Should female gamers and developers be discouraged from creating safe, welcoming environments for women in the industry? Should women shut their mouths and hope to assimilate in the sea of men? Should gender issues be ignored?
Uh, no. But apparently that hasn’t stopped some of the lovely ladies in our midst from turning pretty catty. They say separate space is detrimental and draws attraction to women as different. Well, Lordy me!
Check out a more competent rebuttal over at Women Gamers, in a piece of mine that went up on Saturday called “Separate but Equal”. Alas, sometimes feminism just makes sense.
November 7th, 2005 at 10:33 am
More than a seperate sphere of professional representation or IDGA segment, women need a sphere of quality and innovative titles created and designed by at least one woman. Titles that explore gender and sexuality as game mechanics will make their points all the more sharply. This is something you yourself could do, Bonnie. Consider the possibilities.
Remember, in an industry whose mentality is dominated by male gamer tropes of better graphics, bigger boobs and badder violence, the only language the majority will understand is quality gameplay that simultaneously delights, makes implications about the mechanics of gender in society and gives the finger to all those pointy headed industry types who think game design is all about cold math and stapled on storylines.
November 7th, 2005 at 10:40 am
I totally agree, but I don’t think that negates the issue at hand. Women need to have comfortable space in the industry - if they want it - before jumping right into being the creative force behind a project. I would hope though that the one would lead into the other.
November 7th, 2005 at 2:52 pm
One will lead to the other, but which one? The standard industry model in inefficient and risk-averse; women getting into those rare creative director positions at mega-funded companys would require not only getting over the gender barriers, but getting over all the other barriers to innovative individual ideas as well. I think the ticket in this dept. is female indie developers/designers with a crucially fun yet also poignant gameplay concept that can be pulled off with a low budget.
You’re right though that the women who think its all good and equal (or roughly equal) need to wake up and smell the instant coffee. But that could also be said of alot of the men working at creatively stagnant corporate positions in the industry, who think that staying with the status quo is safer than going out on their own and doing something innovative. Make the art and the respect will follow.
November 7th, 2005 at 3:00 pm
Definitely a good parallel, and a good point. Personally, I take what you’re saying as really encouraging. I’m trying to piece together some ideas of my own. Hopefully, they’ll go somewhere :-).
November 7th, 2005 at 5:19 pm
All this discussion makes me think that we need a spectrum of woman developers. Women making it in the corporate game world can and will change industry thinking. On the other hand we can’t wait for the stagnation of the megala-corporations to change. To make a difference now we also need progressive minded startups and communities that don’t have to fight the bureaucracy. I think we need to change things with more than one approach.
November 7th, 2005 at 6:42 pm
I completely agree that feminism makes sense, but I do not understand why that would privilege your argument over theirs. I consider myself to be a feminist and I see a lot of merit in what these women have to say. Given your belief in the marginalized position of female gamers, I cannot imagine a better approach than normalization, at least in so much as Foucault employs the term, which is where I imagine the women you contradict borrowed it from.
I am in many ways a “gamer,” and although I myself do not really prefer to label myself in such a way, I am even more hesitant to add the qualifyer “female” since I do not believe I choose games based on my sex. I play games, I play some of them rather well and my being female has nothing to do with it. I was made even more adverse to the term “female gamer” or “woman gamer” after learning in your rebuttal that I am not an “actual wom[a]n” and that by not feeling that these women are “jumping over” my concerns, I am not a “normal female gamer.” I do not need to be comforted about my engagement in or feelings toward video games and I cannot understand what issues I would have as a female gamer that are not male and female issues. (I like playing many different genres of games, and depending on genre, often enjoy the skimpy costumes and massive violence. I have plenty of different games to choose from, and cannot see a lack of games directed at my myriad tastes.) The only “unique” issue I can imagine is that women are, to a certain extent, marginalized by male gamers, but that is not substantially different from many other fields and arenas still dominated by men. I consider this not a “female gamer” issue, but a over-arching feminist, all women issue, in that there are still places where we are not allowed.
I am also a little bothered by your choice of terminology. In contemporary feminist, women’s studies, and gender studies, sex normally refers to male/female and man/woman binaries (the distinctions you are making in your rebuttal) whereas gender refers the more sliding scale of masculinity and feminity. (A good overview can be found at http://www.indiana.edu/~lggender/sex-vs-gender.html) My gender is not and never will be woman. My sex is woman and my gender varies based on which specific attributes I am being defined by and which stereotypes I am being compared to. (Example: I am more feminine than my boyfriend in that I am good at and enjoy household tasks such as cooking and taking care of our home, but I am more masculine than he is in that I have far more mechanical aptitude and much more of a desire to work in that area.)
November 7th, 2005 at 8:04 pm
Rowan, agreed!
Alana, this isn’t a matter of terminology under a microscope (and somehow, I strongly doubt either of these women are references Foucault). If this is how you feel about your self and your position as someone who plays games, that’s fine. I disagree. I believe that women can experience very different issues than men when it comes to games and the games industry (As for what could possibly be a specifically, see the rest of this site), and that gender is an incredibly important topic in this field . But I also self-identify as a female gamer. Perhaps that makes the difference between us.
November 7th, 2005 at 10:20 pm
If those women really were referencing Foucault (which I pronounce foe-cult because I live in appalachia) I think things would be very different, anyone who reads Foucault, man or woman, and actually gets it enough to use its terminology closely, would probably identify the very power structures which are constipating the industry, and perhaps choose to go maverick. Its not fear of starvation, you can make a living making niche titles for online distribution, maybe better than industry salaries. I think the problem with “normalists” of any sex or gender is that they don’t have the creative gravitas to stop hugging the thorns of the status quo and do something about the industry. All it takes a breakthrough product, a killer app that proves the value of a new kind of gameplay and achieves market penetration outside of the industry’s marketing machine (which is what has perpetuated much of the sexism associated with games).
You know Bonnie, I wrote a letter to Gamasutra several months back, in response to an article about unionizing the game industry. I said the industry needs to research bold new methods of content creation that artists could utilize, after which the technical talent could unionize so their more standardized skill sets could get better compensation ect. I concluded that going indie was the only way the nessecary experiments and research efforts were going to happen in the near future. A day or so later a crotchy old fella wrote in to insult my letter and declare “Publishers have a stronghold on the video game industry, and going indie is not going to do a thing.” So which I say: I don’t know about you buddy, but I’m too young to die spiritually.
Bonnie, I think your dilemma is along the same lines, but with an issue implicitedly more pertinent to women. Keep in mind that my heckeler and your dissenters seem to come from the other side of the “Two Cultures” divide. They’re engineers and programmers, they were trained to think logically and solve problems. Humanities-related majors are educated to think outside the box. I know that sounds like east-coast liberal snobbery, probably because it is, but I’m intuitively certain that the right-brain thinking writer/designer is going to be essentail to the revolution, of both the industry and it’s representation of gender.
November 8th, 2005 at 3:13 am
“Remember, in an industry whose mentality is dominated by male gamer tropes of better graphics, bigger boobs and badder violence, the only language the majority will understand is quality gameplay that simultaneously delights, makes implications about the mechanics of gender in society and gives the finger to all those pointy headed industry types who think game design is all about cold math and stapled on storylines.”
A puerile obsession with leering sexuality and hyper-violence is the “trope” of a certain kind of male gamer, not all of us. I find it interesting that the “maleness” of designers is only ever mentioned in the negative - ie, when objecting to Lara Croft or some other embarassment.
Sid Meier, Richard Garriott, Scott Adams, Shigeru Miyamoto, Will Wright, Ron Gilbert, Warren Spector, Tim Schaefer and many other designers who have given us excellent, hallmark games that do not pander to the Quake d00dz demographic have something in common: They’re MEN.
If we’re going hear about “male gamer” this or that whenever some clown like American McGee rolls out his latest lame, cliche exercise in “edginess,” a fishwrap mag like PC Gamer slavers over Stevie “Boobzilla” Case or trash-talking whigger microcephalics ruin yet another Xbox Live game, howabout a little balance?
Or does masculinity only exist to be blamed…?
November 8th, 2005 at 7:15 am
I didn’t mean to come off like that, I’m just as male as the next guy and I totally respect all those people you listed, even American McGee. When I say “gives the finger to all those pointy headed industry types who think game design is all about cold math and stapled on storylines” I mean just that, in order to innovate we might just have to innovate in spite of the institutions and the gross number of jaded yet seemingly complacent folk who saturate said institutions.
I don’t mean to decry masculinity, maybe more like the overly mathmatical, hyper-reductionist masculine mentation that disses the potential of new and exciting ways to game.
November 8th, 2005 at 11:05 am
I can dig it, Patrick.
To be clear, I’m not denying the existence or problem of sexism in games design and business. It is a plague. But I think it has less to do with men and more to do with how certain kinds of gamers - mostly male, I admit - have come to the fore and how the “suits” have responded to them.
November 8th, 2005 at 11:23 am
Patrick,
My thoughts about What Happened to Gaming can be found over at womengamers.com
I broke the URL in half so as not to mess up this Comments section.
http://www.womengamers.com/forums
/viewtopic.php?t=12200&highlight=enstupidation
November 8th, 2005 at 4:15 pm
“Humanities-related majors are educated to think outside the box.”
Having spend some time with all too many pseudo-Foucault, Deleuze or Derrida wanabees, I’d rather say something along the lines of “Humanities-related majors are educated to think in the box outside the box.”
Sometimes they even break through.
I must say I don’t like the idea of separation, but it’s just my french “egality comes through mediocrity” side speaking. On a pragmatic level, I’m rather for it.
But it’s itching in the back of my mind.
November 8th, 2005 at 4:20 pm
I’m a hardcore believer in the essential potential and/or goodness of human nature, but lately I’ve been realizing the extent of “enstupidation” that has seeped in all around me, the gaming culture included. Maybe the first thing we have to do before we reinvent the industry is to reinvent the player. In order to reinvent the player we need to reinvent our suite of microgames that we use at the core of our games. In order to do that we need to think about the cognitive mechanisms what work at a basic level in the typical microgames, and then think about how to take it further. (By microgame I mean basic repetetive activity, or series of similar loops, which form the core vehicle to most larger gameplay experiences, or “macrogames”) Most of the microgames we’ve seen have dealt with the limbic system and have rewarded repetition by allowing the process to integrate into the subconscious, allowing the player to seamlessly jump/frag/fly/spell-cast without much thinking about it (this is why so many casual gamers are turned off by games these days, the hardcore typically have years of experience that allow them to integrate these microgames into their subconscious, so when they get a new game they dive straight toward the greater bounds of the macrogame, while casual gamers have to learn it from the atom up).
If we reinvent the microgame to deal with social dynamics instead of the merely physical, then we’ll be calling on the player’s to evoke whole different regions of the brain, such as the social symbolic mapping of the cerebellum. This will give the majority of our audience a head start on the microgame and allow them to use that repetetive social vehicle to explore the thematic and narrative rich macrogame that a socially atomic game would likely have. Even people who’ve only played Snake on their cell phones will have a preliminary training in a social microgame, because that training is their whole life. Evolutionary psychology might suggest that this is the elusive “what” that women want, but a broader view, such as memetics or even Lacanian psychology, would suggest that dealing with the social symbolic as a cognitive activity is common to almost everyone, irrespective of gender.
So there, by coming up with microgames evoking social intelligence, we can circumvent the puerile ferment of “enstupidation” that has settled in much of the hardcore gamer market, not by alienating the hardcore (we wouldn’t dream of it, we love you, we are you) but by expanding to a true mass market, an audience who can relate to this new type of game because its cognitive demands more broadly reflect those of real life.
Damn, that was some lightening wasn’t it?
November 8th, 2005 at 7:00 pm
"Humanities-related majors are educated to think in the box outside the box."
Uh, yeah thats definetly true, but I suppose theres no end to the rabbit hole, is there?
November 9th, 2005 at 9:24 am
Patrick, I completely agree with your push toward change, in terms of business, development, “microgame”, etc. The biggest problem in my opinion is getting things out there, working to break throughthe hegemonic wall of big business gaming as it currently exists
MD^2, you fear “equality comes through mediocrity”, and I agree. That’s why it shouldn’t be a question of assimilation. People are different. If we all simply shut and try to act the same, we’ll get nowhere worthwhile.
November 9th, 2005 at 9:07 pm
Well put, Patrick. I’d agree that pushing the Reset button industry-wide might be just the trick. But how to do it?
November 11th, 2005 at 12:10 am
I remember reading an article somewhere online - sorry, can’t remember where - that a key reason the FPS and other “twitch” genres were so eagerly embraced by gaming companies was that such games have very little in the way of writing, characterization and story. (Half-Life being something of an exception, as Valve hired an actual writer - Marc Laidlaw - to work on the game.)
The development of new and better “twitch” games is all about perfecting their 3D environment engines. Nothing else really matters. Tech-heads also love this because, unlike the humanities-type stuff mentioned above, it can be very easily and starkly quantified.
And really, when was the last time you saw a top-ranking games company advertising for a WRITER?
November 11th, 2005 at 9:44 am
Brummbar, that is so true. Wouldn’t it be great if the two creative worlds - writing and gaming - could combine more often to make GOOD games. There are so many writers out there right now (not that all of them are competent), but something should really happen. A new, more creatively powerful type of game writer. I know there was recently a gamer writers conference in Austin. Any idea if this sort of thing was discussed?
November 11th, 2005 at 4:34 pm
Well, I just read through all these comments right now, so I may not have processed all the information as thouroughly as possible. Nonetheless, I think that Bonnie’s critical response to the article is well founded. Something that should be noted is there is an extreme similarity between this and the feminism that emerged in the 1960’s and 70’s. There has been and likely always will be a very large debate over “difference” and “equality.” I personally believe that celebrating difference is what makes difference so appealing. Rather than attempting to shut down outside categories and envelope them into the norm we should be acknowledging them as their own worthy spaces.
Of course this gets to be extremely difficult when you look at the world of gaming as it stands at the moment. Women are a tiny minority in the culture in general, whether it be as players or as creative forces. Granted, the market for so-called “women-gamers” is increasing every day, but the behind the scenes world is still sparsely populated with women. To steal a great deal from Helene Cixous in the Laugh of the Medusa, “It is time for women to start scoring their feats in written and oral language.” While she is obviously referring to the more pertinant level of societal suppresion, I think it logically applies to the situation with women and the game industry. Cixous encourages women to “Write your self. Your body must be heard.”
I realize that this becomes a very controversial stance because even many feminists argue against sexual difference per se. I happen to believe there is enough to convince me that despite societal effects there are differences between the genders. These differences are not a bad thing. I’m different from every other guy I know, more or less so depending on the man, and I revel in that. It is what makes me special. In the same way women are special because of that very otherness that has been forced upon them in some cases. If the gaming community stepped up and accepted female gamers as other and as part of the whole as well it would radically shift the trajectory of gaming.
Responding to Alana, I find the whole gender sex dynamic extremely troubling personally. I agree that we are much more subtly defined than simple categories such as man or woman can possibly convey. However, to assign femininity and maculinity to certain behaviors is to affirm their societal gender distinctions. Sure they are traditionally associated with a specific sex, but that does not mean somehow they belong to a category that derives its term from that sex. I have read an extensive enough amount of critical theory to disagree with the concept of a gender gradient. That is of course my personal opinion. In a lot of ways I think the whole concept is out dated, but that doesn’t change the biological relevancy of sex. There are certain things that biology can’t help but influence and many of those are what we have come to determine as sex or, on occasion, gender. In general I think it is more productive to recognize the existence of difference, even difference based on sex, and to argue for a separate space for the difference to be expressed.
To use a much less topical analogy, RPG’s in the US were absolutely off the map in the beginning. It was a market that US companies saw as a niche market, not worth putting the extra money and effort into. I have been an RPG nut for as long as I can remember. And I damn sure remember the landscape before Final Fantasy 7 and afterwards. The point is, at least I hope it is, that the people who played RPG’s were being marginalized as a group. Sports gamers received all the attention in the US. Once the market was realized as a vast potential, all of a sudden RPG’s flooded into the US. A marginalized group of gamers, albeit one with very similar interests something which is not the case with “women-gamers”, became part of the mainstream. While the situation is obviously not a direct corollary to the situation with women and gaming, it is a relevant connection in my mind.
Perhaps all women who play games don’t feel marginalized, but there are obviously some who do, not to mention there are people, and I know it for a fact, that stay away from video games because of the sexist portrayals they often contain. We would serve ourselves as a community best, if we began to move away from this idiotic paradigm of “big-tits and big guns.” I find it insulting as a man and I know there are others who feel the same.
November 11th, 2005 at 11:57 pm
I found the article I was referring to earlier. It was, ah, something I wrote in an old ‘blog of mine. Whoops.
Anyway, I think the point still stands.
October 30th, 2007 at 8:30 am
bet 050…
sectional spongers inequalities,screamed:shimmering testified …