Why does sexism persist in the video games industry? | Hacker News Reader

Why does sexism persist in the video games industry?

bbc.com

8 pointsschrofer12 comments

I am still trying to find how they defined "gamer". Does a mom obsessed with candy crush count? Statistics without background can be worse than useless.

Also, adding female assassins would not be as simple as "create a model". Each added character requires dozens of animations (climbing, falling, running, using each weapon), full voice acting for each of those situations (every time "he" is used would need to be re-recorded with "she"), each cutscene would need to be reviewed for timing issues, and the bug testers would need to do everything twice to check for graphical bugs. While they probably could have done it, something else would need to be cut.

"Does a mom obsessed with candy crush count"

Why wouldn't she count? Cause she's a mom? Cause the game has candy? Or what?

As for female assassins, truth is somewhere in the middle. You don't need to make everything from scratch. Procedural adjustments can be made to the male animations and you can use the same animations for females.

I mean come on, women have a slightly different figure, but they have two legs, two arms, one head and so on. They're humans. It's not like the complaint is that birds and dogs were left out of the game.

That said, I'm fine with women being left out being a business decision. They'll now see what the effects of that business decision is on sales, and have the chance to learn for the next version.

It's misleading because they spend the article talking about mostly console games, but use statistics about mobile gamers.

You don't need to make everything from scratch. Procedural adjustments can be made to the male animations and you can use the same animations for females.

Here, here! Look at the animation in the original Rainbow Six--animations were used across genders, and it worked fine.

Maybe she shouldn't count if you're writing an article about why there are so many female gamers isn't there a female character in Assassin's Creed. My mom is in her mid-fifties and just got an Android tablet to read ebooks and is now addicted to Candy Crush. By that ESA study's standards she's now one of the ~50% female gamer demographic. She is not going to transition into a "hardcore gamer" even if more "hardcore" games have female characters. The statistic is just not useful in the context of the article because "female" contains a lot of disparate demographics.

I think comparing across genres would be more informative...for example, the percentage of female characters in an FPS (say, CoD, Bioshock, or whatever) as opposed to an MMORPG (WoW, Eve, etc.)

There's also a certain danger in adding females into games, right? Behavior which may be acceptable against only male characters can get pretty bad when applied to females--consider the case of Postal 2, GTA, or any number of sandboxy games. Fallout, for what it's worth, at least was equal opportunity and let you shoot both women and children in the face.

If you allow females in a game with violence as a major component, you open yourself up to all of the issues of some insecure jackass perpetuating violence against women and posting about it--or just getting yelled at straight-out for supporting that functionality at all.

EDIT:

It's kind of funny, actually, that we were arguably more progressive in FPSs in the 90s than we are today. Stronger female characters (System Shock, Jurassic Park: Trespasser), more options for character customization (Half-Life, Quake 2), and better socialization (Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, Everquest). For shame.

A better question is why has there been so much obsession over female characters in the past 2 years? Not having a female character in your game is not sexist. Its dumb to claim otherwise.

> Average gamer is 31 years old

> 48% of gamers are female

> 71% of gamers are 18 or older

> 53% of gamers play games on their smartphones

> While the percentage of female gamers has increased, that has been primarily due to the rise of mobile games, which often do not have characters.

Combining "mobile" gamers with PC/Console gamers is like combining chess players with professional wrestlers.

Just because a lot of women play Candy Crush, doesn't mean that you need all PC and console games to have female protagonists 50% of the time.

I think the real problem here is that there are a few female gamers that go online and just get offended by the same thing male gamers say to each other all the time. Maybe online games should have a 'politically correct' section where easily offended people could go and play.

As a game developer (mathbreakers.com) we recognized this was something we could pay attention to, and from the start we tailored the game to appeal to girls including female characters. Truthfully it was also a good business move, as the question often comes up with important contacts.

We still see the widely-held belief in potential customers (parents) that "girls (kids) might not like our game" because it has explosions and logic in it, but from our perspective there is little difference.

Like racism or homophobia, sexism will take a long time to percolate out, but gradually it is happening.

Another example is Mass Effect 3: You can play a gay, non-white female

Begs the question. Before you can ask why sexism persists in the video game industry you have to ascertain that it really does persist. Personally, I don't see much evidence.

Please don't editorialize titles. The HN guidelines ask you not to. (The submitted title was "48% of gamers are female".)

And yet, I wouldn't have opened yet another article on gamer sexism (I get it, gamer sexism is bad mkay?), but I did find the data point of half the gamers being female very compelling (and useful to mention during meetings).

Sometimes, the guidelines should be broken.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com