereas boys often don't (there are quite a few male gamers up through about 37 in age). Another interesting study: the most-played game among teenage girls is...Halo.

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?

[darga]

the reason gamers are skewed toward male is because women are too busy doing housework? wtf. i'm pretty sure when i started playing games as a little kid my sister had exactly as much free time as i did. when i was in college playing videogames, my girlfriend wasn't off ironing my shirts in some dungeon. there are many valid reasons that women may have played less videogames than men, but men being magically less busy than women is not one of them.

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[misterooga]

Probabaly men can ignore chores easier than women...hack, I know I can just close my eyes on all the cleaning that's required...

Though perhaps that's more of a personality.

Does "brains are wired different" count as an answer?

Look no further

[4D6963]

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.