Women's Issues

The fact that they're even having the debate is important, of course. Before it would have been seen as a sign of shame that the country *needed* to put women to work.

Actually it was over you guys wanting to burn alive people who didn't follow your branch of Christianity. When we say the US was founded by religious exstreamists we aren't kidding.

Adult women now the largest gaming demographic, while male teenagers (aka "the typical gamer") have shrunk to a mere 17%.

Thing is that doesn't actually have much of an effect. The "gamer" identity isn't tied to just if you play games and and "gamer culture" and even the culture of the gaming industry aren't about jut that. All those things are much more tied to specific forms of gaming, largely non-mobile non-casual gaming.

To me it comes across kinda like if we got the headline "women largest group in the workforce" but it turned out that women in the workforce are still largely limited to a few specific sectors that society keeps insisting are the only appropriate ones for them.

It's good news I guess, but it still doesn't change the fact that we have a real problem with women being under represented in both gaming culture, the games industry, and most non-mobile non-casual gaming genres.

Edit: I mean really it's kinda obvious, there are a lot more women over 18 then men under 18, it shouldn't be a surprise that women make up more people who play games then boys do, especially when you consider the disposable income gap.

edited 28th Aug '15 9:13:40 PM by Silasw

Adult women have had higher numbers than underage boys for a long time. IIRC it was the 2005 Essential Facts report (which is significant because it's before the launch of the iPhone and the smartphone boom as well as before Facebook caught on and had social games) that first had a statistic comparing them, and as long as the statistic has been there women have been a higher percentage of the market than boys

@ Ogodei : I have not been home to judge the tone of things in a few years, but it probably still is a mark of shame.

Our economy is absolute trash right now, when I came to the US 1USD would get me about 80 yen, now 100 yen gets about 80 cents.

That's why you need to make lots of money here so you can be super rich when you go back there.

That's how it works right?

And unfortunately that women dominate the demographics is largely irrelevant to gaming culture in general. It's run and built around a minority.

Only way we'll really fix that for good is to get more women developers.

That also has to do with the difference between gaming as a developer-driven enterprise and gaming as a consumer-driven enterprise. I'm not an expert economist, but it's also about how market saturation is hurting the so-called "hardcore" gaming market. "Hardcore" here is of course a nebulous term, but a lot of guys - and I do mean guys - are taking the economic trends way too personally. You can see traces of this in the tech field.

Hypothetically, I can sell a large quantity of low-price mobile games better than I can sell one 59.99 USD AAA game. What has a lot of more fanatical male gamers in a tizzy is how the economics of the situation aren't looking too good for them in the long term. That's where some of this aggressive, territorial hobby loyalty is coming from.

The logic goes that if the market isn't suspect, then the consumers must be suspect, ergo they are to be interrogated for committing sacrilege by entering our territory. The reality is that it's really just a nasty case of entropy in the AAA market, and it's just easier and more cost-effective to cater to soccer moms who want to play Candy Crush and Cookie Dash at the office.

EDIT: This is anecdotal, but a female friend of mine in software development has talked to me about how some of her male colleagues seem to have gotten in their heads that easy-to-make products like mobile games are artistically and technically cheapening video games as a medium ^note  Upon being told this, she quickly cites Watch_Dogs and Assassin's Creed Unity as hilarious examples of why the "big budget, big effort project = high quality" argument is faulty. , but she's also seeing some improvements in the workplace culture to some extent. That's a plus.

edited 28th Aug '15 10:17:49 PM by Aprilla

The main problem with mobile and casual games is that they tend to be hit or miss.

Sure there are the angry birds and candy crush games that sell millions, but creating a major hit is much harder than it is spamming the market with cheap mobile games.

I got friends who worked for the app and game development on a company based inside the college campus and the most profitable for the company they worked was animation commissions for advertises and private studios, even then the company went bankrupt because none of their original content was getting popular enough to pay for themselves even though they are cheap to make.

The AAA titles on the other hand already have a loyal and guaranteed customer base that will absorb pretty much anything they spew out, even when it is a bug ridden game like Watch Dogs or Arkham Knights, on the hopes the developers will release the patches fixing the game.

While AAA titles cost a lot you'd have to screw up massively for the game to tank while mobile and casual games need to be constantly renewed or the devs need to keep spamming new games on the hopes one sticks. In the end it while not as expensive as AAA titles it can be hardly profitable.

Co D Ghost and Advanced Warfare don't have a year between each other and yet were one of the best selling titles of the Co D franchise. DICE messed up badly with Battlefield Hardline but the game still managed to pay for itself and Battlefront 3 is coming and already has people just waiting for the pre purchase.

I'd be lying if I said I haven't bought Call of Duty games on principle before.

And I totally bought the fancy $100 version of Hardline and still play it even though it's kinda crap.

I'm sorta obligated to at this point.

>.>

I have spent about 500usd on destiny by this point.

considering how much I play it though...

Christ Immy, how can you actually spend that much money on it?

Like I wasn't aware there were $500 worth of things to buy.

@Angelus: Are you amending my point or refuting it?

This was what I was getting at. Brand loyalty is good for publishers up to a point, but it can lead to a situation where the market becomes too sensitive for its own good. Ghosts, for example, was still a major financial success, but it was among the first in the Call of Duty franchise to not reach target sales. Likewise, indie games and mobile games operate in a relatively low-risk environment (I said relatively - don't miss that word), so there's less at stake in terms of catering to a niche yet vocal audience.

EDIT: As it's been noted before, women designers aren't flocking necessarily to the indie genre for its aesthetic quirks, but because the field offers more flexibility and less judgmental gatekeeping. AAA publishers are obviously catching onto this fact, and the current shift toward Angry-Birds-style games on a corporate level is somewhat indicative of that awareness.

edited 28th Aug '15 11:00:17 PM by Aprilla

I threw the cost of my PS 4 in there because I got the PS 4 bundle eddition.

Before we get re-railed, I do wanna throw this Forbes article I found about the unsustainability of current AAA development into this conversation

The bro gaming culture is trying to blame the increased visible presence of women in the market for the threats to their precious AAA games when ultimately it's the development and publishing houses who are ruining the market.

Amending.

Major budget games aren't dying as much as block buster movies are as the existence of indie movies and low budget movies didn't steal the scene from major releases, the problem is when the Publishers, not the developers, set the bars too high and expect their games to be extremely successful. It is like they expect the game not just pay itself once or twice but enough times to fund all the next ones in the franchise and still bring a neat profit.

Another problem the developers sometimes get torn into catering their loyal fanbase versus appealing to a wider audience.

That means also making AAA titles that are female and casual friendly but close enough to the original core gameplay to keep most of the fanbase.

I don't think any dev and studio managed to do both at the same time, and it doesn't help that some niches like action games and shooters have a rather immature and noxious overwhelmingly male fanbase that can come as unappeasable if you decide to do something different.

edited 28th Aug '15 11:23:04 PM by AngelusNox

Okay.

I think both Angelus and Imca said this before, but the problem is also aggravated by poor working conditions for programmers and other members of the development teams. Between the poor pay, unstable contracts and long hours, the bugs and glitches in the final product should come as no surprise.

There's a part of me that sympathizes with the guy who didn't raise his hand in protest when the art team designed their latest female character to be another generic Bodacious Sexy Tough Girl. He probably didn't speak up not just because of the fraternal politics (which is a huge problem to penetrate from what many male and female IT professionals have charged), but because he quite frankly didn't have the energy to say anything. When you're under a strict contractual obligation, when the suits upstairs won't shut up about the deadline and when you're sleep deprived, you find yourself picking your battles very carefully. Speaking from experience. Doesn't mean it's right, though.

edited 28th Aug '15 11:17:35 PM by Aprilla

Le huh at blaming women for why less AAA games being made.

I'll put forward my own theory - it's because it takes about 80 hours to get thru a hardcore game.

Last time I actually finished an RPG was over a decade ago. When it comes to media and entertainment (w/ stories), I mainly just want to know what happens next without throwing 3 hours down the grind gauntlet to get to the next chapter.

On the Gender Pay Gap: British Women in their 20s earn more than men of same age, study finds

One of the other big problems with the gaming industry is that the group that's meant to check it and inform customers about how screwed up it is, the gaming press, seems to largely either consider itself above games journalism or have no understanding of bias and the need for objective journalism.

Point being you cant use the excuse of a sausagefest to keep pushing and marginalizing women out of the arena.

Sure but the problem is that there are going to be people (and have been for a while I believe) who will argue that women aren't marginalised by the gaming industry or gaming culture, after all, they make up the largest group of gamers.

The gaming industry and gaming culture are still a sausage fest, and that's the problem.

The industry and culture are only a sausage fest because women keep getting shouted out of them whenever people notice they're there. Yet still, their presence grows and they're becoming less and less willing to be shouted out.

Hostile misogyny may win a battle here or there, but it's losing this war and it knows it. That's why it's so desperate.

edited 29th Aug '15 6:30:13 AM by TobiasDrake

Actually, no. They are not.

Gaming culture isn't a sausagefest. They just like to think they are and their voice is the loudest.

People out there still say Psychology is a sausagefest and yet, that's not true either. Even if it was there is no reason to try and say "Ooops, the treehouse is already full of men! We cant invite the women!"

What you do is kick out the vitriolic assholes and before you know it, women will come in droves because it is actually safe now to speak up.

Triple A games are still largely done by men for men, how does that not show that mainstream gaming culture and gaming industry is dominated by men? On top of that esports, gaming You Tube, gaming streamers and such are still heavily male dominated.

I'm not saying that the treehouse is full of women so we can't let any women in, I'm saying that it's full of men and that that's a problem and we need to get some women in. And that patting ourselves on the back and going "well sure the treehouse is full of men, but if we count the women stuck outside hanging on the branches there are plenty of women, so we don't need to do anything" is a very bad thing.

edited 29th Aug '15 6:37:20 AM by Silasw