[MUD-Dev] Re: Gender specific

[Mike Sellers]

At 12:56 AM 11/24/97 PST8PDT, Adam Wiggins wrote:
>[Mike Sellers:]

>> First, generalizing from individual experience like this is extremely
>> risky.
>
>I don't know how you mean 'risky' - I can trust some percentage
>thrown at me by a magazine (like the 40% mentioned above) or what I
>see with my own two eyes.  I'll take the second any day.

Well, it depends what you're doing.  If you're creating a game for your own
uses, you can afford to follow what you see.  OTOH, if you're talking about
creating a commercial game, you're going to be spending several hundred
thousand dollars (at least) of somebody's money.  That's where trusting
your own two eyes or your personal experience/preference (or even
unsupported stats from someplace like CGW -- though I'd trust them more
than most other mags) becomes extremely risky.  How much are you willing to
bet that your experience accurately reflects the majority of people out
there?  Is it just possible that you're seeing a skewed sample?  When
there's more than just your personal time and ideas on the line, you just
can't afford to _assume_ that your preferences and experiences match those
of people who might buy your game.  


>Okay, let's say that 5% of all Quake players are female.  Let me
>take a completely wild guess and say that there are two million
>Quake players.  That means that there are 100,000 female Quake players.
>This seems to contrast rather strongly with Marian's assertation that
>girl's don't ever buy computer games, which is the statement I was
>originally trying to counter.

I don't think Marian was trying to say anything absolutist like "no women
ever buy computer games" -- that's clearly an indefensible statement.
OTOH, in terms of the overall market, women are a clear and stubborn
minority.  The main reason this is such an issue has little to do with a
desire to be inclusive of women; rather, every computer game company out
there is struggling to increase its sales and its share of the market, and
women (especially women between the ages of 15 and 30) are an underserved
market.  As a group, women have been almost entirely ignored in the design,
approval, production, packaging, and advertising of games.  It's not that
game developers are misogynistic, they're mostly just kinda clueless when
it comes to branching out from their bread-and-butter young-adolescent-male
market.  Computer games don't appeal to women because women have never
really bought them -- and women don't buy computer games (as a rule,
clearly there are exceptions) because computer games don't appeal to them!  


>> They are intimidating and/or uninteresting even on the shelves, 
>> and those few that many women have played have been gifts and have
>> not exactly energized them to run out and buy more.  Of course, the fact
>> that most game developers are male (on top of that, most are single white
>> males in their twenties) doesn't exactly endear them to a somewhat
>> 'foreign' market.  If anyone is being presumptuous here, it is the
>> developers who cannot do more than snicker at the very people they would
>> love to court as customers.
>
>I hardly think that last bit is the case.  It's funny, though...the
>female designers that do exist seem to be either ignored or overlooked
>when it comes time to discuss "what's wrong with game designs".
>Roberta Williams has been designing adventure games for 15 years now,
>and has probably had a fairly major impact on the way that adventure
>games play, through her own games and the games produced by the
>company she founded.

Citing a single counter-example does not change the fact that (truly) most
people employed in the US as designers, programmers, directors, or
producers in the game industry are young white men in their twenties, most
of whom are single.  Most of the women in this industry are still in the
lower-status roles of artists, QA, or customer support-types.  Oh, and for
some reason, there are a lot of women in marketing and PR.  There are
vanishingly few "minority" (by race) game designers.  Go to any of the
major production houses, or especially the CGDC, and you'll see what I
mean.  There *are* good women game designers out there, but they are almost
an endangered species -- but I think too that their numbers may be slowly
increasing.  

>Secondly, I'm not sure that having female designers is going to
>instantly make the games appealing to women.  Miyamoto what's-her-name,
>who works for Sega Japan, designed the Lost World shooting game
>currently found in arcades.  It's quite entertaining, and has some
>really well-done effects and animation.  However, I doubt that this
>game has had any effect on getting more females into arcades.

Again, citing a single example doesn't account for overall effects.  Will
getting more women in positions as game designers necessarily mean we'll
have games that appeal to a wider demographic?  No, not necessarily -- but
the probabilities have got to be a lot better than if we just have a team
of guys making guy-games.  To cite a counter to your example, I've worked
on professional teams made up of all guys (mostly in their twenties,
mirroring the industry), and teams where women were in positions of
authority and voice.  The designs and work that came out of these teams
clearly reflected their character.  If we want to appeal to a wider
audience we need to start looking at our designs and our designers.



Mike Sellers                                    Chief Alchemist
mike at online-alchemy.com                         Online Alchemy              

        Combining art & science to create new worlds.