
The Videogame That Finally Made Me Feel Like a Human Being - cyphersanctus
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2014/02/left-behind-women-video-games/
======
xarien
I honestly hate when stats are distorted. The "almost half of gamers are
female" stat is true, but the majority of female gamers favor puzzles and
extremely casual games. AAA title customers are still strongly dominated by
male audiences and thus, the market will cater towards that demographic.
There's really nothing wrong with this. It's about as sexist as the male
section in my local Macy's being 1/10 the total size of the store.

~~~
egypturnash
Hi! I'm a female video gamer.

I grew up playing video games. I have played, and still play, a lot of games
involving shooting things, punching and kicking things, and colorful
explosions. I got hooked on the medium with Williams' "Defender".

I don't play FPSs because they are, with very few exceptions, coded as Games
For Guys. I've had a great time playing Portal, System Shock 2, Antichamber,
and a few other first person puzzle shoot things, because they are either
genderless, or are strongly feminine. (You would destroy me in a high-speed
deathmatch because my 'put cursor on dude' skills are minimal - largely
because almost every single 'put cursor on dude' game requires me to inhabit
the grey/brown shoes of Mancho McGruntsalot, so I really don't feel like
playing them.)

I avoid most AAA games for similar reasons. They are all clubhouses with a "NO
GURLS ALLOUED" sign hung out front. I played the hell out of Skyrim and
Saint's Row 3/4 in no small part because I could make female avatars and the
game would happily let me be that. (For that matter, I basically quit buying
the 3D GTA games when they stopped having any 'play as another model' codes
that I could input to force the game to acknowledge my gender. Even if it did
sometimes result in a cutscene where a lady model stood with her legs wide
open, talking in a male voice, and dangling a gun in front of her crotch
obscenely.)

I have a bunch of lady friends who have spent tons of time playing MMORPGs. I
haven't, myself, because I know I'd fall into that hole and never come out -
but again: easy access to female avatars right there in the stock game, no
hassle, hey maybe we'll welcome women.

~~~
blah32497
I don't really play a lot of videogames anymore, but I have a lot of trouble
empathizing with this. When the gender roles are reversed it seems silly to
me.

"most every single 'put cursor on dude' game requires me to inhabit the
grey/brown shoes of Mancho McGruntsalot, so I really don't feel like playing
them"

As a male, I don't think I've ever had an issue following a feminine video
game character. In fact, I've never felt compelled to paused and think that
role-playing a female character was weird (say in Tomb Raider, or No One Lives
Forever, or any other of the relatively few female centric games). Can you
elaborate on why is this a hang-up for you when it comes to playing a man?

~~~
egypturnash
Imagine a world where every major video game stars women. Where when there is
a man in the cast, his only character trait is "he's the guy", versus an
assortment of ladies who are at least two-dimensional. He is also probably
going to be kidnapped, so he has no agency as a character - really, he only
exists as a prize for the ladies to fight over.

This is not one game. This is pretty much any video game. This is pretty much
every single video game in the world. Games where a male character has agency
are rare. Really, games are all for girls, and you should go back to your
little man things, like cooking and raising the baby.

Oh yeah, and any big budget movie has a similar gender distribution too.
Almost every animated feature you watch growing up tells you to be a good
little prince and wait for a brave princess to come save you. Same with TV.
Everyone chases the disposable income of the teenage girl, and molds their
product to her taste.

And of course there are big chunks of society that basically want to
disempower you because of your gender, too.

Wow, it sure would be nice to be able to have a space where you could imagine
being someone who can kick ass and not bother taking names now and then. Maybe
to even spend some time pretending to be someone who'll inspire you to take
more control of your real life. But all the games like that are for the women.
And everyone says the games about guys aren't 'real' games anyway. They're
"casual" games. And are all about cooking and taking care of babies anyway.
Not very good for escaping from reality.

The few games that star dudes kicking ass become precious to you. Larry Croft,
Bayonet, Kay Archer, Samuy, these are rare chances to pretend to be someone
not too far off from your actual self who has POWER to actually change their
environment. Sometimes you might even find yourself thinking "how would
Bayonet handle this situation" and taking inspiration from it, because he's
one of the few role models of your gender available for you to really inhabit
via games. One of the few times you've been able to take the role of a
supremely confident and capable guy, instead of a supremely confident and
capable woman.

Then you have the temerity to speak up about how good the rare game that lets
you play as a guy with guy concerns, who can also kick ass, and you
immediately get a bunch of ladies piling on and insisting that this all seems
really silly and that games are made for women, guys have those "casual" games
about cleaning and cooking or about ungendered abstract puzzles and they sure
play a lot of them, don't they!

And then you whimper softly to yourself and pick up your Vita to play TxK
because Jane Minter may be a lady, but she's a lady who makes a damn fine
abstract game about blasting the shit out of abstract things.

It's not pretending to be the opposite sex for one game that's the problem.
It's pretending to be the opposite sex for almost EVERY game. It's pretty
fucking wearying.

------
downer99
Woah! So wait. Dave Sim is a misogynist? Like, a card-carrying member of the
Misogynist party?

 _THE_ Dave Sim, creator of the Cerebus comic book?

How do you kick off an article with a bold statement like that, and not
include at least a link to an interview or something? Is he like, the founder
of some kind of Men's Rights Advocacy group or something? Does he run a
political action committee?

Is he quoted anywhere as explicitly stating anything like:

    
    
      Hello, my name is Dave Sim, and I hate women. Yes, all of
      them, and as a general rule. You may know me as auhor of 
      the independently published comic book, Cerebus. At this
      time, I'd like to go on the record about my opinion of 
      women: I hate them. Make no mistake. Much like racists 
      hate other races, my hatred of women is similarly general, 
      and all-encompassing. To reiterate, I, Dave Sim, am a 
      self-proclaimed misogynist.
    

Like, really? He's simply a misogynist, and it's a bald fact?

~~~
lotsofmangos
Have you read his stuff on women? I like Cerebus, but he definitely has issues
with women.

 _" Emotion, whatever the Female Void would have you believe, is not a more
Exalted State than is Thought. In point of fact, I think Emotion is
animalistic, serpent-brain stuff. Animals do not Think, but I am reasonably
certain that they have Emotions. 'Eating this makes me Happy.' 'When my fur is
all wet and I am cold, it makes me Sad." "Ooo! Puppies!' 'It makes me Excited
to Chase the Ball!' Reason, as any husband can tell you, doesn't stand a
chance in an argument with Emotion... this was the fundamental reason, I
believe, that women were denied the vote for so long."_

 _" Behind this...lies the Greater Void, the Omnivorous Engine which drives
every... institutionalised waste of human time and energy, which drives, in
point of fact, our entire degraded society. The wife and kids."_

 _" In one of those Poor Us studies for which the Emotional Female Void is
notorious, it was pointed out that after a divorce, the average male standard
of living rises... the average female standard of living drops... I think
the...explanation is that the excision of a five-to-six- foot leech from the
surface of a human body is going to have more of its own blood in its own
veins. Unless the leech finds another body, it is going to go hungry."_

 _" In labouring to fill the insatiable Void Need for material possessions at
home, his time and his energy and his spirit disappear into the Vaginal Bottom
Line of the workplace."_

 _" The Male Light and the Female Void: Seminal Energy and Omnivorous
Parasite."_

 _" If you look at her and see anything besides emptiness, fear and emotional
hunger, you are looking at the parts of yourself which have been consumed to
that point."_

 _" It wouldn't be that big a stretch to categorize my writing as Hate
Literature against women . . . in this Fascistic Feminist country"_

~~~
downer99
Well! Those certainly are some, eh... curious... statements, aren't they?

I never read Cerebus cover-to-cover, because, well, it's freaking huge. I've
only perused a couple of volumes, in particular, the first and last volumes.

I'm reading his wikipedia article now. I never realized he'd become mired in a
controversy and gained such a weird reputation. He doesn't seem to self-
identify as misogynistic though.

~~~
lotsofmangos
He self identifies as being a defender of _The Truth_ against a feminist
dictatorship that invents things like child poverty.

For him to identify as misogynist would require him to accept a world-view
where viewing women as unthinking beasts was hateful, rather than being a
divine message from the true god Elohim about that female trickster Yahweh.

Personally I just think he went crazy with hate over his ex-wife.

~~~
downer99
It's tough in a court of public opinion, though. Especially when it comes to
artistic works of fiction as interpretted by adversarial critics. Some of this
is just so much gossip. Such is the life of the cartoonist who courts
controversial topics, I suppose.

If the guy tries to explain himself, and only comes across as even more
batshit insane, then I suppose that's his own tough luck (...or grand design,
if that's what suits him). At any rate, when a person winds up in a hole, it's
usually best to stop digging. From the sound of things, it seems entirely
possible that he probably doesn't even really care, either way, anymore.

------
vezzy-fnord
The best video game with a strong female protagonist that I've played is NOLF.
_Criminally_ underrated and almost never noted these days, even in feminist
discourse.

Anyway, this is apparently a DLC pack to a ludicrously well received game
called _The Last of Us_ , which honestly I had not heard of before. I can't
help but think the reviewer is overly dramatic here, though.

Finally, I want to address this:

 _Although women make up nearly half of all gamers, only a fraction of
videogame characters are female, and fewer still are playable._

This is a fallacy as it only takes up the raw total percentage and completely
ignores some critically important details: gender distribution by genres. That
makes a huge difference.

For instance, women make up very high numbers for things like casual games,
World of Warcraft, The Sims and others.

On the other hand, a lot of major AAA titles like Grand Theft Auto, Devil May
Cry and Mass Effect enjoy only small female audiences (14-22%).

That's why there's not much of an incentive. Don't just grab the whole
percentage and throw it around like a gospel of injustice when you're going to
voluntarily ignore the complexity and fragmentation of the market.

~~~
ekianjo
> Although women make up nearly half of all gamers, only a fraction of
> videogame characters are female, and fewer still are playable.

Double false claim. Women certainly don't make half of gamers (unless you
consider people playing Tetris and phone games real gamers, and that's a very
different subject altogether).

Fewer are playable, false claim as well. Tomb Raider, Bayonetta, Most
adventure games from Roberta Williams, Lots of japanese games have female lead
characters too (too many to list here), and a lot of these games were very
much liked by male gamers as well. I'm personally a huge fan of Bayonetta, and
the fact that the character is a female had a huge part in this preference.

~~~
lotsofmangos
Of course tetris fans are real gamers.

~~~
ekianjo
Well, yeah, Tetris is a game. But it's a game in the same way that a termite
is also a living species just like an elephant is another one. They just do
not benchmark on the same scale.

~~~
icebraining
I strongly disagree. A game should be first and foremost measured by its
gameplay, and Tetris easily beats 99% of the games released each year on that
department.

~~~
ekianjo
I wouldn't picture myself playing Tetris all my life, just like tons of games
in the same time that you find nowadays on mobile phones, so I strongly
disagree with your view. I wouldn't count Flappy Bird as a "game" as well -
for me it all goes in the same bucket as Tetris, i.e. something to kill the
time, but nothing I would consider to be a serious game in any measure.

------
ekianjo
ugh, that was a painful read. Even text adventures were more emotionally
charged than most games today, and i didnt have to wait 2014 to feel like a
human being. you just had to play computer games and not console games.

~~~
jmileham
Painful how? It sounds like the author was genuinely moved by the game. It has
to be a good thing that a AAA console title can have that effect, even if it
only took 30-odd years for us to get there.

~~~
ekianjo
Such console games "get" this effect just because they look more and more like
movies, not because they are better intrinsic games than what we had before.
And the examples shown by the author show her clear ignorance of PC games in
the 80-90s, so it's not surprising he didn't feel "much" in front of consoles
games. We basically had to wait for late SNES games and PS1 games to see more
and more games on consoles with deeper storylines and character development.
But this occured on PC way before it happened on consoles, and you had actual
strong female characters way before on PC too (hey, come on, the Roberta
Williams games had almost always female protagonists, and were hugely
popular!).

The idea that "we had to wait until 2014 to feel something when playing games"
is what I considered the most painful. Because it's preposterous.

Wired has really become an over-hyped tabloid.

~~~
icebraining
The whole article is about how the author found a game which she could
identify with the character, yet you still refer to her as "he".

I just thought it was curious.

~~~
ekianjo
Corrected.

------
facepalm
"Boys got action figures, not dolls. Boys got to have watergun fights, not
play dress-up. Much like their videogame counterparts, boys got to do things,
and I wanted to do things too"

Find the error...

If you want to do things, don't buy stuff, do things. If you feel you need to
buy stuff to do things, you have already lost.

~~~
kylemaxwell
Accidentally upvoted. So to counteract: TFA is talking about _children_. You
know, impressionable and malleable young minds that don't yet have the benefit
of wisdom and experience.

Your post is Shit HN Says material.

~~~
facepalm
She's claiming girls can't do things because they don't get action figurines.
That's "Shit Feminists Say" material...

I feel sorry for her if she really didn't get to do water battles. I wonder
where she grew up, some ultraconservative Victorian household?

I sent my niece 4 water guns for her birthday and the whole family had a
blast. It never occurred to me that girls wouldn't do water battles. The
author is probably just extremely unlucky with her family.

------
danso
OK, to go off on a tangent...here's the best example I can think of that
illustrates the imbalance of gender neutral roles that men take for granted
and that women basically have never had: the only time I can think of, in
American entertainment history, that a woman achieved the authority and an
unforgettable identity that had nothing to do with "...because she's a woman"
is: Ripley in Alien and Aliens (never saw 3 and 4, and probably never will).

In fact, she was so good at being "just" Ripley that it wasn't until I saw
Sigourney Weaver in other movies did I realize, "Huh, Sigourney Weaver is a
woman and _she is hot_ "...She is the only female character I can think of in
which her gender has no real bearing to how she acts, what she says, or how
she is presented on screen.

I challenge anyone to think of any other woman character who follows Ripley's
mold:

1\. Does not overtly seek a romantic relationship

2\. Sexual tension is not a compelling foil or conflict for the character

3\. Is not thrown into an action role purely for the spectacle of a woman
kicking ass

4\. Is not shouted down or treated differently specifically because she is a
woman.

5\. Is not shown in a gratuitously sexual light (she is in her underwear the
same time everyone else is logically in their underwear).

6\. Is unequivocally the hero of the movie. In fact, in both movies [spoiler
alert for 20 year old movies], it's quite notable that she is literally the
last human being standing, and she wins on her own terms.

No other contenders, that I can think of, meet this standard, _especially_ in
the action film role: Catwoman, Aeon Flux, Tomb Raider...nope. Clarice
Starling...even if you want to argue that no sexual tension exists between her
and Hannibal Lecter (even though he specifically refers to it), much of the
non-gruesome psychological conflict her character faces is precisely because
she is a woman in a (tall) man's world. Beatrice in Kill Bill...great role,
but again, it only works because she is a woman and it is a spectacle, even if
empowering (i.e. could you imagine Kill Bill being made with a man in the
role?)

The only woman character who comes close to the unisex appeal of Ripley is
Marge Gunderson in Fargo. Other than that, it's pretty slim pickings...whereas
for males, there are too many to count.

Anyway, I sometimes wonder how much growing up with Alien/Aliens affected how
I think about gender roles and imbalance. Those being among the first and the
most interesting of the action movies I'd ever seen (then, and today), I kind
of think that the idea of a woman action hero was _completely normal_ to me.
And yet, as far as I can see, no one like Ripley has since been written...

~~~
TheEzEzz
Excellent points. I think if we broaden our scope to television (which is
arguably becoming looked upon just as highly as movies) there are better
pickings. There are a lot of characters that are _based_ on sex, but there are
a few that could work either way. That's not to say that sex-specific
situations don't come up. They do, but that's more because of the need for
greater amounts of filler content on a TV show than because of a fundamental
basis for that character. So, not as perfect as Ripley, but not bad.

(I don't watch a lot of TV, but Continuum and The Black List come to mind,
though neither offers a true Ripley)

------
na85
Samus Aran is a great character in general, not just a great _female_
character.

Except for in Other M.

------
beloch
There are some great games out there with female protagonists and quality
interaction (e.g. The Dreamfall series). There are also many games that bend
over backwards to be gender (and sexual orientation) neutral, such as the Mass
Effect series. However I have to agree with the poster that adolescent males
are far more frequently targeted by any sort of game that actually has a plot.
While some might argue that most female gamers simply stay away from such
titles, I question this assumption and wonder if this is another instance of
the girlie-beer phenomenon.

i.e. In recent years, several brewers have attempted to market beer to women
with pink packaging and, in some cases, pink dye in addition to supposedly
"girl friendly" qualities such as being low-calorie, not too strong tasting,
etc.. The problem is, women who don't want to drink beer won't, and women who
like beer want good beer, not beer made for women who don't like beer. So far
these girl-branded beers have all been abject failures.

Would more female gamers play blood-and-guts action games if they were
gratuitously girly, or would it barely be more than those who don't mind
playing as muscle-bound brutes when they crave a bit of the ol' ultraviolence?
I'm not saying that the industry shouldn't do more to marginalize misogynistic
characterizations, but I do suspect that male protagonists and testosterone
driven character interactions tend to give blood-and-guts games more
credibility even with female audiences. That should change slowly with time,
as we're seeing in cinema, but we should also recognize that this is the
present we're currently dealing with. Women aren't an audience that are being
ignored. It's what they want that's the problem!

It's also worth noticing that we are very selective about what we define as
"guy stuff" in male dominated video games. It's definitely not "older guy"
stuff. e.g. When was the last time you saw a male protagonist blow thousands
of enemies to bloody giblets and, in the next scene, talk about his prostate
problems, the virtues of fiber, and his receding hairline? Really, these games
are about violence. If a woman does the slaying, it doesn't bother most male
gamers at all. It's when they start talking about the female analogues to "old
guy stuff" that _everybody_ , males and probable females alike, start to get
itchy trigger fingers.

This tendency of most video games to sate adolescent desires for violence
while ignoring more mature material is, in my opinion, of equal concern to
both genders. Any game that makes male-female relationships a part of core
game-play instead of an optional bolt-on is instantly branded as a weird
Japanese dating simulator for Otaku's who never leave their houses. Games that
focus on drama or exploration without "sufficient" violence are frequently
viewed as having "boring gameplay". Video games are no longer an emerging art-
form. Their gross sales have surpassed that of cinema! However, video games
are still stuck in the Nickelodeon era. Practically everything is gratuitous
violence with a smattering of sex. However, only now are adult audiences
starting to outnumber adolescent ones. The next few decades for video games
may well be remembered similarly to the early twentieth century when cinema
progressed from being a low-brow diversion to an art-form that fascinates all!

~~~
facepalm
Sticking to the beer example, what is the possible solution? Why don't the
women simply drink beer that is good? So they won't drink beer that is simply
good, but they won't drink girly beer either. Yet they claim to be avid beer
drinkers? Is there some magic wonder beer from fairy land that they would
finally drink?

Should there be more games about prostate problems?

I think it fundamentally doesn't make sense to claim that games should be
different. If anything, you could ask for more other games, where nobody seems
to know what they should like.

Note the irony that the author complains about a girlish upbringing and then
revels in a game that finally lets her do girlish things.

~~~
dfxm12
Women who drink beer do drink good beer.

The author is saying that too many "good videogames" mistreat women.

The point is good beer doesn't have a history of marginalizing women they way
popular videogames tend to.

On a more general note, videosgames aren't much different from music or
movies. Just like bubble-gum pop singles & mindless action movies there are
tired AAA videogame titles, all with dubious critical value, but enough appeal
to sell to the global lowest common denominator. However, if you really care,
there are niches out there doing some incredible stuff.

