Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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.

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?

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.

>As a male, I don't think I've ever had an issue following a feminine video game character.

That's because lead female characters are (almost always) sexualized.

> (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.)

Excuse me, but most males would get destroyed in a deathmatch because most of us are not 14 year olds with nothing to do but play videogames 8 hours a day. That's true of any "twitch" game.

However, I get a little tried of the griping about video games being dominated by "male targeted". Let's flip the complaint around:

"I'm so tired of all the Disney singers/boy bands/American Idol targeting girls. Where are the songs written for boys?"

Now, see the problem?

These things are targeted at specific demographics. The FPS makers are targeting young males just like the singer factories are targeting young females.

What both sides of this equation have in common is: "Why don't the producers do <creative thing X> instead of just factory churning a product?" And the answer, as always, is profit.

And us ladies saying WE ARE LADIES WHO GREW UP GAMES, WE ARE "HARDCORE" TOO get dismissed. Even though there's a fuckton of us.

And I'm saying that those gaming companies know the exact number that you describe as "fuckton" is. And they have decided that your "fuckton" ... well ... isn't.

I have the same issue AND I AM MALE. I like adventure games. I like RTS games that aren't clicky-twitch-fests (see Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander). I like turn-based strategy. How many like you and me are there?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_games

Looking at that list, it looks like there are roughly about one million of us--male AND female. There is the occasional hit that crosses that (Portal, The Sims), but it looks like the best a company can count on is about a million. Okami (which is absolutely awesome), sold about 600,000 units, so that's also a good cross check.

Now compare that to even mediocre FPS that gets panned and note that their numbers break a million without working hard.

See, that's the problem. There aren't a "fuckton" of us.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com