Messofanego
Banned
Thought y'all wanted some really positive food for discussion. I don't know about you, but after watching and reading this stuff, I'm more optimistic about this industry going forwards based on the data from the studies here.
Mostly centred around the GDC talk by Ashly Burch and Rosalind Wiseman (educator, author of Queen Bees and Wannabes, the book that was the basis for Mean Girls).
Sample size: Across the country in various schools, 1853 people filled out the surveys and bit more than 1400 of them were between 6th-12th grade (11-18 years old). 59% suburban, 22% urban, 18% rural. 58% from public, 39% from private, and 3% from charter schools.
Sources:
The Interesting Gaming Habits of Teenage Girls
Curiosity, Courage and Camouflage: Revealing the Gaming Habits of Teen Girls
Platform, not gender, drives gamer differences - EEDAR
Watch the GDC talk, it's pretty great. Lots of stats about comparing middle and high school boys and girls, surprisingly a lot more in common than you think.
Girls like blowing shit up! They love them some shootbangs!
"According to their study, girls don't just play games, they are prolific gamers; although many of them have developed a negative association with that specific term. Of the girls in the study, 26% played first person shooters, 36% played RPGs, and 15% played MOBAs. In all, more than 80% played at least one type of game, with many of them playing several. These are genres that are typically considered the preserve of the male 'core' gamer, but as Wiseman quipped, 'we have girls who like blowing shit up.'"
"This is October 18th [a summit in a Pennsylvania school], 700 girls, 7th grade, I put up a slide of Call of Duty. And the girls went bananas! They were high-fiving, they were yelling, they were totally happy! They were doing what I usually see with boys. They were recognising imagery that they really like...I wish I had recorded this."
Gender gap narrowing in preference of types of games
Women aren't just playing social games, and it's not like men don't play those same social/casual games too. Men and women often tend to like the same games. Even in the mobile space, men prefer the exact same matching and brain puzzle games that is the majority with women, too. It's more about platform lines, and even then in the PC space women and men are both playing RPGs, MMORPGs, and strategy games, so there is overlap.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-10-30-platform-not-gender-drives-gamer-differences-eedar
"Traditionally, it was held that male and female players acted and gamed in significantly different ways, with men gravitating to more core gaming experiences while women leaned more towards casual ones.
But in reality, this perception appears to be far from accurate - active gamers (whether they are male or female) are engaging with video games in largely the same manner. This is not to say that all men and women are gaming identically, but that the overarching pattern and their average level of investment do not differ significantly. The truly significant differences, rather, emerge along platform lines."
Boys think girls are playing everything!
" I was shocked by this. Boys don't think girls are just playing mobile games. Boys think they play everything."
Not Gamer Girls
Not Gamer Girls (girls who don't identify as gamers) and gamer girls both love GLaDOS from Portal as their favourite character (along with Luteces from Bioshock Infinite by a 10th grade not-gamer girl, Natalie and Julia from Harvest Moon by a 10th grade not-gamer girl, Sylvanas Windrunner from WoW by a 10th grade gamer girl). The testimonials are worth listening to about why they pick these characters.
One 11th grade gamer girl bloody loves Ghost in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. RIP Ghost.
What do girls and boys want to play as? Do they even give a fuck?
"One of the most common answers that games companies and marketers will trot out any time the topic of women protagonists enters the conversation, is that people simply don't want to play as a woman. The industry tends to assume that men are their primary audience and men only want to play as men. But Wiseman and Burch's study counters that base assumption as well. When asked, most of the boys they surveyed said that they either wouldn't mind playing as a woman, or would be happy to do so. Girls on the other hand, had an overwhelming preference, particularly as they got older, to see more people that represent them in games.
Of everyone that answered, 57% said they'd love to see more women protagonists in games. An additional 35% said they wouldn't mind."
Gamer Boys, 86% of them want to see more women play the same games as them. 55% of gamer boys want to see more female heroes. 56% of gamer boys believe women are treated as sex objects in games.
Most teenage guys are totally fine with sexualised women in games, right? WRONG!
"The majority of boys surveyed said that women in games were too often treated as sex objects. In fact, only 19% of the boys said they'd be happy if more women-as-sex-objects made their way into games."
Sexism In Games
Watch the boy and girl talk about this, they are really smart.
Theo (20:47)
Theo: "This game, it's called Mortal Kombat. I really like it, but I notice a lot of the female characters are wearing very scantily clad clothing which doesn't make any sense because if you're playing a videogame like that, you expect everybody to be armored because it's a fighting game! If these girls are dressed how we think we they should be dressed, objectified like this, it just defeats the entire purpose of wearing armor. I just thought it's kind of polluting young kids' brains to think this is how they should dress. Like, this is how women will dress everywhere."
Rosalind: "And Theo, if you had a female character that was dressed in the kind of armor that you want to see, would you want to play as that character?"
Theo: "Yeah, a lot more. I would definitely respect the character a lot more for like having some dignity."
"200 7th grade kids clapping in support of a boy in their class talking about sexism in games."
Rebecca (24:35)
Rebecca: "I play Trivia Crack and on Trivia Crack, there's always these ads for Game Of War. In Game Of War, Kate Upton plays a female and she's barely wearing any clothes and her upper area is bouncing and it's disgusting and it makes me uncomfortable and I know that makes other kids uncomfortable...I personally find it sexist and if she's going to be dressed like this - and she definitely shouldn't have been - then why aren't other people, why is it just the girl? She's the only girl. This game is played by kids and I don't know any kids who want to see that."
Vocal minority:
"We are constantly in fear of our consumer base, because there's a vocal minority that's giving us the cause to be that way. As this data showed me and Rosalind, these boys are not that vocal minority. They don't make up the whole of our community. So, why are we making games for the people that put the fear in us when really these boys have the same values as the people working in the industry right now?"
False attribution of commercial success of games:
"Developers understandably are afraid of our games not selling. You put so many hours, so much passion, so much energy, into all the games you make that it's terrifying to imagine the game's not going to sell. But it could be that we're falsely attributing the success of these games to things that don't actually matter to kids that are playing them. Kids don't really care that much about the protagonists in their games and in fact, boys don't really have a preference about whether they play as a male or female."
Marketing self-fulfilling prophecy:
"I've spoken to many people in this industry about this. They feel like they can't put females in their games because they're afraid that the game won't sell. But what happens when you're afraid a game isn't going to sell is, you don't market the game. And what happens when you don't market the game? IT DOESN'T SELL! You see all these games with female protagonists, well those games didn't sell. Yeah, cause you didn't market them! Cause you thought they wouldn't sell to begin with!"
TL;DR You know what this means, right? Industry figures, publishers, consultant think thanks, marketing tanks, PR, shareholders, and pretty much anyone in management should watch this talk, take this data in, and come away with broadening their horizons. Not be afraid if you want to have more female protagonists. Not be afraid of advertising core games to girls. Not be afraid of commercial success based on protagonists. Stop the self-fulfilling prophecies based on myths and focus on the actual data.
Mostly centred around the GDC talk by Ashly Burch and Rosalind Wiseman (educator, author of Queen Bees and Wannabes, the book that was the basis for Mean Girls).
Sample size: Across the country in various schools, 1853 people filled out the surveys and bit more than 1400 of them were between 6th-12th grade (11-18 years old). 59% suburban, 22% urban, 18% rural. 58% from public, 39% from private, and 3% from charter schools.
Sources:
The Interesting Gaming Habits of Teenage Girls
Curiosity, Courage and Camouflage: Revealing the Gaming Habits of Teen Girls
Platform, not gender, drives gamer differences - EEDAR
Watch the GDC talk, it's pretty great. Lots of stats about comparing middle and high school boys and girls, surprisingly a lot more in common than you think.
Girls like blowing shit up! They love them some shootbangs!
"According to their study, girls don't just play games, they are prolific gamers; although many of them have developed a negative association with that specific term. Of the girls in the study, 26% played first person shooters, 36% played RPGs, and 15% played MOBAs. In all, more than 80% played at least one type of game, with many of them playing several. These are genres that are typically considered the preserve of the male 'core' gamer, but as Wiseman quipped, 'we have girls who like blowing shit up.'"
"This is October 18th [a summit in a Pennsylvania school], 700 girls, 7th grade, I put up a slide of Call of Duty. And the girls went bananas! They were high-fiving, they were yelling, they were totally happy! They were doing what I usually see with boys. They were recognising imagery that they really like...I wish I had recorded this."
Gender gap narrowing in preference of types of games
Women aren't just playing social games, and it's not like men don't play those same social/casual games too. Men and women often tend to like the same games. Even in the mobile space, men prefer the exact same matching and brain puzzle games that is the majority with women, too. It's more about platform lines, and even then in the PC space women and men are both playing RPGs, MMORPGs, and strategy games, so there is overlap.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-10-30-platform-not-gender-drives-gamer-differences-eedar
"Traditionally, it was held that male and female players acted and gamed in significantly different ways, with men gravitating to more core gaming experiences while women leaned more towards casual ones.
But in reality, this perception appears to be far from accurate - active gamers (whether they are male or female) are engaging with video games in largely the same manner. This is not to say that all men and women are gaming identically, but that the overarching pattern and their average level of investment do not differ significantly. The truly significant differences, rather, emerge along platform lines."
Boys think girls are playing everything!
" I was shocked by this. Boys don't think girls are just playing mobile games. Boys think they play everything."
Not Gamer Girls
Not Gamer Girls (girls who don't identify as gamers) and gamer girls both love GLaDOS from Portal as their favourite character (along with Luteces from Bioshock Infinite by a 10th grade not-gamer girl, Natalie and Julia from Harvest Moon by a 10th grade not-gamer girl, Sylvanas Windrunner from WoW by a 10th grade gamer girl). The testimonials are worth listening to about why they pick these characters.
One 11th grade gamer girl bloody loves Ghost in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. RIP Ghost.
What do girls and boys want to play as? Do they even give a fuck?
"One of the most common answers that games companies and marketers will trot out any time the topic of women protagonists enters the conversation, is that people simply don't want to play as a woman. The industry tends to assume that men are their primary audience and men only want to play as men. But Wiseman and Burch's study counters that base assumption as well. When asked, most of the boys they surveyed said that they either wouldn't mind playing as a woman, or would be happy to do so. Girls on the other hand, had an overwhelming preference, particularly as they got older, to see more people that represent them in games.
Of everyone that answered, 57% said they'd love to see more women protagonists in games. An additional 35% said they wouldn't mind."
Gamer Boys, 86% of them want to see more women play the same games as them. 55% of gamer boys want to see more female heroes. 56% of gamer boys believe women are treated as sex objects in games.
Most teenage guys are totally fine with sexualised women in games, right? WRONG!
"The majority of boys surveyed said that women in games were too often treated as sex objects. In fact, only 19% of the boys said they'd be happy if more women-as-sex-objects made their way into games."
Sexism In Games
Watch the boy and girl talk about this, they are really smart.
Theo (20:47)
Theo: "This game, it's called Mortal Kombat. I really like it, but I notice a lot of the female characters are wearing very scantily clad clothing which doesn't make any sense because if you're playing a videogame like that, you expect everybody to be armored because it's a fighting game! If these girls are dressed how we think we they should be dressed, objectified like this, it just defeats the entire purpose of wearing armor. I just thought it's kind of polluting young kids' brains to think this is how they should dress. Like, this is how women will dress everywhere."
Rosalind: "And Theo, if you had a female character that was dressed in the kind of armor that you want to see, would you want to play as that character?"
Theo: "Yeah, a lot more. I would definitely respect the character a lot more for like having some dignity."
"200 7th grade kids clapping in support of a boy in their class talking about sexism in games."
Rebecca (24:35)
Rebecca: "I play Trivia Crack and on Trivia Crack, there's always these ads for Game Of War. In Game Of War, Kate Upton plays a female and she's barely wearing any clothes and her upper area is bouncing and it's disgusting and it makes me uncomfortable and I know that makes other kids uncomfortable...I personally find it sexist and if she's going to be dressed like this - and she definitely shouldn't have been - then why aren't other people, why is it just the girl? She's the only girl. This game is played by kids and I don't know any kids who want to see that."
Vocal minority:
"We are constantly in fear of our consumer base, because there's a vocal minority that's giving us the cause to be that way. As this data showed me and Rosalind, these boys are not that vocal minority. They don't make up the whole of our community. So, why are we making games for the people that put the fear in us when really these boys have the same values as the people working in the industry right now?"
False attribution of commercial success of games:
"Developers understandably are afraid of our games not selling. You put so many hours, so much passion, so much energy, into all the games you make that it's terrifying to imagine the game's not going to sell. But it could be that we're falsely attributing the success of these games to things that don't actually matter to kids that are playing them. Kids don't really care that much about the protagonists in their games and in fact, boys don't really have a preference about whether they play as a male or female."
Marketing self-fulfilling prophecy:
"I've spoken to many people in this industry about this. They feel like they can't put females in their games because they're afraid that the game won't sell. But what happens when you're afraid a game isn't going to sell is, you don't market the game. And what happens when you don't market the game? IT DOESN'T SELL! You see all these games with female protagonists, well those games didn't sell. Yeah, cause you didn't market them! Cause you thought they wouldn't sell to begin with!"
TL;DR You know what this means, right? Industry figures, publishers, consultant think thanks, marketing tanks, PR, shareholders, and pretty much anyone in management should watch this talk, take this data in, and come away with broadening their horizons. Not be afraid if you want to have more female protagonists. Not be afraid of advertising core games to girls. Not be afraid of commercial success based on protagonists. Stop the self-fulfilling prophecies based on myths and focus on the actual data.
